I am flabbergasted by the negativity.
It is more expensive of what we hoped for.
Is it overpriced? I tried to calculate what a PC would cost NOW and it's exactly the same cost.
I have a big Steam Library, a Steam Deck (actually 2), a desktop PC, a very old desktop pc.
We are also a family of 4 and both my kids enjoy gaming (they are my kids after all), recently they started showing a lot of interest for games I play rather than Nintendo games, so I am getting one, here is what I see as positive that others don't:
- I'm buying a console for which I have to buy zero games for. That's probably saving me more than 3k right out of the gate.
- if I buy a game for such console I can play it on a flight, on the go, at my tv, at my desk
- if I want to mod it, I can
- I can finally give a computer to my kid that's not severely outdated, and it has linux, so they learn freedom and power before anything
- I can finally play Nightreign with my wife without using Nucleus Coop (2 instances on the same pc), which makes my PC a furnace
- Buying it puts me in the camp of "I have more linux gaming devices than windows gaming devices"
I don't think the problem is that there aren't people in the market for it, but more that increasingly products that used to be meant for the average middle class are now perks for wealthier individuals - to the point where I think if there's a collapse of the AAA gaming industry is because there's not enough wealthy people time to accommodate for all the titles.
Like GTA VI is speculated to release at around 90$, and any AAA game that will drop around that time will probably have a bad release.
But regarding the steam machine, it's just yet another example that this product isn't at the reach of "the people", it's yet another luxury item.
Not because Valve wanted to, but because this new standard of scalping, hoarding and squeezing the most out of the market is having repercussions across industries.
The sad thing is that Valve used to be on the other side of the fence, at least for some products, it seemed like it was aimed to be accessible for gamers in a pro-consumer way (not all of course, that would be impossible).
In the end even Valve had to fall in line with the rest, and it's just sad to witness it.
So let people grief, they're not just grieving Valve, but also the last hope of a group that still thought there was a counter culture company in the current state of a greedy world, where shared holders value is more important than customers.
For basically my whole gaming life starting in the early 1990s, PC games have been ~$50. It is frankly shocking that the price points have been so sticky. $50 in 2000 dollars is $96 today. Inflation is real. It sucks, but that's the reality of economics. It is completely reasonable for video game prices to appreciate along with everything else.
> In the end even Valve had to fall in line with the rest, and it's just sad to witness it.
It's sad that LLMs have hiked prices so high that economical computers don't exist? I would agree, but your phrasing makes it sound like Valve "had to get involved in shady practices because everyone else did" but the truth is that you can't build a computer at the moment for a reasonable cost because tech bros are speed racing us to a global climate catastrophe.
Yes my phrasing was deliberately like that because I think that's the general sentiment.
I don't think Valve has high margins with this when you factor in assembly and distribution costs, and I don't think Valve has the business model like some console makers had where they could afford to sell at a loss - it would be sold out anyway.
The way you summed it up as the truth, is spot on.
And the parts aren't comparable when it comes to size and acoustics (and, frankly, aesthetics). The Steam Machine is a very small and, by all accounts, very quiet box. Might not be worth it to most people, of course, but I've seen a ton of supposed comparisons that don't take that into account at all. To say nothing of the people who claim to be able to build something cheaper but then talk about buying used parts or reusing RAM and SSDs they had purchased last years or earlier.
I have a desktop with a relatively powerful 5070 (I think) GPU for playing VR games. But my priorities for couch & controller games is not really around super high graphics performance.
Lately I find myself playing classic games on emulator, or generally games without huge graphics demands (been playing that climbing game PEAK a lot lately).
For me, getting a random no-name-brand Mini PC is such a fantastic deal these days. Throw bazzite or now real Steam OS on it, have access to your whole library - it's a linux machine you can configure to your hearts content. I love it. Probably the best deal on amazon right now is this machine, though there's others if you know how to search.
I've always worried about latency for that - but it's ironic since I regularly stream over dedicated WiFi to my Quest VR headset. I'll have to give it a try some time. If they have some asynchronous reprojection tech for streaming that would be ideal
"Nothing is safe, nothing is reliable, and I am looking at the extremely real possibility that I am already unemployable if I have to go back on the market."
Anyone I know who has needed to look for work has had a hell of a time with it. It's a scary world out there.
Meaningless considering gig work counts against unemployment, but has none of the benefits traditionally associated with employment.
It's 14.3%-19% if you include full time gig work and %30.7-35.4% if you include part time gig workers.
It's ridiculous to say that the "economy works" or is doing well if 99% of people deliver pizzas. Most of the wealth created doesn't come from pizza delivery if people aren't participating in the industries that generate value then they might as well be outside of the labor market entirely.
It's shocking that people don't understand the history or purpose of the unemployment metric. If someone living in a rural town moves to an industrialized city and they cannot find a job then the industrial machine needs more capital allocated to it. Currently we've built a slave economy were low tiers service high tier people. It's a very easy trap to fall into for obvious reasons, but it stalls growth.
Employment numbers don't tell the whole history. You may lose your job as a SWE making 200k/y and to control the hemorrage of your savings, accept a part time contractor role that nets you a fraction of what you used to get, without benefits, or you can start driving for uber, door dash, etc. All of it will make you count as employed.
That's often called "occupational mismatch" and it smuggles in a normative claim that someone always deserves a job matching their prior title, education, or salary. Labor statistics do not and should not assume that.
Also in my experience part time contractor roles are awesome. <20hr/wk = low stress, most of my big purchases like computer hardware were deductible business expenses, and the coveredca subsidy let me get a very good health plan (courtesy of all the full time guys who bleed taxes and get zero subsidies in return)
The point is, I hope you agree that normal people may find a labor market where should them lose their jobs, there's a heightened chance they will find themselves in a situation of "occupational mimatch" a lit bit stressing and not really the ideal, optimal market under their point of view.
It may be that this perception would be particularly amplified when those persons have some doubt whether they would be able, in any single month, to be able to pay both their mortgage and food with their "occupationally mismatched" new income levels.
Despite the fact that you're probably right when you say the labor statistics should not assume that those people are unemployed, I think you can now appreaciate the fact that for some people, the current labor market is not particularly reassuring no matter what numbers the Department of Labor proclaim for this particular statistics.
U-3 (unemployment rate) is 4.3% like he said. U-4 (U-3 plus discouraged workers, people who want and are available for work but stopped searching) is 4.6%. Practically the same.
If you want more detailed numbers, go look them up. BLS publishes them.
Unemployment is nearly at historical lows. But don't let data distract you from the same tired "everything is terrible" line that's every other post here.
Pretty massive difference between "being employed" and "being employed with a decent wage". Yeah, there's plenty of low-wage service industry or gig economy work available to take you out of the unemployment statistic -- there's a lot less employment available that enables you to live a decent lifestyle (i.e. live somewhere without 4 roommates or raise a family)
Very common for people suddenly laid-off from salaried work to turn to part-time gig work and that immediately removes them from the 4.3% unemployed statistic.
That's U-6 (U-5 plus people involuntarily working part-time). It's 8.1%. Pretty low by historical standards, but not as low as it was 3 years ago (6.9%)
The folks who made accurate federal numbers were fired some time ago. the current numbers are about as accurate as someone with an active interest in lying about it cares.
I think that is a better way to look at it, although you then need to compare the 35% to historical trends, or you will just have an emotional "that's a big number" reaction.
Historical trends is another kind of trap, because employment used to mean something different compared to the necessity an income has become today.
For most of history anybody could just claim land. You literally just said "Mine!" And it was yours. You could shoot anyone who tried to enter it. You could do whatever you want - hunt on it and trade the fur and meat for pure gold, fish, drill for oil, create 100s of acres of opium fields.
Frankly, for most of history, nobody needed a job.
Today all land is owned by somebody, and even if you do own it, you still owe taxes and it comes with all sorts of restrictions and zoning for how you can use it. Often they are managed by POAs and HOAs, so it's not much different than renting. For those that do rent, it's even worse - you stay working forever.
I digress - even as recently as the 1970s or 80s, if you wanted a job, you had one. If you wanted a house, you had one.
Today, you need a job to survive, there's no safety net (at least not the United States) and basically no way to legally obtain the resources, space, and structures a typical human needs to survive well in the world.
So yeah, something like a 35% unemployment rate - where rent is the most expensive thing in the economy, nobody is allowed to build houses, nobody except for a few are allowed to sell goods, nobody is allowed to freely trade or construct anything - is a cause for immense daily suffering for no good reason.
hIsToRy will not look back on this brief era fondly. It's poverty and suffering for no reason, and we could (and will) do better.
> So what now? The short answer is that I have (a) a nice couch; (b) a big TV; (c) a Steam Deck that I never use. I even have a dock for the Deck. So I should hook them all together and try out some games.
This is the real answer. Why lust over new hardware and fret about finances when you have everything you need to play some games right now? There's not even any mention of what games they want to play on the Steam Machine that they can't play on their Steam Deck. They already bought a new TV to use with the Steam Deck and then didn't use it, so why even consider spending more money on more gaming hardware?
The Steam Machine was $250 less before all of the price increases from hardware buyouts. Go complain to Big Tech.
You can install Steam on almost any Linux device. The Steam Machine is great for those who want a portable console-like device. Have you ever tried to build and maintain a shuttle PC yourself? It's obnoxious. This makes the goal of high quality portable gaming much easier.
If you want to maintain the PC (replace or upgrade parts) the Steam Machine seems like a worse choice over a mini-ITX build. The price for the two is comparable.
If you want a console I agree, it's expensive but you can leverage your existing library and use sales, so not too bad if you buy a lot of games.
This is very true. I had a Ryzen Mini PC up until a couple of months ago, when it broke. Low quality VRMs, needed board repair.
Support says I need custom molds to reapply the liquid metal thermal compound, or it would 100% leak. Regular thermal compound just isn’t good enough. It was true. I could send it to China and they would fix it for free, but it would take 60 days and I would have to pay tariffs.
I just cut my losses and harvested the RAM and SSD for something more dependable.
Let's hope his friends don't try to drag him into any competitive mainstream games. Valorant, Call of Duty, Battlefield, EA Sports FC, …
Kernel-level anti-cheat usually doesn't work on Linux.
Let's hope Valorant, Call of Duty, Battlefield, EA Sports FC and others who explicitly deny their anti cheat from working on Linux react to the increasing demand for gaming on Linux, and begin supporting anti cheat on Linux.
Also, if his friends play Halo, CS2, Ark, War Thunder, Arma, Hell let Loose, Splitgate, TF2, DOTA, Overwatch, or The Finals, he'll be fine.
Okay? You can wipe off your tears and go buy a cheap gaming PC off Craigslist. Toss Bazzite on it, and you're good to go.
I'm not sure what type of sympathy people want to court with the "woe is me" narrative around how they need a third gaming device. The selling point of the Steam Machine is the software. Nothing about the bespoke hardware is worth crying over, it feels like object fetishism for the sake of it.
Exactly - I just built myself a knockoff Steam Machine by putting Steam OS (might switch to Bazzite but so far real Steam OS is fine) on a $300 Mini PC and I'm super pleased with it. 16GB of RAM and a Ryzen 7640HS runs all of my library just fine, though to be fair, I'm not much of a AAA super modern high-graphics gamer. Doing a lot of emulation these days.
End-to-end (hardware, OS, UI software) support from a single vendor for a narrowly-configured gaming PC, with actual serious support in terms of software updates and such, not just "we'll maybe honor the warranty if it breaks", including for TV-attached use cases where PCs (windows or Linux, either) tend to be kinda wonky[0], was appealing enough to me that I planned to buy it day-1 if it was under $700, and probably would still have bought it up to $800, to replace my giant gaming tower with Bazzite on it, even though performance-wise it would be roughly a lateral move or slight downgrade. I was really looking forward to the day I took that thing out of my house, but now... nope, gonna be a while because a few billionaires bid PC hardware up to the Moon.
I'm not aware of a single other product on the market that offers what Valve's device does. Tons of companies offer gaming PCs and you can slap Bazzite on lots of them, but that won't get you everything the Steam Machine offers. It's, AFAIK, unique.
[0] "But I've been running a PC attached to a TV literally for decades..." yeah, you've probably been missing some HDMI features that you don't care about but others do, or had trouble with them, while any gaming console or media player will have those features and have few or no problems with them; do you have surround sound over HDMI to a proper audio receiver, with non-broken mode-switching depending on current output? Use CEC features to wake your PC from sleep? What's your color gamut like? I've done this before too, a lot, hell I did it all the way back when I needed a composite or S-Video out on my video card to make it happen, on a CRT TV before HDMI ports were really a thing. Really good support for the use case looks a lot different than what you usually get by just plugging a PC or laptop into a TV.
> What games do you play now that this specialized piece of hardware would better?
It'd likely be better as a living room TV PC than any PC I've ever owned or have seen for sale before, and it's likely to enjoy years of good support and frequent updates for its entire software stack by the same vendor that's selling the hardware, which is something I've never seen from anyone but Apple (aside from Valve, of course, for my Steam Deck) in more than 25 years of buying PCs and PC hardware. I tend to use my gaming PCs for five or so years at a time, despite never buying any parts that are top-of-the-line, so I'd expect to use this at least five years, and if the steam deck is any indication, it'll likely have 1st-party support for exactly the device and software I am using that entire time.
It'd be better for approximately all the games I play now than the power-hungry giant tower I have (it's effectively a lateral move on everything except 3D processing speed, which'll be roughly double what I've got now), plus, unlike this bazzite-running franken-PC, I expect it won't do stuff like have a weird whole-screen momentary color-shift every couple minutes (multiple monitors, it's the software, not the monitor's fault), constantly forget how to connect to bluetooth devices it's paired with (this, with a USB-attached bluetooth chip that's allegedly "really good on Linux", LOL; incidentally, it also can't pair with some devices in "desktop mode" [KDE] but can connect to them there once paired in "Gaming Mode", it's so weird), freak the hell out and scream like the damned(!) if a game tries to output something other than stereo audio, et c. I expect it'll have fewer "minor" problems like that on account of the 1st party vendor support and their having very few total hardware configs to test against.
I want it to play video games. Who in god's name would brag about something they merely bought? Especially if that something is mass-produced electronics.
Are the cheap gaming PCs off of Craigslist here in the room with us right now?
Snark aside, the second hand market is off the rails, too... The Steam Machine is cheaper than any DIY gaming PC I can build right now, even from parts off of OLX... And unlike the one I'd make, the Steam Machine will get the Steam Deck treatment as far as optimisation and certification (as in Runs on the Deck) goes.
Be interested to know which country. In USA and UK for the price it is fairly easily match the specs with new parts. And if you leave them on their default power profile in a larger case you get better performance.
you're paying for form factor, 'it just works', and convenience. how have we been having this same apple debate for 30 years, i feel like i'm on slashdot.
People say this about all unjustifiable products. "Why do I want a Juicero? Why do I need a Surface Laptop?" The same form factor, just works, convenience argument.
Nobody wants to acknowledge that it's all marketing halo. It takes less time to install SteamOS on the PC that you already own than it takes to buy and unbox a Steam Machine. But that's not "oooh new thing" retail therapy, so everyone waits with bated breath to see if they can afford the media center equivalent of jewellry. Nobody actually cares about functionality, convenience, or form factor if they're ignoring the most functional, convenient and proximate solution.
Yes, I wasn't criticising just saying a large company who will also be taking a 30% rake on most software run on it is not passing on any bulk purchasing discounts. For some it will be well work the convenience, for me it is not (but the Deck was).
Yes, or and hear me out, go ahead and shell out the extra $200 or so as a "hassle fee," if you get the Steam Machine you're much more guaranteed that everything else will just work.
I absolutely agree on your notion of "what is with this 'I need the shiny new thing for sake of having a shiny new thing.'
"
At this price point they should have never released it, they should have waited. Everywhere I see reviews of it on the internet, come along with forced smiles and talk about how they agree with the philosophy behind it and they should be commended for fighting against Windows. But ultimately no one recommends this to the general public.
The writing is on the wall. This thing is going to flop.
Only thing they can do now is keep it on the market, and in a few years upgrade *and* discount this thing in hopes of reigniting the hype.
If they withdraw it, the very small but existing set of current buyers will scream bloody murder about being abandoned, and if they then try and re-release, trust will already have been broken.
If prices go back to normal, v2 of this product will be great. This version, at these specs, at this point in time would only be a buy if it was good value (like $500). People will buy them all anyway.
Steam Deck & Machine appear to be very low margin, so Valve will make very little profit on them whether they sell a lot or a little. So profit isn't the success measure they're aiming for.
They're all just tools to get people to buy more games, which is where the margin is. And the existence of the Steam Machine makes the ecosystem more attractive even if you don't actually buy the Machine.
> What matters is if they make a profit throughout the product's lifecycle.
That may not matter either.
In fact, the most likely outcome is that they sell out of inventory, and the next iteration of the device gets GTA6 level hype. The scarcity of the premium product.
They use the OS in multiple products. Tons of people run it on their own hardware.
They could probably not update a single thing on there and it wouldn't matter, the games themselves are mostly running through an emulation layer anyway and will continue to work.
So what are you saying? They can do this single limited release and then discontinue it and everyone is going to be happy about it? People will just flock to the next version when it comes out and not feel burned by what happened?
Not many people run games on linux, only about 5%, amd of those nearly all keep a windows OS around to handle edge cases and upgrading firmware, etc.
This is what the fight is about. If Steam can't get linux based devices into the hands of enough people continuing to support it will remain a money pit for them for as long as they try.
Releasing the Steam box at this price is not helping their cause. They have to recover from this now.
You don't understand how Steam works, the culture around it, or why people are excited about this.
> So what are you saying? They can do this single limited release and then discontinue it and everyone is going to be happy about it?
They're selling a gaming console, of which in their case the hardware is the least important part and a means to an end. It is commodity hardware. No integrated memory. No special sauce.
These are hardware drivers that are a part of the Linux kernel.
What they are selling is a portal (grin) to their ecosystem, and an experience that is different from their competitors. One that unlike many of their competitors, doesn't require a monthly fee to be a part of (multiplayer). AND access to it is now scarce. A limited premium product.
> Not many people run games on linux, only about 5%
You're going to find a bunch of those on this website, myself included. No windows PC laying around though.
I game on Fedora 44 w/ Steam.
> Releasing the Steam box at this price is not helping their cause. They have to recover from this now.
I think most of the non-success outcomes involve an objectively bad experience, regardless of the price. Example of that would be a buggy system that feels more like a cut down PC than a console. From reviews, we see that this outcome doesn't seem to be the case.
The other potential failure outcomes involve selling the product at a loss, or tying up too much cash in it and having liquidity issues while stock moves. Valve's cash flow is likely excellent, we know they're not selling it at a loss and we know they aren't producing too many.
So overall, the possible outcomes all seem like different degrees of success.
Valve has been working toward this ecosystem for over a decade. This is a single product offering among a growing product line that provides access to their store.
To be clear, their competitors are pretty pathetic.
> I think you're too cloae to take any criticism
I'm not even their target market, nor would I buy one when I can roll my own on my own hardware - even using SteamOS if I wanted.
Their competitors are xbox and playstation and the cost is way more than each of these. You admit you won't even buy it because I guess you are too technologically inclined. And yet it's not a flop to you. Why?
The fact they've worked on running games on linux for over a decade and still only have a 5% market cap does not bode well for them.
This was supposed to be their great moment, and they ruined it with an expensive box with subpar performance. They should have waited. Now after the hype dies down and it doesn't sell, they'll just have another black eye they have to recover from.
Look, I run linux and have for 30 years. I run games on linux and have steam on linux installed myself. But I'm not trying to fool myself and others that it's some great success story. It isn't.
If you have no revenue, you can say you’re pre-revenue... It’s not about how much you earn. It’s about what you’re worth. And who’s worth most? Companies that lose money.
Gaming reviews have diverged from reality. Everything is about finding controversy and something to be angry about. Gaming journalism and social media are extremely toxic, but not really indicative of average gamers or consumers any more.
> The writing is on the wall. This thing is going to flop.
I would bet that it's going to be oversubscribed and sell out.
They’re privately owned, not every project needs to be profitable. It can just not lose money and strengthen the Steam ecosystem where the real profit is.
If this thing becomes unobtanium unless you’re a game studio or a journalist, but becomes a standard optimization/compatibility target for game developers like the Steam Deck has been, I would consider it successful, imo.
They may not recoup R&D costs for a while depending on volume, but they will make a profit per unit. They can't sell them as loss leaders like regular console manufacturers can, since then general computer buyers would get them as a priced down unlocked PC.
And importantly, they have the finances to support that R&D expenditure taking longer than expected to be recouped. The same situation with a small company would be very different than a company with solid income elsewhere.
I'm sure that the steam machine will sell out just because A) it's a small batch B) It's Valve C) It's a neat form factor.
But as someone who was originally going to pick one up (thinking it was going to be a great little gaming PC powerhouse), seeing it come in close to last in most of the GamersNexus benchmarks was pretty disheartening (pulling 20-50FPS at 1080p on most recent games).
I was hoping that they were going to bring a console mindset to PC building to create something that exceeded what a DIY-er could do with off the shelf parts. But the fact you can make a faster DIY machine for cheaper right now feels...eh, what's the point?
My guess is they sell the first few batches, then Steam Machine goes on a small vacation for a few years while they wait for prices to come back down.
The only thing that keeps me from being genuinely baffled by this person taking the time to write this is the fact that I'm seeing similar takes elsewhere, which also baffle me to no end.
Are people really this enamored by "the thought of buying new thing," as opposed to, like, thinking about whether they'll use it?
Anyway, the Steam Machine seems like an extremely solid deal. It's a reasonably powered PC, and for an extra $200 or so, you'll get the guarantee that everything will just work, at least game-wise.
I'm in the "steam deck that I never use" camp but it's because I've been too lazy to take a Saturday to repurpose it into a dedicated console piracy device, it turns out I hate playing basically any PC game "on the go" (their touchpad-thingies seem to please some people as a mouse replacement but I find them entirely unusable), and it's just weak enough that I've found it worth keeping my old gaming PC around for now for 1080p+ gaming at OK quality & frame rate (and if I've got that plugged in, why plug in the steam deck?)
For me the Steam Deck proved to me that Linux gaming was viable (finally! I've been trying since the days of Unreal Tournament being a current game and having an official Linux binary, LOL) and that I like the idea of an official Valve device, but that I needed a little more power and a desktop-alike form factor to reach a point of "good enough" for me (well, portable would still be fine, I just wouldn't use it that way so it'd be better if I didn't have to pay for the extra parts or have the added complexity and jank-risk of a dock)
Like if my gaming PC broke I would't replace it (at least not for quite a while) but I would plug my Steam Deck into my monitor and start using it again, it's not that the device is wholly useless to me. It just wasn't quite a fit for what I do & want, it turns out. I do use my gaming PC, and that's what a Steam Machine would have replaced. I even have Bazzite on there so I for-sure would have used the Steam Machine, as I basically have a somewhat rougher-edged (and way bigger, with obnoxious "gamer light" horse-shit all over because that's hard to avoid for some reason) version of it already.
I'd say if you feel this way and you're not really using the Steam Deck as a handheld you might as well sell it and take the money to buy the Steam Machine. Used 512GB Steam Decks go for >$500, you'll probably get a bit for selling the docking setup you have as well.
... holy shit, why are they so high used, I'd never have guessed?! Thank you for pointing this out, as someone with a Steam Deck I almost never use and a desktop gaming PC running bazzite that I do use, a lot, but wanted to replace with a Steam Machine, I'll probably do exactly his.
It is possible to build an equivalent PC with Steam Machine specs, with same case size (internal PSU) and similar or lower price? I'll probably still a wait a bit to see reviews from actual users, but I really dig the form factor and was unable to find anything similarly sized with built-in PSU.
I've long wished for rich western societies to run extensive student exchange programs with low income countries. Living even one year in most of the world will change your outlook for the rest of your life.
Usually the people in low income/developing countries that engage in student exchange programs are upper middle class and beyond and have lives no much different from their peers in developed western societies.
People in western societies tend to ignore that developing countries are not merelly poorer but also generally marked by extreme wealth and income inequality. The rich and the upper middle class for all practical effects live like the citizens of developed countries, it is just that there are less of them compared to the general population.
Even Bangladesh have huge gated communities (almost closed city districts, with office buildings and commerce besides residences) that are orders of magnitude that do a really good job of isolating someone from the general dystopian chaos of the city.
There's a video somewhere in this Library of Babel of some Palestinian kids who got a chance to visit New York (when Palestinian kids were still allowed to enter the USA, leave their occupied nation, and not be genocided to death).
Obviously they looked at all the skyscrapers with bewilderement.
as much as we are blaming the pandemic, and the crypto and AI bubbles I think Moore's law was really about transistors getting exponentially cheaper not just exponentially smaller. If you can't afford them it doesn't matter how big or small they are!
I think the EUV transition broke the long-term cost decreases and we might be seeing the end of progress in electronics and computing unless there is some fundamental change.
I think China came to the conclusion that the French got it right when they standardized on the Hualong One [1] rather than AP-1000. I did break out the champagne the other day when I heard they actually installed a BWRX 300 module at Darlington the other day!
As for electronics manufacturing it's believable we see something entirely different in 20 years (SQUID? true 3-d integration?) but I expect a rough patch for most of the rest of my life. Not like I won't have enough retro games to play for my entertainment.
Just got back giving from Casey Handmer some tough love over (1) it is not commercially interesting to make methane on Earth and (2) it is not feasible to make make methane on Mars unless you can make everything else. Handmer is a tragic figure like Klein, except Klein's tragedy is a tragedy for us all whereas Handmer and I are the only ones crying over his tragedy because I could use a buddy to talk to about the interests we share who is worth talking to.
If Musk was the hard man he pretended to be he'd be interested in my notes on how to attain manufacturing autarky after the future event the Club of Rome warned you about. But he's not so he's not. He gets to date the models from Looker [3] but which witch can resist a pet therianthrope? [2]
[1] ... of which, oddly, there are two different designs!
[2] ... sorry gsf_emergency_\d but a good parody deserves a parody; is @cindy your sister?
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looker (I was so dazzled by that LOOKER Gun, my second favorite sci-fi gun of all time, that I had to watch the movie a few times to realize it really is just as bad as everybody else says it is)
Nah, it's the gun the psyclos have in Battlefield Earth; it looks like a piece of junk like some power tools mated with a pistol, it seems really painful to get hit with but like the L.O.O.K.E.R. gun it doesn't do tissue damage when set to stun.
Can't say I have an emo attachment to any gun--- but I'll admit a couple make me pause the way avantgardey prime my third eye to underserved sources of attraction.
Eg The Doodad (after Gibson, neither 0% nor 100% lethal, cf Venezuela, "Middle America"). PP gave me retro-pause marvelling at the Chinese supplying precursors to the WestHem factions (existenz). kinda vibe-prophetic.
My best take on what you meant by the tragedy Handmer is that he has the mike (and loves to drop it whenever he can)--- but the tragedy of the rest of us here is that we don't quite. ?.
And Martian ice caps?
Just realized I'd never connected face to name, so I'd bounced off his Dwarkesh clips BC 1st impression was "fake genZ". Oops.
Now admiring the ambiguities in "rough patch" and "Cindy".
My takeaway from the French essay was that there was nothing stopping others from learning from one's mistakes (ie "without doing")
My hope is that whatever makes hardware prices go down over last decades would eventually work again now. I guess CPU is a dead end, but why not RAM and storage?
I am flabbergasted by the negativity. It is more expensive of what we hoped for.
Is it overpriced? I tried to calculate what a PC would cost NOW and it's exactly the same cost.
I have a big Steam Library, a Steam Deck (actually 2), a desktop PC, a very old desktop pc.
We are also a family of 4 and both my kids enjoy gaming (they are my kids after all), recently they started showing a lot of interest for games I play rather than Nintendo games, so I am getting one, here is what I see as positive that others don't:
Yeah there are some of us in the market for it!I don't think the problem is that there aren't people in the market for it, but more that increasingly products that used to be meant for the average middle class are now perks for wealthier individuals - to the point where I think if there's a collapse of the AAA gaming industry is because there's not enough wealthy people time to accommodate for all the titles.
Like GTA VI is speculated to release at around 90$, and any AAA game that will drop around that time will probably have a bad release.
But regarding the steam machine, it's just yet another example that this product isn't at the reach of "the people", it's yet another luxury item.
Not because Valve wanted to, but because this new standard of scalping, hoarding and squeezing the most out of the market is having repercussions across industries.
The sad thing is that Valve used to be on the other side of the fence, at least for some products, it seemed like it was aimed to be accessible for gamers in a pro-consumer way (not all of course, that would be impossible).
In the end even Valve had to fall in line with the rest, and it's just sad to witness it.
So let people grief, they're not just grieving Valve, but also the last hope of a group that still thought there was a counter culture company in the current state of a greedy world, where shared holders value is more important than customers.
For basically my whole gaming life starting in the early 1990s, PC games have been ~$50. It is frankly shocking that the price points have been so sticky. $50 in 2000 dollars is $96 today. Inflation is real. It sucks, but that's the reality of economics. It is completely reasonable for video game prices to appreciate along with everything else.
The problem was mainly the income not following inflation.
People have been buying $1000+ iPhones for a decade now.
> In the end even Valve had to fall in line with the rest, and it's just sad to witness it.
It's sad that LLMs have hiked prices so high that economical computers don't exist? I would agree, but your phrasing makes it sound like Valve "had to get involved in shady practices because everyone else did" but the truth is that you can't build a computer at the moment for a reasonable cost because tech bros are speed racing us to a global climate catastrophe.
Yes my phrasing was deliberately like that because I think that's the general sentiment.
I don't think Valve has high margins with this when you factor in assembly and distribution costs, and I don't think Valve has the business model like some console makers had where they could afford to sell at a loss - it would be sold out anyway.
The way you summed it up as the truth, is spot on.
Except others have done the same comparison to current PC prices and still found a ~50% markup.
Grab pc part picker and do it yourself, it's not complex.
How can there be 50% markup if the ram price is alone like 500$
And the parts aren't comparable when it comes to size and acoustics (and, frankly, aesthetics). The Steam Machine is a very small and, by all accounts, very quiet box. Might not be worth it to most people, of course, but I've seen a ton of supposed comparisons that don't take that into account at all. To say nothing of the people who claim to be able to build something cheaper but then talk about buying used parts or reusing RAM and SSDs they had purchased last years or earlier.
I have a desktop with a relatively powerful 5070 (I think) GPU for playing VR games. But my priorities for couch & controller games is not really around super high graphics performance.
Lately I find myself playing classic games on emulator, or generally games without huge graphics demands (been playing that climbing game PEAK a lot lately).
For me, getting a random no-name-brand Mini PC is such a fantastic deal these days. Throw bazzite or now real Steam OS on it, have access to your whole library - it's a linux machine you can configure to your hearts content. I love it. Probably the best deal on amazon right now is this machine, though there's others if you know how to search.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DK34WJ84
Example of real-life gaming performance here - nothing mindblowing, but more than you'd expect from a tiny box that costs like $400.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlup85AxRd0
Just wipe windows immediately and put SteamOS on it and you're good to go
You can also stream games from your powerful PC to the mini PC using Steam, so specs are not as important.
I've always worried about latency for that - but it's ironic since I regularly stream over dedicated WiFi to my Quest VR headset. I'll have to give it a try some time. If they have some asynchronous reprojection tech for streaming that would be ideal
I've co-op games with my friend who lives 2 hours away. Same household should be fine.. It helps if your desktop is plugged into ethernet.
[dead]
"Nothing is safe, nothing is reliable, and I am looking at the extremely real possibility that I am already unemployable if I have to go back on the market."
Anyone I know who has needed to look for work has had a hell of a time with it. It's a scary world out there.
In the US, unemployment is at 4.3%.
You’ll want the U-6 rate as well for comparison: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
And U-6 is lower than e.g it has been in ALL of 2008-2018? Generally pretty close to historic lows. Not sure what extra information it provides
Well, the difference is ~13 million people when you scale it to US population. (14.7m @ 4.3 vs 27.8m @ 8.1%)
For perspective that's roughly New York, LA, and Las Vegas, OR Vacaville (CA), Clinton (MI), San Angelo (TX), Allen (TX), Tuscaloosa (AL), San Mateo (CA), Tracy (CA), Tyler (TX), Roanoke (VA), Sparks (NV), Spokane Valley (WA), Las Cruces (NM), Rialto (CA), Hesperia (CA), Renton (WA), Bend (OR), Carmel (IN), Longmont (CO), Sandy Springs (GA), Vista (CA), Davenport (IA), San Marcos (CA), New Braunfels (TX), Edinburg (TX), Mission Viejo (CA), League City (TX), Fall River (MA), Kenosha (WI), El Cajon (CA), Fishers (IN), Flint (MI), South Bend (IN), Green Bay (WI), Roswell (GA), Peoria (IL), Boulder (CO), Greeley (CO), Brockton (MA), Waterbury (CT), New Bedford (MA), Richmond (CA), West Palm Beach (FL), Everett (WA), Hillsboro (OR), Centennial (CO), Conroe (TX), High Point (NC), Pompano Beach (FL), Elgin (IL), Antioch (CA), Burbank (CA), Pueblo (CO), Fargo (ND), El Monte (CA), College Station (TX), Richardson (TX), Daly City (CA), Clearwater (FL), Costa Mesa (CA), Downey (CA), West Jordan (UT), Carlsbad (CA), Miami Gardens (FL), Rochester (MN), Murfreesboro (TN), Temecula (CA), Gresham (OR), Victorville (CA), Arvada (CO), Springfield (IL), Independence (MO), West Valley City (UT), Pearland (TX), Abilene (TX), Norman (OK), Vallejo (CA), Berkeley (CA), Ann Arbor (MI), Allentown (PA), Evansville (IN), Olathe (KS), Beaumont (TX), Cambridge (MA), Peoria (AZ), Lansing (MI), Lafayette (LA), Odessa (TX), Athens (GA), Columbia (MO), Manchester (NH), Billings (MT), Hartford (CT), Concord (NC), North Charleston (SC), Meridian (ID), Surprise (AZ), Santa Clara (CA), Fort Collins (CO), Miramar (FL), Charleston (SC), Denton (TX), Coral Springs (FL), Roseville (CA), Pasadena (CA), Warren (MI), Thornton (CO), Kent (WA), Midland (TX), Waco (TX), Carrollton (TX), McAllen (TX), Sterling Heights (MI), Columbia (SC), Gainesville (FL), Cedar Rapids (IA), New Haven (CT), Stamford (CT), Elizabeth (NJ), Topeka (KS), Kent (WA), Victorville (CA), Syracuse (NY), AND Dayton (OH).
So, ya know, like a couple people.
That has nothing to do with the fact that the hiring market for software engineers sucks right now.
Meaningless considering gig work counts against unemployment, but has none of the benefits traditionally associated with employment. It's 14.3%-19% if you include full time gig work and %30.7-35.4% if you include part time gig workers.
It's ridiculous to say that the "economy works" or is doing well if 99% of people deliver pizzas. Most of the wealth created doesn't come from pizza delivery if people aren't participating in the industries that generate value then they might as well be outside of the labor market entirely.
It's shocking that people don't understand the history or purpose of the unemployment metric. If someone living in a rural town moves to an industrialized city and they cannot find a job then the industrial machine needs more capital allocated to it. Currently we've built a slave economy were low tiers service high tier people. It's a very easy trap to fall into for obvious reasons, but it stalls growth.
Employment numbers don't tell the whole history. You may lose your job as a SWE making 200k/y and to control the hemorrage of your savings, accept a part time contractor role that nets you a fraction of what you used to get, without benefits, or you can start driving for uber, door dash, etc. All of it will make you count as employed.
That's often called "occupational mismatch" and it smuggles in a normative claim that someone always deserves a job matching their prior title, education, or salary. Labor statistics do not and should not assume that.
Also in my experience part time contractor roles are awesome. <20hr/wk = low stress, most of my big purchases like computer hardware were deductible business expenses, and the coveredca subsidy let me get a very good health plan (courtesy of all the full time guys who bleed taxes and get zero subsidies in return)
The point is, I hope you agree that normal people may find a labor market where should them lose their jobs, there's a heightened chance they will find themselves in a situation of "occupational mimatch" a lit bit stressing and not really the ideal, optimal market under their point of view.
It may be that this perception would be particularly amplified when those persons have some doubt whether they would be able, in any single month, to be able to pay both their mortgage and food with their "occupationally mismatched" new income levels.
Despite the fact that you're probably right when you say the labor statistics should not assume that those people are unemployed, I think you can now appreaciate the fact that for some people, the current labor market is not particularly reassuring no matter what numbers the Department of Labor proclaim for this particular statistics.
This doesn't count those who've given up on looking.
U-3 (unemployment rate) is 4.3% like he said. U-4 (U-3 plus discouraged workers, people who want and are available for work but stopped searching) is 4.6%. Practically the same.
If you want more detailed numbers, go look them up. BLS publishes them.
Unemployment is nearly at historical lows. But don't let data distract you from the same tired "everything is terrible" line that's every other post here.
Pretty massive difference between "being employed" and "being employed with a decent wage". Yeah, there's plenty of low-wage service industry or gig economy work available to take you out of the unemployment statistic -- there's a lot less employment available that enables you to live a decent lifestyle (i.e. live somewhere without 4 roommates or raise a family)
Also doesn't count the underemployed.
Very common for people suddenly laid-off from salaried work to turn to part-time gig work and that immediately removes them from the 4.3% unemployed statistic.
That's U-6 (U-5 plus people involuntarily working part-time). It's 8.1%. Pretty low by historical standards, but not as low as it was 3 years ago (6.9%)
nor those who are driving Uber or doordashing
The folks who made accurate federal numbers were fired some time ago. the current numbers are about as accurate as someone with an active interest in lying about it cares.
168m of 340m in the US work.
Non-employment is about 51%.
Remove all children and elderly and it’s about 35%.
The 4.3% is contrived - though the decimal is a nice touch.
I think that is a better way to look at it, although you then need to compare the 35% to historical trends, or you will just have an emotional "that's a big number" reaction.
Historical trends is another kind of trap, because employment used to mean something different compared to the necessity an income has become today.
For most of history anybody could just claim land. You literally just said "Mine!" And it was yours. You could shoot anyone who tried to enter it. You could do whatever you want - hunt on it and trade the fur and meat for pure gold, fish, drill for oil, create 100s of acres of opium fields.
Frankly, for most of history, nobody needed a job.
Today all land is owned by somebody, and even if you do own it, you still owe taxes and it comes with all sorts of restrictions and zoning for how you can use it. Often they are managed by POAs and HOAs, so it's not much different than renting. For those that do rent, it's even worse - you stay working forever.
I digress - even as recently as the 1970s or 80s, if you wanted a job, you had one. If you wanted a house, you had one.
Today, you need a job to survive, there's no safety net (at least not the United States) and basically no way to legally obtain the resources, space, and structures a typical human needs to survive well in the world.
So yeah, something like a 35% unemployment rate - where rent is the most expensive thing in the economy, nobody is allowed to build houses, nobody except for a few are allowed to sell goods, nobody is allowed to freely trade or construct anything - is a cause for immense daily suffering for no good reason.
hIsToRy will not look back on this brief era fondly. It's poverty and suffering for no reason, and we could (and will) do better.
> So what now? The short answer is that I have (a) a nice couch; (b) a big TV; (c) a Steam Deck that I never use. I even have a dock for the Deck. So I should hook them all together and try out some games.
This is the real answer. Why lust over new hardware and fret about finances when you have everything you need to play some games right now? There's not even any mention of what games they want to play on the Steam Machine that they can't play on their Steam Deck. They already bought a new TV to use with the Steam Deck and then didn't use it, so why even consider spending more money on more gaming hardware?
The Steam Machine was $250 less before all of the price increases from hardware buyouts. Go complain to Big Tech.
You can install Steam on almost any Linux device. The Steam Machine is great for those who want a portable console-like device. Have you ever tried to build and maintain a shuttle PC yourself? It's obnoxious. This makes the goal of high quality portable gaming much easier.
If you want to maintain the PC (replace or upgrade parts) the Steam Machine seems like a worse choice over a mini-ITX build. The price for the two is comparable.
If you want a console I agree, it's expensive but you can leverage your existing library and use sales, so not too bad if you buy a lot of games.
> Have you ever tried to build and maintain a shuttle PC yourself? It's obnoxious.
The benefit of a SFF PC you made yourself it that it doesn’t use proprietary hardware like the Steam Machine, is easily repaired and easily upgraded.
This is very true. I had a Ryzen Mini PC up until a couple of months ago, when it broke. Low quality VRMs, needed board repair.
Support says I need custom molds to reapply the liquid metal thermal compound, or it would 100% leak. Regular thermal compound just isn’t good enough. It was true. I could send it to China and they would fix it for free, but it would take 60 days and I would have to pay tariffs.
I just cut my losses and harvested the RAM and SSD for something more dependable.
Exactly. This is going to be perfect for my kid as he enters his teenage years. I dont want to mess with building one for him.
Let's hope his friends don't try to drag him into any competitive mainstream games. Valorant, Call of Duty, Battlefield, EA Sports FC, … Kernel-level anti-cheat usually doesn't work on Linux.
Let's hope Valorant, Call of Duty, Battlefield, EA Sports FC and others who explicitly deny their anti cheat from working on Linux react to the increasing demand for gaming on Linux, and begin supporting anti cheat on Linux.
Also, if his friends play Halo, CS2, Ark, War Thunder, Arma, Hell let Loose, Splitgate, TF2, DOTA, Overwatch, or The Finals, he'll be fine.
Okay? You can wipe off your tears and go buy a cheap gaming PC off Craigslist. Toss Bazzite on it, and you're good to go.
I'm not sure what type of sympathy people want to court with the "woe is me" narrative around how they need a third gaming device. The selling point of the Steam Machine is the software. Nothing about the bespoke hardware is worth crying over, it feels like object fetishism for the sake of it.
Exactly - I just built myself a knockoff Steam Machine by putting Steam OS (might switch to Bazzite but so far real Steam OS is fine) on a $300 Mini PC and I'm super pleased with it. 16GB of RAM and a Ryzen 7640HS runs all of my library just fine, though to be fair, I'm not much of a AAA super modern high-graphics gamer. Doing a lot of emulation these days.
End-to-end (hardware, OS, UI software) support from a single vendor for a narrowly-configured gaming PC, with actual serious support in terms of software updates and such, not just "we'll maybe honor the warranty if it breaks", including for TV-attached use cases where PCs (windows or Linux, either) tend to be kinda wonky[0], was appealing enough to me that I planned to buy it day-1 if it was under $700, and probably would still have bought it up to $800, to replace my giant gaming tower with Bazzite on it, even though performance-wise it would be roughly a lateral move or slight downgrade. I was really looking forward to the day I took that thing out of my house, but now... nope, gonna be a while because a few billionaires bid PC hardware up to the Moon.
I'm not aware of a single other product on the market that offers what Valve's device does. Tons of companies offer gaming PCs and you can slap Bazzite on lots of them, but that won't get you everything the Steam Machine offers. It's, AFAIK, unique.
[0] "But I've been running a PC attached to a TV literally for decades..." yeah, you've probably been missing some HDMI features that you don't care about but others do, or had trouble with them, while any gaming console or media player will have those features and have few or no problems with them; do you have surround sound over HDMI to a proper audio receiver, with non-broken mode-switching depending on current output? Use CEC features to wake your PC from sleep? What's your color gamut like? I've done this before too, a lot, hell I did it all the way back when I needed a composite or S-Video out on my video card to make it happen, on a CRT TV before HDMI ports were really a thing. Really good support for the use case looks a lot different than what you usually get by just plugging a PC or laptop into a TV.
Do you want to buy it to play video games on or do you want to buy it as a display/bragging rights piece?
What games do you play now that this specialized piece of hardware would better?
> What games do you play now that this specialized piece of hardware would better?
It'd likely be better as a living room TV PC than any PC I've ever owned or have seen for sale before, and it's likely to enjoy years of good support and frequent updates for its entire software stack by the same vendor that's selling the hardware, which is something I've never seen from anyone but Apple (aside from Valve, of course, for my Steam Deck) in more than 25 years of buying PCs and PC hardware. I tend to use my gaming PCs for five or so years at a time, despite never buying any parts that are top-of-the-line, so I'd expect to use this at least five years, and if the steam deck is any indication, it'll likely have 1st-party support for exactly the device and software I am using that entire time.
It'd be better for approximately all the games I play now than the power-hungry giant tower I have (it's effectively a lateral move on everything except 3D processing speed, which'll be roughly double what I've got now), plus, unlike this bazzite-running franken-PC, I expect it won't do stuff like have a weird whole-screen momentary color-shift every couple minutes (multiple monitors, it's the software, not the monitor's fault), constantly forget how to connect to bluetooth devices it's paired with (this, with a USB-attached bluetooth chip that's allegedly "really good on Linux", LOL; incidentally, it also can't pair with some devices in "desktop mode" [KDE] but can connect to them there once paired in "Gaming Mode", it's so weird), freak the hell out and scream like the damned(!) if a game tries to output something other than stereo audio, et c. I expect it'll have fewer "minor" problems like that on account of the 1st party vendor support and their having very few total hardware configs to test against.
I want it to play video games. Who in god's name would brag about something they merely bought? Especially if that something is mass-produced electronics.
Are the cheap gaming PCs off of Craigslist here in the room with us right now?
Snark aside, the second hand market is off the rails, too... The Steam Machine is cheaper than any DIY gaming PC I can build right now, even from parts off of OLX... And unlike the one I'd make, the Steam Machine will get the Steam Deck treatment as far as optimisation and certification (as in Runs on the Deck) goes.
Be interested to know which country. In USA and UK for the price it is fairly easily match the specs with new parts. And if you leave them on their default power profile in a larger case you get better performance.
you're paying for form factor, 'it just works', and convenience. how have we been having this same apple debate for 30 years, i feel like i'm on slashdot.
People say this about all unjustifiable products. "Why do I want a Juicero? Why do I need a Surface Laptop?" The same form factor, just works, convenience argument.
Nobody wants to acknowledge that it's all marketing halo. It takes less time to install SteamOS on the PC that you already own than it takes to buy and unbox a Steam Machine. But that's not "oooh new thing" retail therapy, so everyone waits with bated breath to see if they can afford the media center equivalent of jewellry. Nobody actually cares about functionality, convenience, or form factor if they're ignoring the most functional, convenient and proximate solution.
Somehow “it just works” is a meme or joke for every company except Valve
Yes, I wasn't criticising just saying a large company who will also be taking a 30% rake on most software run on it is not passing on any bulk purchasing discounts. For some it will be well work the convenience, for me it is not (but the Deck was).
I think SteamOS itself also now officially supports you installing it on any PC. (Ah, actually that's mentioned in this post even.)
Yes, or and hear me out, go ahead and shell out the extra $200 or so as a "hassle fee," if you get the Steam Machine you're much more guaranteed that everything else will just work.
I absolutely agree on your notion of "what is with this 'I need the shiny new thing for sake of having a shiny new thing.' "
The entitlement of the gaming “community” is next to none.
I did what you said last year and it’s been a delight.
Jensen getting gamers to buy CUDA devices on the backs of their endless Reddit induced hardware lust was an incredible move
At this price point they should have never released it, they should have waited. Everywhere I see reviews of it on the internet, come along with forced smiles and talk about how they agree with the philosophy behind it and they should be commended for fighting against Windows. But ultimately no one recommends this to the general public.
The writing is on the wall. This thing is going to flop.
Only thing they can do now is keep it on the market, and in a few years upgrade *and* discount this thing in hopes of reigniting the hype.
If they withdraw it, the very small but existing set of current buyers will scream bloody murder about being abandoned, and if they then try and re-release, trust will already have been broken.
> The writing is on the wall.
This thing is going to sell out.
If prices go back to normal, v2 of this product will be great. This version, at these specs, at this point in time would only be a buy if it was good value (like $500). People will buy them all anyway.
Dave2D covered it very well.
https://youtu.be/Huw11M9aaMk
Selling out doesn't equate to success. They've already said the initial launch will be heavily limited.
What matters is if they make a profit throughout the product's lifecycle. Not whether they sell out on initial release.
Steam Deck & Machine appear to be very low margin, so Valve will make very little profit on them whether they sell a lot or a little. So profit isn't the success measure they're aiming for.
They're all just tools to get people to buy more games, which is where the margin is. And the existence of the Steam Machine makes the ecosystem more attractive even if you don't actually buy the Machine.
> What matters is if they make a profit throughout the product's lifecycle.
That may not matter either.
In fact, the most likely outcome is that they sell out of inventory, and the next iteration of the device gets GTA6 level hype. The scarcity of the premium product.
It all depends on how well they support the current iteration, though.
If it turns into a Google Glass or an Apple Vision Pro and is left nearly or actually abandoned, then I think people won't be so interested.
This doesn't make any sense.
They use the OS in multiple products. Tons of people run it on their own hardware.
They could probably not update a single thing on there and it wouldn't matter, the games themselves are mostly running through an emulation layer anyway and will continue to work.
So what are you saying? They can do this single limited release and then discontinue it and everyone is going to be happy about it? People will just flock to the next version when it comes out and not feel burned by what happened?
Not many people run games on linux, only about 5%, amd of those nearly all keep a windows OS around to handle edge cases and upgrading firmware, etc.
This is what the fight is about. If Steam can't get linux based devices into the hands of enough people continuing to support it will remain a money pit for them for as long as they try.
Releasing the Steam box at this price is not helping their cause. They have to recover from this now.
You don't understand how Steam works, the culture around it, or why people are excited about this.
> So what are you saying? They can do this single limited release and then discontinue it and everyone is going to be happy about it?
They're selling a gaming console, of which in their case the hardware is the least important part and a means to an end. It is commodity hardware. No integrated memory. No special sauce.
These are hardware drivers that are a part of the Linux kernel.
What they are selling is a portal (grin) to their ecosystem, and an experience that is different from their competitors. One that unlike many of their competitors, doesn't require a monthly fee to be a part of (multiplayer). AND access to it is now scarce. A limited premium product.
> Not many people run games on linux, only about 5%
You're going to find a bunch of those on this website, myself included. No windows PC laying around though.
I game on Fedora 44 w/ Steam.
> Releasing the Steam box at this price is not helping their cause. They have to recover from this now.
You just don't get it.
I think you're too cloae to take any criticism. Any result seems like it'd be a success to you.
I think most of the non-success outcomes involve an objectively bad experience, regardless of the price. Example of that would be a buggy system that feels more like a cut down PC than a console. From reviews, we see that this outcome doesn't seem to be the case.
The other potential failure outcomes involve selling the product at a loss, or tying up too much cash in it and having liquidity issues while stock moves. Valve's cash flow is likely excellent, we know they're not selling it at a loss and we know they aren't producing too many.
So overall, the possible outcomes all seem like different degrees of success.
Valve has been working toward this ecosystem for over a decade. This is a single product offering among a growing product line that provides access to their store.
To be clear, their competitors are pretty pathetic.
> I think you're too cloae to take any criticism
I'm not even their target market, nor would I buy one when I can roll my own on my own hardware - even using SteamOS if I wanted.
https://www.theverge.com/games/953411/valve-steamos-desktop-...
Their competitors are xbox and playstation and the cost is way more than each of these. You admit you won't even buy it because I guess you are too technologically inclined. And yet it's not a flop to you. Why?
The fact they've worked on running games on linux for over a decade and still only have a 5% market cap does not bode well for them.
This was supposed to be their great moment, and they ruined it with an expensive box with subpar performance. They should have waited. Now after the hype dies down and it doesn't sell, they'll just have another black eye they have to recover from.
Look, I run linux and have for 30 years. I run games on linux and have steam on linux installed myself. But I'm not trying to fool myself and others that it's some great success story. It isn't.
I guess time will tell. ;)
> Selling out doesn't equate to success
If you have no revenue, you can say you’re pre-revenue... It’s not about how much you earn. It’s about what you’re worth. And who’s worth most? Companies that lose money.
> Everywhere I see reviews of it on the internet,
Gaming reviews have diverged from reality. Everything is about finding controversy and something to be angry about. Gaming journalism and social media are extremely toxic, but not really indicative of average gamers or consumers any more.
> The writing is on the wall. This thing is going to flop.
I would bet that it's going to be oversubscribed and sell out.
I bet it sells out, too. But selling out a heavily limited release doesn't mean they are going to make a profit.
They’re privately owned, not every project needs to be profitable. It can just not lose money and strengthen the Steam ecosystem where the real profit is.
If this thing becomes unobtanium unless you’re a game studio or a journalist, but becomes a standard optimization/compatibility target for game developers like the Steam Deck has been, I would consider it successful, imo.
They may not recoup R&D costs for a while depending on volume, but they will make a profit per unit. They can't sell them as loss leaders like regular console manufacturers can, since then general computer buyers would get them as a priced down unlocked PC.
And importantly, they have the finances to support that R&D expenditure taking longer than expected to be recouped. The same situation with a small company would be very different than a company with solid income elsewhere.
The Steam Deck also sells out but the overall userbase is a drop in the ocean compared to the Switch.
I'm sure that the steam machine will sell out just because A) it's a small batch B) It's Valve C) It's a neat form factor.
But as someone who was originally going to pick one up (thinking it was going to be a great little gaming PC powerhouse), seeing it come in close to last in most of the GamersNexus benchmarks was pretty disheartening (pulling 20-50FPS at 1080p on most recent games).
I was hoping that they were going to bring a console mindset to PC building to create something that exceeded what a DIY-er could do with off the shelf parts. But the fact you can make a faster DIY machine for cheaper right now feels...eh, what's the point?
My guess is they sell the first few batches, then Steam Machine goes on a small vacation for a few years while they wait for prices to come back down.
Waited until when? 2028?
I predict it sells out
> The writing is on the wall. This thing is going to flop.
No. They've made just enough to sell out and drive demand.
Person has a Steam Deck that they don't use?
The only thing that keeps me from being genuinely baffled by this person taking the time to write this is the fact that I'm seeing similar takes elsewhere, which also baffle me to no end.
Are people really this enamored by "the thought of buying new thing," as opposed to, like, thinking about whether they'll use it?
Anyway, the Steam Machine seems like an extremely solid deal. It's a reasonably powered PC, and for an extra $200 or so, you'll get the guarantee that everything will just work, at least game-wise.
> Are people really this enamored by "the thought of buying new thing," as opposed to, like, thinking about whether they'll use it?
Yes. I know rationally it's overpriced and underpowered but a tiny part of me still wants to own it, just because. It's a shiny black box.
You have a steam deck you don't use, so sell it and buy the Steam Machine, and then don't use that either.
I'm in the "steam deck that I never use" camp but it's because I've been too lazy to take a Saturday to repurpose it into a dedicated console piracy device, it turns out I hate playing basically any PC game "on the go" (their touchpad-thingies seem to please some people as a mouse replacement but I find them entirely unusable), and it's just weak enough that I've found it worth keeping my old gaming PC around for now for 1080p+ gaming at OK quality & frame rate (and if I've got that plugged in, why plug in the steam deck?)
For me the Steam Deck proved to me that Linux gaming was viable (finally! I've been trying since the days of Unreal Tournament being a current game and having an official Linux binary, LOL) and that I like the idea of an official Valve device, but that I needed a little more power and a desktop-alike form factor to reach a point of "good enough" for me (well, portable would still be fine, I just wouldn't use it that way so it'd be better if I didn't have to pay for the extra parts or have the added complexity and jank-risk of a dock)
Like if my gaming PC broke I would't replace it (at least not for quite a while) but I would plug my Steam Deck into my monitor and start using it again, it's not that the device is wholly useless to me. It just wasn't quite a fit for what I do & want, it turns out. I do use my gaming PC, and that's what a Steam Machine would have replaced. I even have Bazzite on there so I for-sure would have used the Steam Machine, as I basically have a somewhat rougher-edged (and way bigger, with obnoxious "gamer light" horse-shit all over because that's hard to avoid for some reason) version of it already.
Fun projection, there are three steam decks amongst my roommates, all three of them use is basically daily.
the original post says:
I'd say if you feel this way and you're not really using the Steam Deck as a handheld you might as well sell it and take the money to buy the Steam Machine. Used 512GB Steam Decks go for >$500, you'll probably get a bit for selling the docking setup you have as well.
... holy shit, why are they so high used, I'd never have guessed?! Thank you for pointing this out, as someone with a Steam Deck I almost never use and a desktop gaming PC running bazzite that I do use, a lot, but wanted to replace with a Steam Machine, I'll probably do exactly his.
> why are they so high used
New ones are $800-950. Other new handhelds that have much less brand caché out there are $1,000 or even more.
It is possible to build an equivalent PC with Steam Machine specs, with same case size (internal PSU) and similar or lower price? I'll probably still a wait a bit to see reviews from actual users, but I really dig the form factor and was unable to find anything similarly sized with built-in PSU.
I've long wished for rich western societies to run extensive student exchange programs with low income countries. Living even one year in most of the world will change your outlook for the rest of your life.
Usually the people in low income/developing countries that engage in student exchange programs are upper middle class and beyond and have lives no much different from their peers in developed western societies.
People in western societies tend to ignore that developing countries are not merelly poorer but also generally marked by extreme wealth and income inequality. The rich and the upper middle class for all practical effects live like the citizens of developed countries, it is just that there are less of them compared to the general population.
Dhaka, Bangladesh, it's not a nice place to live no matter how much money you have compared to developed countries.
Even Bangladesh have huge gated communities (almost closed city districts, with office buildings and commerce besides residences) that are orders of magnitude that do a really good job of isolating someone from the general dystopian chaos of the city.
There's a video somewhere in this Library of Babel of some Palestinian kids who got a chance to visit New York (when Palestinian kids were still allowed to enter the USA, leave their occupied nation, and not be genocided to death).
Obviously they looked at all the skyscrapers with bewilderement.
My university offers locations such as India for the semester abroad, but most people rather go somewhere else.
I hope it is a while before I have to buy a new computer!
Don't buy new. Get a 10 year old dual processor server tower on eBay with 128GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.
It's cheaper than new and it'll do everything you need it to without even breaking a sweat.
I wish I could look forward and say, "prices will go down again" I don't see when or how. I hope I'm wrong.
RAM prices are crazy now, but they always tended to go up and down in waves over the years.
Well the bubble could pop, but...
as much as we are blaming the pandemic, and the crypto and AI bubbles I think Moore's law was really about transistors getting exponentially cheaper not just exponentially smaller. If you can't afford them it doesn't matter how big or small they are!
I think the EUV transition broke the long-term cost decreases and we might be seeing the end of progress in electronics and computing unless there is some fundamental change.
On a wide enough horizon, litho (& MRI) machines are nothing more than a source of entertainment?
Narrower horizon: https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/enepol/v38y2010i9p5174-5188.ht...
I think China came to the conclusion that the French got it right when they standardized on the Hualong One [1] rather than AP-1000. I did break out the champagne the other day when I heard they actually installed a BWRX 300 module at Darlington the other day!
As for electronics manufacturing it's believable we see something entirely different in 20 years (SQUID? true 3-d integration?) but I expect a rough patch for most of the rest of my life. Not like I won't have enough retro games to play for my entertainment.
Just got back giving from Casey Handmer some tough love over (1) it is not commercially interesting to make methane on Earth and (2) it is not feasible to make make methane on Mars unless you can make everything else. Handmer is a tragic figure like Klein, except Klein's tragedy is a tragedy for us all whereas Handmer and I are the only ones crying over his tragedy because I could use a buddy to talk to about the interests we share who is worth talking to.
If Musk was the hard man he pretended to be he'd be interested in my notes on how to attain manufacturing autarky after the future event the Club of Rome warned you about. But he's not so he's not. He gets to date the models from Looker [3] but which witch can resist a pet therianthrope? [2]
[1] ... of which, oddly, there are two different designs!
[2] ... sorry gsf_emergency_\d but a good parody deserves a parody; is @cindy your sister?
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looker (I was so dazzled by that LOOKER Gun, my second favorite sci-fi gun of all time, that I had to watch the movie a few times to realize it really is just as bad as everybody else says it is)
Man did I google a lot of things in this comment. Paul, you're an interesting person.
And you didn't even ask me what my favorite sci-fun gun is?
I didn't... Is it the one from Existenz? The one from Portal is pretty cool.
Nah, it's the gun the psyclos have in Battlefield Earth; it looks like a piece of junk like some power tools mated with a pistol, it seems really painful to get hit with but like the L.O.O.K.E.R. gun it doesn't do tissue damage when set to stun.
https://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Battlefield_Earth
https://3dprintedprops.com/shop/looker-light-gun/
Can't say I have an emo attachment to any gun--- but I'll admit a couple make me pause the way avantgardey prime my third eye to underserved sources of attraction.
Eg The Doodad (after Gibson, neither 0% nor 100% lethal, cf Venezuela, "Middle America"). PP gave me retro-pause marvelling at the Chinese supplying precursors to the WestHem factions (existenz). kinda vibe-prophetic.
My best take on what you meant by the tragedy Handmer is that he has the mike (and loves to drop it whenever he can)--- but the tragedy of the rest of us here is that we don't quite. ?.
And Martian ice caps?
Just realized I'd never connected face to name, so I'd bounced off his Dwarkesh clips BC 1st impression was "fake genZ". Oops.
Now admiring the ambiguities in "rough patch" and "Cindy".
My takeaway from the French essay was that there was nothing stopping others from learning from one's mistakes (ie "without doing")
Edit:
https://youtu.be/1aQrPK9ulD0
https://lethalindisguise.org/crowd-control-weapons/acoustic-...
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a32892398/...
Very ICE, also vibe-prophetic
Edit 2 (reel vs real)
The RI <-> SV
Met <-> Dems (sorry if too heroic but no one else wants to be official with stubbers)
Klepts <-> "Trumpians"
Stubbers <-> DSA
Edit 3: ah so it's an IMI Micro Uzi
My hope is that whatever makes hardware prices go down over last decades would eventually work again now. I guess CPU is a dead end, but why not RAM and storage?
Related:
Steam Machine launches today
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632884
Oh man, you don't want to buy a generic computer because it won't make you look good in front of others and its only sorta expensive
They should have made it $540/$692/$989
540 is basically 500. People could say “it’s half the price of an iPhone!”
It’s a no-brainer price, but really, people are buying the ~700 one and the ~1k one.
It should also come with a base controller that is good but made of cheap parts.
All the upgrades with lights and weights and accelerometer etc is a huge market on its own. Steering wheels, guns, and so-on, too.
First world problems
Blame Altman et al.
“homebrew steam machine” it’s called a computer
computers have gotten more expensive, deal with it lmao
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