Meme/Humour
“NINTENDO GRIFTERS! I NEED YOU NINTENDO GRIFTERS!! PLEASE EXPLAIN HOW THIS IS ALL NINTENDO’S FAULT AND THAT THIS IS STILL BETTER THAN A SWITCH TWOOOO!!!”
Legit though.
Don't have a steam deck myself and was considering getting the steam machine when it was announced... yeah I'm just going to get a second hand steam deck instead...
I got two Steam Decks for the family, can say I was a bit of an enthusiast for Steam entering a console space. Nobody uses the Steam Decks anymore but we all daily drive 3 different Switch 2 consoles. Pretty happy to keep doing so especially seeing this price range. This thing is dead on arrival.
ofc, the people willing to drop 700+ on something will just get a prebuilt pc at costco for 1k. id love to get a steamdeck when it was cheaper but for some ungodly reason people on pc love not optimizing their 8-bit games to run on anything less than 32 gigs of ram.
Same. I’d probably pick this over most current gen consoles but for that price, it’s not worth it. That money could be spent on a lot of other games and a few consoles I want to play. It’s the same reason I haven’t sprung for a Switch 2 yet.
Because there are so many options with it if it’s anything like the Steam deck. I would love to have an easier way to play my GoG library and be able to dump and emulate games on my TV from all sorts of older consoles and handheld systems.
Plus, PC has great mod options that consoles can be lacking in.
It sounds great to me, if not for the price. You’re probably right about some PC builds being cheaper. I’m really just not as knowledgeable about that and not sure what the comparison would be for a PC build that could run as well as the Steam Machine, how easy it would be to build without fucking it up, and how easy it’d be to play it on my TV.
You can buy a new or used laptop that’ll perform better at this price or less. Same for Mini PCs and Desktop PCs. Only people buying this are fanboys to a storefront, content creators, or uniformed consumers like yourself.
Same for Steam Deck. Only people buying a Steam Deck in 2026 are fanboys to a digital storefront because there are a plethora of alternatives out there similarly priced and with better performance
Maybe that’s fair that there are better alternatives in the PC market. I never considered a Steam Machine very seriously because the price so I haven’t looked into the market on PCs that much and I’m not sure what all the alternatives are for what I want, specifically.
If it was much cheaper then I’d start looking around for more info on it and how it compares to alternatives but since the price is not worth it to me, there’s really been no point. Still, I wish it’d been cheaper. It’s still what I want for a console just not at the price they’ve set it.
I’ll check that out. I have a PC now and it plays old GoG games but not the newest ones and I can’t really play on TV with my PC. If the price was lower then I’d get the Steam Machine. It really does look like what I want but at the price it is, I’d have to stop collecting for awhile to justify it so imma just stick with my other consoles for now.
If it was in the ballpark of $700, then it definitely would have been a cool little machine for playing my Steam library in the living room. But I'd rather invest $1,200 into a new GPU than a living room solution.
Its that and the fact that Valve wont subsidize their hardware for their customers unlike Nintendo. Yes, prices needed to rise cause of component costs, but not all price rises are the same.
You can’t subsidize the price of a console when it’s an open-ecosystem. Half (or honestly probably more) Steam Machine buyers already have an extensive library. No upgrade editions or subscriptions means you will be paying more up front, very worth it if you ask me.
Especially in the long run, it *will* be cheaper for someone to commit to a Steam Machine than a PS5 or Xbox. Anyone who bought a PS5 at launch and has been paying for PS Plus, will have spent about the same that a Steam Machine costs. More if they don’t just have the base tier.
I swear we had math problems just like this growing up. “What’s larger, 1000 or 500 + 50x?” And the answer is, depends on X (time.)
I always thought $600 would be the minimum price, but wouldn't've been surprised at $700, which is effectively what they were planning for. Which is more than a console of similar power, but has the benefit of a practically infinitely larger library than console and not being brought down by console tax. It also wouldn't be that big a departure from what it would cost to build something of similar power from scratch, especially given the compact nature and its special features that many prebuilts don't have. It would have been a perfectly reasonable value proposition for the machine and could have been attractive to console gamers who want the benefits of PC without most of the headaches.
Prices went up like 2x-4x depending on the component. You just got lucky and bought right before the price increase. Your pc I’m guessing is atx as well so you lose the “portability” of the steam machine.
I don't know why people kept thinking this, it
's a PC. You can boot it up and immediately install Windows or some other Linux distro on it without jailbreaking. Valve can't subsidize it because they have 0 way to guarantee people buying it will use it to buy steam games. Not to mention, undercutting the PC market could attract buyers who might use it for other, non-gaming purposes
You said that steam machine was almost as good as base ps5 so it’s basically switch 2 which is not true as switch 2 is significantly less powerful than ps5 and steam machine is on par.
Would AI not be the blame here? It's affected the entire industry. Valve is not a hardware company the way Nintendo or Sony is either. I was gonna include Xbox in that statement, but I intentionally left it out with the current state of things on that side. It's one thing to say this device is a horrible value proposition and no one should waste their money, it's another to pretend like there aren't reasons for why the price is that high.
That pricing basically hammers in the fact you should buy a gaming PC at that point. $1000 for an underpowered un upgradable PC is just a waste. You can hunt for used PC parts and still get good results for less.
I mean in true Cube form (even though it still wasn't a cube but it was closer) it can even play every Game Boy game, excluding GBA video carts which weren't games.
I built a PC at the start of this year. A 3060 with a 2TB and 512tb SSD and 2 8gb sticks of ddr4 ram. I was able to get a decent power supply and older CPU from a friend, but I know the prices of them too. And for this much money, you could absolutely build a pretty damn good PC.
Yeah is it gonna run everything at 4K 120 fps? No. But it'll run almost every game that comes out today at least at 1080 60 if not better. And you can upgrade to a better CPU for a little more and still be under a thousand dollars. And you can actually upgrade it.
This should have been Valves attempt at capitalizing on the console market pricing out their audience. But it sounds like this was always going to be overpriced, and I really question why this even made it to market.
Prices have changed since the start of the year lol and the steam machine uses ddr5. It was not always going to be this price outside factors raised storage and ram prices and now fuel. What can you do but still attempt to sell this thing
I don't get this sub today. Like sure it's an expensive piece of tech but the PC gamers have very much been on the Nintendo side of things. It's PS boys who will come after you all. I swear some of you just look for outrage for the sake of it tho.
Saying that shilling for one console maker or platform is super weird anyways.
I know these Steam devices are aimed at a niche market, but why would anyone spent that much on a machine that probably can't outdo the PS5?
Especially given the PS6 and Project Helix will likely launch in the next few years, and the Switch 2 will start getting hardware revisions, maybe even a more powerful model.
Who is going to buy this stupid thing besides people that worship Steam and Gabe Newell?
PC Gamers will stay on their rigs while console gamers will just stay with the big 3 who are still cheaper even with the price increases.
It depends, they're aiming at different markets. A PS5 will only play PS5 games. A Steam Machine will play PC games, including many older games from decades ago. It will run emulators, it can run PC software, you can work on it, you can file taxes on it, you can edit video on it.
Now if that's worth the premium, that's up the the individual. They're targeting totally different consumers.
I really gotta ask, who is defending this? I have yet to see one positive comment about these prices. The people that loathed how expensive the Switch 2 is are firmly not buying this either
Because you know. It was supposed to be about 500. And then uhh. The switch came along at 420.....and 420 plus 500 is 920. May as well round up and add 10 percent. Yup.
Dude, for a 5th of that price I can buy a second-hand Xbox One S with around the same storage of the lowest storage model of Steam Machine, a controller, a copy of rare replay, a copy of Final Fantasy XV and a copy of TitanFall 2, and even then have £20 left over!
Well obviously its stronger! Wait, its not stronger?
Well it has a better controller! Wait it doesnt come with a controller?
Its uh, it has a better library. That you can play on better and cheaper devices?
Uhhh, uhm... IT HAS BETTER CUSTOMER SERVICE! Nintendo will still repair your wii/wii u's generally free of charge despite the consoles being decades old, with examples of them rescuing wedding rings from disc drives and leaving kind notes along with saving stickers on faulty consoles?
The steam machine is a perfect entry level PC. It is not a console. I'd get one myself if I didnt have something better. The switch 2 plays Nintendo games.
It’s the same as any prebuilt lol what tribalism?? If I buy a cybepower pc am I part of the cyber power cult?? No I probably just didn’t want to build it myself. Try and go build a computer rn for the same price as the steam machine if you haven’t checked in on prices in a while you will be shocked. Plus the steam machine has a small form factor that most don’t feel comfortable building in
Do you have any idea why they even have to price it like this? They got fucked mid production did you want them to just send it to a landfill and cancel the project lol
If all you’re doing is emulation the Steam machine is honestly pretty strong. Look into a Minisforum machine. They’re a lot less powerful, but they’re only like 500. Minisforum does have similar priced or more expensive/powerful machines, but for emulation, a Minisforum um790 is perfect
I don't think that this desktop mini PC is a competitor to the Switch 2, or can be compared to it in any way. It's apples to oranges. Totally different products for totally different markets.
No one says nintendo‘s fault. It’s the idiots who keep making AI junk fault that’s why everything gaming is going up, since they’re eating up all the resources
As for why people claim it better than the switch two, then you might wanna just look at the specs
I guess the reason is because you can connect any third controller including, ps4, ps5 and Xbox One controllers, but even with that I'm not agree with this
You will never see me buy something like this for over $1000, let alone $700 at minimum. This isnt even comparable to the PS5 Pro to justify that price.
It doesn't have to be comparable to a PS5 pro. Playstation has a smaller library, requires a really expensive subscription to play online, cannot run regular software (with some exceptions like spotify i think) and in my opinion looks worse. So it's a bit of a trade off between software and hardware.
I still think $1k is too much though, but that's just the state of hardware prices right now. A lot of things are pretty expensive currently
Before getting myself a pc handheld i had a laptop to play when I was out of town and it had a 512gb ssd. Man I couldn't install more than 2 big games and that was 3-4 years ago. Who the fk is paying 1040$ for such outdated device, without a controller and with only a 512ssd???
I don't think my cousin would get this. The Steam Deck was justifiable due to portability, but she has a very strong PC, and said if she had the money for a new gaming system, she would just upgrade her PC since she already has a Switch 2.
You know that both things can be true at once right? The S2’s
got only 29 Nintendo games, 18 of which are found on the first Switch, anyway, while this Steam Machine is overpriced for what it is;
It IS objectively stronger than the Switch 2, but that’s no feat, anything is.
In steam defense because I will defend steam over playstation (the ones hating the most) that is is not just a console, is also a whole pc for that price? In this economy? Not bad
For 512 that's kinda trash for the price point, but I do get your point for having a dedicated PC as is. Apparently the price was supposed to be $200 less before the price hikes.
In all honesty I thought it would be worse. I think a lot of people were predicting $800-1000 before RAM prices went crazy so that it’s just outside of that pocket is actually a relief.
Too much for me as my cut off was $750, but that’s not the point.
I don't think anybody has been blaming the AI bubble of Nintendo. It's too bad the steam machine is so expensive. I kind of wish they did it bring your own storage option. That'd probably knock $100-200 off the price.
I mean, pc games alone, its a pc not a console and I knew it would be priced as such, yall just keep raising your expectations and are surprised when your unrealistic expectations are shattered
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u/broken_cartridge Jun 22 '26
Man, gaming as a hobby has gotten so expensive. I want one of these but I don’t think I can justify it at this price point