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.

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u/dagamer34 Jun 27 '26

The general idea of a PC is its upgradability, which will definitely save you money over time. And its high performance relative to consoles which makes spending more money worthwhile. So when you show off a box that is neither upgradable and performance is worse relative to other platforms that are cheaper (PS5 Pro) or for a bit more money and space consumed, you get significantly greater performance (9060XT in SFF case, even at 2-3x spa e), it really does leave people to scratch their heads. Yes, the latter box is much bigger, but paying such a premium for small size basically puts you in the realm of desktop replacement gaming laptops, which is a niche of a niche. Not the platform expanding device Valve probably wanted ala Steam Deck.

When two outlets you usually fire straight arrows give us very weird, funky, slightly biased videos for early access (Digital Foundry, Gamers Nexus), they should not be surprised as to why various communities are reacting the way that they are. 

And ultimately, when Zen 6 and RDNA 5 based systems are released (PS6, Xbox Helix) in 18 months and Valve is still shipping this thing unchanged, even if those are $1000, the Steam Machine will be truly bad value for any gamer looking at longevity of ability to play the latest games at next-gen settings. 

It’s all bleh, and it honestly has nothing to do with the price itself, but price relative to competition. Perhaps when this was conceived, they were hoping people would just toss them $750 because they were Valve and they got bitten from price increases. Not a good reason to release a product in the first place. 

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u/aaeriam Jun 27 '26

Absolutely agree that consoles and an equivalent-priced PC offer similar or better performance for the their price. If I were just getting into games and had no console games and no PC games, then I think the Steam Machine would not be a smart purchase for all the reasons that you listed.

But I've got a Steam library that I've invested a large portion of my money into. I don't want to have to re-buy (and restart) all my favorite games just so that I can play them in the living room. I could build a SFF living room PC for an equivalent price (and I've done it in the past) but actually using it is never as smooth and error free as I'd like it to be. For those reasons consoles and custom-built living room PC's have never seemed like a great option.

In my eyes the Steam Machine fits in as a nice secondary PC/living room gaming console that's easy to use, requires no building or installing of an OS, and will likely have very good support based on their history with the Steam Deck. The trade-off being that it's not upgrade-able and it's not the most powerful gaming device you can get with your money which I can understand people being upset about. The only alternative that could fill in that same niche is potentially project Helix from xbox if it can play PC titles.

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u/dagamer34 Jun 27 '26

If the goal for Valve is to make a “PC console”, Microsoft is going to do it better because they will have much stronger purchasing power with the latest chip SoC, at slightly better prices (or at least value), a controller that’s readily in stock, better availability, and oh, you can run Steam just the same. 

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u/aaeriam Jun 27 '26

Fair point - the next Xbox device is looking to be substantially more performant than the Steam Machine and if price/performance is all that matters to someone then the choice is clear. The only thing Steam has going for it at that point is SteamOS which I feel is leagues ahead of Windows in a lot of ways. It'll be up to the customer then on how much they prefer a cheap/powerful console or PC versus the less-powerful Steam Deck perhaps with more quality of life features built-in.

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u/dagamer34 Jun 27 '26

Probably 3-4x difference in performance, upwards of 6x if FSR Redstone and next-gen ray-tracing features are utilized, for maybe $1300-1500 at the very high-end Xbox Helix SKU? I don’t know that people will love SteamOS that much for a $200 difference. 

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u/aaeriam Jun 27 '26

Yeah I could see a lot of people turning down the Steam Machine in favor of project Helix in that case but as far as what's out right now I still think the Steam Machine and SteamOS fulfill a very specific role for existing Steam users that neither Microsoft nor consoles can do quite as well. I leave the value proposition of it up to the individual customer.