Not a number. Not interesting.

The price really seems way too high if they are this scared to put out a number

Is PC

Shock and awe when told it MAY cost similar to a PC

The worst thing about the hardware unveiling is the endless posts about pricing 😮‍💨

Facts people forget:

• Assembling your own Steam Machine with similar parts will cost around 800
• Even if you assembled it yourself you would be missing features, such as cec, wake by controller, sleep mid game, etc. LTT will try to build one, it will be interesting to see what they come up with, but I'm 90% it won't have feature parity.
• There's lots of engineering gone into this machine, they're way more compact, less power hungry and more quiet than anything you can build yourself.
• Buying the same build as a prebuilt brings a premium and costs around 1000
• Valve purchases stuff in scale so they can diminish their margin and could potentially sell it cheaper than prebuilts, and possibly cheaper than building it yourself.
• Consoles are sold at a loss, and they recover it with games because the platform is closed.
• The Steam Machine is not closed, they can't be sure they're getting game purchases, because people might be buying this to be their work computer. So they have to price it as a PC, with margin on hardware, not promise of future returns.
• Price might fluctuate between now and announcement, RAM prices are going crazy nowadays.

With all of that being said, it seems to me it's very likely it will be around 800 but less than 1000. For people saying you can build one for that price yourself, sure, go ahead, you'll have a huge, power hungry loud box, without the same features and you would have saved only a small fraction of the value by having to assemble everything yourself.

This is going to come off as shilling for Valve, but it isn't my intention.

I could entirely see Valve pricing the Steam Machine relatively affordably and this statement is ultimately a dig at how overpriced pre-built PCs and consoles can be.

"The Steam Machine outperforms 70% of current user PCs...we neglected to say that the majority of user PCs are overpriced for what they deliver."

The discourse around this confuses the fuck out of me. Did people actually expect this to be <$500?

I went to PCPartPicker and tried to assemble a similarly spec'd PC, not with the absolute cheapest components, but definitely from the lower end sorted by price, it came out close to $800.

I guess if Valve can price it at that and be smaller it might have a market, but if much more than that people are better off just buying a PC.

P.S. Since Valve is not buying retail I think there is room for lower than that, and it'd definitely be welcome, but I'm not sure Valve will make that decision.

They're letting us discuss this ad nauseam just to understand what prices people consider acceptable for these devices

1. The top end Steam Deck was like $750 at release. Replace the screen with better CPU and GPU, and there's your baseline for the Machine. Since it's "6x" performance, price will probably be a bit higher. People thinking way less are smoking crack.

2. How many of you have actually had a Linux PC connected to your living room TV? I built one about 13 years ago (and upgraded the guts occasionally) and it's been awesome. With a regular web browser you can watch YouTube (with uBlock of course), Plex/Jellyfin, or any streaming service, in addition to gaming. Plus I've done stuff like vacation planning with my partner, where we can easily bring up maps and hotel listings from our couch without hunching over a laptop or tablet.

3. While Linux hardware support is quite good these days, there's still something to be said for buying a machine that you know is fully supported and targeted by game devs.

I hope they release the price soon, the discourse on this has become incredibly tiring.

Fair prices are fair, the existence of billionaires is not. Tax Gabe Newell and the rest of 'em too.