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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Steam Machines flopped because everyone with the badge thought it was a licence to print money and marked up mini PCs to the point where it made no sense to not buy a dedicatd gaming laptop instead.
We live in a very different world with 1080p capable mini-pcs abounds and SteamOS/Bazzite showing how a gaming OS should be.
I would love to see them sell the controller and mini PCs through hardware partners that get that this is an opportunity to shift units, not mark up, but I'm not optimistic, and if I save $200 by not having a little steam badge so be it.
It's pretty obviously both things that were a problem. A mediocre prebuilt with a $200 premium over other mediocre prebuilts was unattractive, but plenty of people do buy overpriced mediocre prebuilts. The killer feature being that nearly no games were compatible was going to kill it even if the price was right, though.
Now we're in the era of Proton, and games just work, if the price is fair, it'll sell. If the price is you cannot get anything like this without spending much more like the Deck or how consoles used to be priced when the hardware made a loss and the profits came from games, then it'll sell really well.