this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2025
150 points (92.6% liked)
Games
24530 readers
138 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No. It's going to be sub PS5 in terms of performance and should be priced accordingly. You can make the argument that games are a bit cheaper on Steam so they can maybe charge a premium for that.
I am ostensibly the target market for this as I refuse to play games at my desk, only the couch. But I would love to get into the Steam ecosystem and play on my couch and PCVR titles. But I would only consider one if it could do the things my PS5 does at a similar price for both the system and VR headset.
Honestly, they could sell at a loss and still profit. Steam has the biggest selection of games bar none, they've built a culture of buying games too collect them with no intention of playing them, and they get a decent cut of every sale. If they thought of it as a 10 year plan they could sell this thing for $400, and undercut the entire rest of the condole scene, land this in the living room of every kid who wants to game world wide, and literally crush the big 3 in sales.
And then Microsoft or Sony would bulk buy 10k steam machines to use in their server rooms. They can't sell at a loss because the hardware is not locked, otherwise people could just buy these and use them for whatever and Valve wouldn't see a cent from those machines. At the very least they need to be sold at a neutral price point, but more than likely they're looking to get some profit over them.
They'd need 10k steam accounts tho
Yes, it would be very difficult for the owners @outlook to create 10k accounts.
That alone wouldn't solve most of the problems of playing on the couch.
You still need a controller that will go that far and an OS/frontend that works on the TV.
I've tried these couch keyboard mouse setups and they always suck.
Not an experience I would want personally. But that's one of the differences between me and a PC gamer, PC gamers are happy to put up with a lot more crap with their gaming than I am.
Well at a desk you don't have to pull out the keyboard from wherever you stash it and put it on your lap every time you want to change games. It's already there.
But of course I am comparing to console gaming where this option is a lot more crap in comparison.
Yeah I haven't tried big picture mode lately but as I remember you still had to sometimes deal with keyboard and mouse to fix options or sometime edit files on the computer to make things work well on a given hardware. But maybe it's improved since then.
Yeah I'm sure for a lot of PC gamers this will be fine. It remains to be seen if the Steam Machine is really the couch experience I would accept or not. If it involves a keyboard and mouse it's not. Been there, done that, not going back. I think it will probably be priced outside of what I'd be willing to pay for something of this spec anyway.
At the end of the day, consoles do a lot of things very well for the price and are a good value if you don't have a very large game library. On the Sony store you can still pick most stuff up on pretty steep discounts if you wait a bit and put it on a watchlist.
To be fair I do explain my couch use case, the fact that I don't have a Steam library, and directly mention the PS5 at the top level comment of this chain, so you shouldn't be too surprised that I'm a console gamer.
It very well begs the question though, if it's not for console gamers due to mentioned issues and likely price, is it really for PC gamers who likely already have a PC and could easily enough stream to their tv or just get a long cable and a few other peripherals as you mention? And would PC users really be happy with such a nerfed machine graphically? My impression is that most PC gamers are shooting for even higher specs than consoles.