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I can build a better PC for less money
Can you?
First of all, Valve has not even announced a price yet. Everything is still pure speculation.
Second, have you seen the price of GPU’s, RAM, and SSD’s these days? Consumers for gaming PC parts are competing for supply with industrial buyers now. AI is hoovering all the supply up with the backing from private equity. The GPU market never fully recovered from the cryptocurrency era either.
I’ve been wanting to build a new mid-range gaming PC for years now. I’ve kept an eye on prices. I spent ~$1k on a machine in 2019, with the GPU costing a mere $175. Nowadays a comparable tier of GPU starts at $600, and the cost fo a mid-tier machine is over $1,500, getting closer to $2,000 with the RAM and SSD prices.
Valve can get better bulk pricing on components. Their primary profit center is software sales, and it’s really hard to sell software when no one can afford hardware. So Valve is incentivized to design these machines that are resistant to being scalped or scrapped for specific components, and to sell them for relatively low margin in order to drive game sales. We already saw this with the Steam Deck- it was hardware that could play games without mining crypto.
I do think the RAM and maybe SSS supply could throw a wrench into Valve’s plans though. Just because if the prices go high enough, people could start buying steam machines to rip out the RAam modules and sell them separately. But we are nowhere near that level of RAM pricing yet.
from my wife - we sit in front of a computer all damn day. we don’t want to sit in front of a computer all damn night too. we want to sit down in front of our TV and play games together in the evening. we just want it to work. we’ve built PCs and we have no interest in cobbling something together and supporting it for it’s lifetime. don’t act like that doesn’t come with a huge cost of time.
100% This, I work in IT all day. The last thing I want to do with my personal time is build and support a home built machine attached to my TV that my kids or wife will use to watch Netflix or play a few games. Especially if I am out of town and something stops working.
That’s why I own a PlayStation and pay a premium for their games on an inferior platform compared to PC. It generally just works with out me having to fuck with it all the time. I’d get a Steam box for the same reason.
…it doesn’t come with a huge cost of time. Literally no idea what the fuck you’re talking about. Where is the time cost?
You just buy a new PC every time you have a driver issue, huh?
Driver issue??
By the time it arrives you won’t even be able to buy the memory for whatever the Steam Machine ends up costing.
Funny meme, but I would genuinely worry for the people who don’t understand the value proposal of a pre-built, console-like PC for Steam gaming. We will see if it’s worth it based on price and specs later, but the logic is definitely there, especially with MS, Sony and Nintendo dropping the ball so much.
Meh. You can’t beat the economy of scale with boutique retail PC part prices. That said, you’re probably going to get the min quality for specified performance.
How do you know you can build one for cheaper if we don’t know the price?
I like the idea that it’s a targetable hardware profile personally.
Aren’t hard drives through the roof on price suddenly because of AI boxes and aren’t games as chonky as heck right now? They are coming out at 150gb lately.
Building a pc is not cheap.
Quite a bit of speculation in these comments considering we don’t even have a price yet
It’s got what PvsZ craves.
brought to you by valve
It has what games crave
Bro have you seen the prices for storage, graphics cards, memory? I’ll take 2 Steam whatever shape it is.
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If Dell will make a $500+ computer that can just hook up to whatever screen you have and allow you to play vast majority of all the games ever, they will be instantly industry leaders. They can’t though. Valve, however, can.
