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 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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%)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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'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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.'
"
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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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.
My university offers locations such as India for the semester abroad, but most people rather go somewhere else.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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> 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.
Waited until when? 2028?
I predict it sells out
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:
> 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?
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.
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.
I think SteamOS itself also now officially supports you installing it on any PC. (Ah, actually that's mentioned in this post even.)
The entitlement of the gaming “community” is next to none.
I did what you said last year and it’s been a delight.
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.' "
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.
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.
First world problems
I hope it is a while before I have to buy a new computer!
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.
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.
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.
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
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