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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It's basically a gaming laptop.
Taking out the screen, the windows license, and some of the margin since Valve will make it back with game sales, $1,000 was the minimum expectable price before RAM got pulled into the “AI” bubble.
If they can make the steam deck for $350, why would the steam machine cost 3x more? Similarly if Sony and Xbox are selling their consoles for $500-600 it would indicate that something a bit more would be feasible. Sony and Xbox get some economies of scale, but most evidence points to them selling at cost or making some profit (from what I recall).
The steam deck is nice, but you have to throttle a lot of games performance. And that's on an already very small screen. I have played the crap out of my steam deck, but there are some games that just don't work super well. The difference is just the power of the components, primarily CPU and GPU, but also RAM and SSD speeds. It would expect the mini gaming PC to be more expensive than the handheld, if the expectation is that you can play any large AAA game at (basically) full specs with good frame rate. You can't do that for cheap. I also don't expect the price point to be a problem
Yeah, making something portable tends to cost more. If it wasn't for tariffs and sudden ram price hike Steam Machine would have been priced cheap with the specs not being anything crazy over powered for a desktop PC.
If Valve had been able to move up their release by just a couple months they could have pushed out some reasonably priced Steam Machines out before ram prices went out of hand.
That couple months made a huge difference.