--Apologies for shitty thumbnail--
Looks like some kind of review embargo has been released, ETA Prime's apparently been sitting on a review model Steam Machine for a month.
YT url once more:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=cF6eAM3jhCY
EDIT:
Oh holy shit, we also apparently have prices and a wait list sign up that... apparently closes on June 25th, 10am Pacific time.
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine
Variant / Price:
512 GB / $1049.00
512 GB + Controller / $1,128.00
2TB / $1349.00
2 TB + Controller / $1,428.00
EDIT 2:
This is all on the same day that we get news that... AMD figured out how to make FSR4 work on RDNA 3 / 7000 series GPUs, and, Steam is currently or just about to push a beta Proton update to Experimental, which will give this thing (as well as any PC w/ AMD 7000 series GPU) FSR4 support for basically any game that currently supports FSR3.
https://www.theverge.com/news/953664/amd-fsr-4-1-upscaling-rx-7000-series-gpus-rdna-3
https://www.eurogamer.net/steam-machine-fsr-4-upscaling-confirmed
So... that's a lot of news.
Yep.
I was initially hopeful that this thing might be surprisingly affordable, due to... basicslly the theory/rumor is that the 'semi custom' apu was initially intended to be used in a planned but cancelled Windows tablet/Surface kind of thing...
But yeah, then, tariffs, rampocalypse, strait's closed due to raids = shipping costs go up bigly.
I'm pretty sure the way Valve does their internal finances is that that 30% cut of all games?
Sure some of it goes toward Steam server costs, but I think most of it just goes into a giant war chest fund, from which they 'experiment', with things like this.
Makes sense to me that they at least want to break even... business wise, that works if it makes more people use Steam and/or increases their reputation as actually innovating in some way.
But being a loss leader would simply be too dangerous, too risky. They are small fries compared to the major console/pc hw manufacturers, and I am very sure the last thing they would ever want to do is owe some outside actor a lot of money.
I would love to see Valve reach 10b annually with their hardware expansion.
Can you clarify what you mean by this?
Are you saying... $10b annually in harware sales?
Using the $1128 price for the 512GB SM + Controller, that'd be uh... ~8.8m units sold annually.
That's totally absurd, imo.
That's roughly a quarter of 2025's PS5 (any variant) console sales numbers.
Valve would have to pivot into basically only/primarily being a hw manufacturer, they'd have to ... somewhere between 10x and 100x the amount of money/capital they're currently using to source components, do assembly and then ship things physically.
They do not have that much money.
Valve has like a total of less than 500 employees, their entire business culture is built around having a very small number of incredibly competent and often multi-domain skilled employees.
They'd have to radically shift the entire fundamental structure of what the company is, to do something like that.
... but perhaps I misunderstand what you mean?
No, I mean they could after expanding their hardware offerings.