Comment by kouteiheika
3 months ago
> I hardly understand the headline. Steam machine is just a computer, and since it can be used for other stuff than playing games, then it can't have the cheap pricing of a console.
I don't understand this train of thought. It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console, as long as Steam is the default store, and the majority of users will use the console as-is and buy games on Steam.
Let me give a quick analogy: Google paid Apple 20B USD just to be the default search engine in Safari, even though users can easily change it. Defaults matter. The vast majority of people are not highly technical users who customize everything in-depth and seek out alternatives. The vast majority of people just use whatever is the default.
The main problem I see is that if this is any cheaper than it's hardware, people will buy 100s of them and stack them in server racks for CI runners or whatever. Generating only losses for Valve and making the hardware unavailable to gamers.
It needs to either be at market rate or locked down to only be useful for gaming.
I don't think they could possibly make it cheap enough for that - especially once you consider all the money being wasted on RGB/Bluetooth/a GPU you won't use.
Messing around with weird consumer hardware in a datacenter context isn't exactly attractive. If all you need is some x86 cores, an off-the-shelf blade server approach gets you far more compute in the same space with far less hassle. Even if the purchase cost is attractive, TCO won't be.
The RGB costs maybe 2€ to add, the bluetooth chip is maybe 50c.
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It happened to the PS3
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Does it have IPMI? Does it have ECC ram? Racking Mac Minis is a painful enough, this form factor is less rackable than that. If you need to physically adjust the form factor per device, whatever you could've saved will be immediately lost in labor.
Orgs racked PlayStation 3s back in the day. If it’s subsidised hardware it could be worth it.
you don't remember playstation clusters?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
that said, practically buying hundreds of them should prove to be quite difficult.
The PS3 was uniquely powerful, compared to its x86 peers. It wasn't just cheap - it provided the compute of 30 desktop computers in the space, power, and price envelope of one.
I think the limitation on server gear these days is electricity price vs compute, with the hardware price being an up front investment but not dominating the lifetime cost. At least at this end of the price range - it's a consumer GPU, not an A100 or anything.
Iiuc, unlike Sony’s PS3 (which were bought and used like this), Steam is the unique distributor so it would be easy for them to not allow (or make really difficult to) buying thousands of machines.
(Or they could sell it everywhere for higher price but the Machine would come with a non transferable Steam gift card.)
> It absolutely can have the cheap pricing of a console
Valve hasn't committed to a price yet, but they told Gamers Nexus that it'll be priced less like a console and more like an entry level computer (i.e. more expensive than a console).
Weird statement, because I can search for PS5 pro & see $750 price points, and entry level computers have been far far cheaper. Cheaper than Xbox series X at $650. Getting pretty solid laptops for a bit under $500 has been possible for many years now.
But "entry level computer" has a very broad interpretation available. Could be higher for sure.
Do those computers play games competently? I doubt they play them as well as the PS5 or Series X. We aren't in the days where integrated graphics instantly meant sub 20 FPS on any game no matter how simple, but I still wouldn't throw any recent triple A game at even new-ish computers with integrated graphics and expect them to perform all that well. They'll play Rocket League, Stardew Valley and Minecraft just fine, and maybe that's all they need to do, but a Steam Machine that can't play tomorrow's title roughly on par with current gen consoles seems like a losing bet unless the price is equivalently lower.
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I assumed they meant an entry level gaming computer, not something with potato-grade integrated graphics, but I agree it's vague.
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Steam machine is barely at base ps5 level in performance
I didn't say it "will", I said it "can". And since pricing is not announced yet we have no idea what they will do in the end.
Sega can also come back and announce a Dreamcast 2.
I'd rather work on likelyhoods than dreams.
Defaults matter at scale. And as for scale, the Steam Deck has the most generous estimates at 7 million. For a side hustle that's great. For trying to compete with the scale of other consoles, that's not enough.
Hardware is very hard to break into. You can't treat it like software and expect to dominate.
It’s like android. You sell pixel at relatively high price but create a wave of other with cheaper alternatives, so you end up make money from being default store.