Steam Hardware

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A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.

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Why $700 could be a "death sentence" for the Steam Machine (arstechnica.com)

submitted 4 days ago by Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz

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Article discusses the effect of rising hardware prices on the deck.

Some highlights:

How much worse has the pricing situation gotten for Valve since November? Superdata Research founder and SuperJoost newsletter author Joost van Dreunen suggested that the 512GB Steam Machine model would probably run $50 to $75 more than he expected when the Steam Machine was announced, and to expect a price “potentially $100+ above target” for the high-end 2TB model. That would mean a $599 to $629 price at the low-end and $849 to $899 for the high-end model, in his estimation.

Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter agreed that, even with the additional component costs, Valve would likely “try to get it out at $599 or so for the 512GB version,” A starting price higher than that would mean “abysmal” sales, he added. “I think $700 is a death sentence and $1,000 is unsellable.”

I'd recommend reading the article though, it has a lot more of value than just those quotes. It goes on to talk about how the price increases will likely hurt valve more than traditional console makers, and how these increases will affect sales.

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Thanks for that a lot to think about

Happy to have an infodump/perspective appreciated, thank you!

I should note that the Steam Machine unfortunately does not appear to be designed with an eGPU in mind.

(Err, well, thats kinda sorta not true. The way a Steam Machine and Steam Frame, the VR headset work together... well the Steam Frame has an ARM, cellphone stype chip, built into it, and it can run less intense games just on its own. So, it is arguably technically the case that... that is a kind of wirelessly connected sort of eGPU for the Steam Machine... or the Steam Machine is a wirelessly connected sort of eGPU for the Steam Frame.)

It may be possible to... somewhat substantially hardware modify the Steam Machine, to get something like a physically connected eGPU working, people did figure out a kind of 'janky but does technically work' way to do that with a Steam Deck...

But basically, we'll have to wait for the thing itself, or detailed schematics of it to come out, to see if that's possible with a Steam Machine.

Alot of Steam Deck type devices, not made by Valve, other handheld-pcs (have controller and screen built in, vs mini-pc which is basically a small box or closer to the size and shape of a console), they do have usb4/thunderbolt ports that more easily support an eGPU set up... but they tend to be significantly more expensive.

So yeah, we shall see!

Its very unfortunate that the AI/RAM-pocalypse is happening at the exact same time that... well what could potentially be a bit of a revolution in the entire concept how to build a pc/gaming machine seems to be possible.

It may be the case that it ends up making more sense to have a new paradigm where you just have the cpu+ram+mobo+minor integrated gfx as one physical thing, and then some kind of an eGPU as another thing, and treat them as two modular components of a total system.