I have a feeling it would have cost drastically less if we didn't have a RAM / storage crisis, which is really sad.

shantara 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The original price should have been in $700-800 range, pre-RAM and storage pricing escalation, which would have changed the equation drastically. I even considered getting it as a mostly streaming box for a living room, intending to play only the lighter games on device. But for the announced price and after delays, it just doesn't make sense financially. As is, you're grossly overpaying for the level of GPU performance Steam Machine offers.

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joe_mamba 15 hours ago | parent [-]

>The original price should have been in $700-800 range, pre-RAM and storage pricing escalation

Also on a 2025 launch, but that 2023 mid-level hardware feels already pretty weak in 2026, especially for a console you're supposed to run 6-7 years into the future. Sure, it's as powerful as a base PS5 but that console is already 6 years old by now. So the valve box is a pain to justify jumping in unless you're a big valve fan and don't want to DIY a PC.

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giancarlostoro 11 hours ago | parent [-]

What's most surprising is the benchmarks dont look too hot vs the PS5... which doesn't cost nearly as much.

	▲	mywittyname 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sony are masters of optimizations. Some of their PC ports run really well on the Steam Deck.

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starkrights 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’ve seen from a couple of places that a valver has commented that they can’t say exactly what the original price goal was, but that you can get an idea from the price increase of the steamdeck (~$200 usd)

That wouldve put the steam machine somewhere around the $800 mark for the base edition, which would’ve been so, so much sweeter of a value proposition.

	▲	frollogaston 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I feel bad for them running into this shortage right before launch. Steam Machine was announced before all this.

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NothingAboutAny a day ago | parent | prev [-]

there's probably ~$150 in the ram and ~$100 in the SSD alone, not to mention everything else. we gotta have data-centers though because, uh.. well, we gotta have em.

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dannyw 21 hours ago | parent [-]

To a large extent, all these datacenters are being built because people want tokens. Do you use something like Opus or GPT5.5 for coding? Well, you're part of the demand.

If you don't, then yes, as a PC enthusiast I'm sad as well. But like, it's a little bit ironic to be complaining about RAM prices if you've got 5 sub-agents hacking away.

	▲	Dylan16807 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If someone is using heavily underpriced tokens I don't blame them much either. They're not funding the hardware purchases, super-investors that want to control the AI world are.