Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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But why buy the Steam Machine over a PlayStation at that point? Your getting worse performance for twice the money. Isn't the SM meant to convert console players, most current Steam users already have PCs. Or am I looking at this all wrong?
I don't think Valve is trying to convert console players. I think (and they've implied) that they're trying to offer what a lot of Steam Deck buyers have been asking for: a more powerful Steam Deck that plays more of their library. That they took a lot of cues from consoles in terms of packaging and design is really more about "the living room" than that specific customer they're targeting.
I could have consoles, and I choose not to because I have a large Steam library and, as OP said, they've earned my trust.
That seems like a niche within a niche to me. The Steam Deck filed a hole in the market, the Steam Machine doesn't. Either way that doesn't explain the high price, last I heard Sony makes a profit selling the PS5 Pro($750) and the Steam Machine has worse specs (60cu vs 28cu GPU/ 2TB vs 500GB storage). Like others have mentioned, the price might be reseller pricing vs buying directly from valve.
Valve hardware is niche. They have (as of 2024) less than 400 people working there, and surely most of them of Steam and... maybe some games.
I really heard nothing in their presentations and interviews to suggest they have grand aspirations of shifting 10s of millions of units. The Deck I think is considered a success, and still only moved in a few years what the Switch did in a few months.
I think their target demographic is PC gamers who are just not super enthusiastic about the endless hardware grind.