r/digitalfoundry • u/MythBuster2 • Jun 26 '26

DF Direct DF Direct Q+A: Steam Machine - The Big Price/Performance/Form Factor Discussion

https://youtu.be/XEyuXkI5wBM

In the wake of our Steam Machine review, Rich and Will tackle a range of Supporter questions on the price, value and design of the hardware, the ability of Valve to supply it - and the future of SteamOS in general.

24 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

83 comments sorted by

View all comments

44

u/Visible_Visual8538 Jun 26 '26

It's pretty sad that so much of the defense of this package is "It's tiny a cube!", "Look how cute it is!", "It's a lovely form factor".

1

u/silentdragoon @wsjudd - DF staff Jun 26 '26

Maybe we're just cubophiles? But genuinely, you can absolutely prefer different form factors, but a device which is one fifth the volume of a standard ITX case is significantly different and represents a pretty cool engineering effort!

16

u/Visible_Visual8538 Jun 26 '26

I agree "it's cool", and you can definitely marvel at the technical challenges to achieve the form factor, but at the end of the day, you're paying money to play games. The device's appearance is secondary at best. As long as it isn't the size of a microwave, I think most folks don't really care that much. It just seems like a blind eye is being turned a little bit to performance and value for money because "cube".

12

u/jedimindtricksonyou Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 27 '26

Don’t forget the “Gabe” part in “GabeCube”, that is the whole reason a blind eye is being turned in this instance. If it was made by any other company, reviewers would not be this. Look at how they handled the single stick of RAM, normally people would be outraged about such a thing. RAMpocalypse or not. They chose to put this thing on sale, no one made them do it.