- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.zip
The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility.
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Personally, I would be interested in a different type of Steam Machine: A shrouded motherboard as a sort of LEGO base, into which you place modular blocks or cartridges that contain the PSU, CPU, USB, RAM, Wi-Fi, audio, drives, and graphics. Each block can have rails, to provide connections for power and signals, so that users don’t need to futz around with wires. Just plonk a brick down onto the rails below it, and you are good for that part.
Would it actually work from an engineering perspective? No idea. All I know is that I would replace parts of my PC more often, if I didn’t have to worry about screwing up in some fashion.
Look at the price of Xbox series X SSD expansion vs PS5 and see if that’s what you really want. $150 for 1TB with Xbox or 2TB for the same price or less for PS5? 1TB NVMe is well under $100 right now.
This. Components would be overpriced and proprietary. Nobody wants that.
Building and upgrading a computer really isn’t that difficult. All the parts only fit in one spot. Getting compatible parts can be tricky if you don’t know what you’re looking for…but this problem could strike this idea, too, because there would certainly need to be different generation mainboards whenever CPU sockets or chipsets or memory speed or really anything else on the mainboard comes around.
So such a solution would likely lead to less choice and more proprietary vendor-locked garbage. Just now solely on the hardware side.
But wait…what games are compatible with this system? What games will run well?
This is something Valve has done really well…they built a benchmark system. This is the problem that’s been plagueing PC, imo. AAA games get built for bleeding edge tech, necessitating upgrades…while the steamdeck sets a bar that developers have to be playable on in order to tap that entire market. Could the game run better on better systems? Sure, probably. But it needs to be at least playable on steamdeck.
What I’m trying to say is we should all just standardize on PlayStation. Cheers.
Monopolies are good for innovation /s
(Bell Labs being probably the only notable exception)
They can’t sell this at a loss, or at least it would be incredibly risky. This is (intentionally) “just a PC”. It ships with SteamOS but you can of course install whatever you want, including windows. If it is (much) cheaper than a roughly equivalent normal PC, companies might just start buying them in bulk but obviously not generating the supporting sales needed.
I don’t think companies would be able to buy them in bulk, at least not directly.
Valve sells direct to consumer, no retail in the middle, they have their own online storefront (duh).
They’re not going to do a B2B mass order.
If a business wanted to try and stockpile them, for whatever reason, to turn into their own thing… or, to try to cause a price panic / supply shortage…
… they’d have to use/create basically a scalper network of essentially unaffiliated people.
If they sell it only through Steam as they do with the Steam Deck, companies wouldn’t really be able to buy them in bulk.
I saw in a LTT video that they already claimed they will not be selling this at a loss because they want their hardware division to be self-sustaining.
I heard at one point in time the fastest super computer in the world was a cluster of 900 ps3. It was cheaper then buying a single computer and in the beginning of the ps3 era you could easily format and run Linux on them.
I certainly remember PS2 consoles being used like that. The cell processor was impressive.
I ran ps2 Linux as my “desktop” for 6 months or so back in the day. It wasn’t capable of much compared to a general purpose computer at the time. Videos only played at almost full speed if you ran em in fbdev from a vterm with nothing else running. There was so little ram that using kde1 would run you into slow motion computing because of all the swapping. Window maker was ok, but running much of anything inside it would eat through that 32 megs of ram pretty quickly (I spent most of my time in vterms).
They did it with ps3 also although in research to make sure I was no mis-remembering I found out I was wrong. It was 33rd fastest super computer not #1.
I’m calling $700 US price. Valve’s the only company that can get into the console space with console prices since the real revenue source is the game store they run.
Edit: I slept on it and decided $750 is a safer bet, at least on the base model
The problem is that it makes less sense for them to sell at a loss than for example Xbox or Sony. It’s just a capable PC, corporations could buy hundreds or thousands and they wouldn’t make a cent off of game sales.
Valve sells direct to consumer, not via retail.
They’re not gonna knowingly do a B2B sale.
A business that wanted to swipe them all would have to create or hire a scalper network of seemingly unafilliated buyers, and I am guessing this would be outside of the capability/risk tolerance level of … basically everyone right now, as the economy is imploding Hard.
You’d be surprised what a small team at a large corporation will do if it lets them complete a project within budget. The PlayStation 3 originally allowed users to install custom operating systems. A lot of groups, even the US military, bought thousands of them because they were inexpensive computers (sold at a loss) and used them for compute projects. Sony eventually stripped out the functionality in an update, presumably because they wanted to cut out this type of buyer.
I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised, I’ve worked at both functional and dysfunctional large corporations, either themselves tech corps or in the tech wing/department of other large orgs.
The PS3 is yes, a great example of making a versatile product that can appeal to many uh, kinds of markets, market demos.
What I am saying is that Valve is probably the most strategically competent tech company in existence, at least in the US, and that they would not willingly allow themselves to be tricked, at the level of long term, big boy corporate strategy.
They are the people who tend to set traps, not walk into them.
You’re talking to an ex-Corpo, lol.
Nonetheless, yes, the PS3 is a great example of what you can do with a product, but I’m trying to analyze the uh, 12D chess or whatever, the actual strategic conditions of the situation that would dictate whether or not it actually makes sense for Valve to do something similar with the Steam Machine.
Right now, no, it does not.
Valves whole thing is basically effectively stealing PC and Xbox gaming away from Microsoft.
It would be silly of them to allow their own tactics to be used against them in an unforced error.
Why on earth would corporations buy this? Lol
It’s not impossible, however, have you seen what corporations buy for their employees? Saving on upfront cost isn’t really part of the equation, it just has to say “dell” and/or “workstation” on it. A large company values long-term support and supply way more than what they’d save by getting a gaming machine.
And besides all that, it’s not like the best selling console of all time didn’t make money because a (objectively large) minority of owners only used it as a DVD player.
Yep reason why people can get some nice Thinkpads for cheap once warranty ends with businesses offloading them.
I don’t think most corporations would be interested in buying a computer that doesn’t include a windows license. Unless they intend to use it for like… server stuff, but they’d be way better off buying like… actual server hardware… if only for the operating cost.
Even as a Linux desktop it would mostly just be interesting for devs and people doing relatively lightweight 3D design work (especially because it will take a while before other distros support it), I don’t see it competing against regular desktops.
Any company who depend on their employees having a decent GPU will likely want to be able to upgrade/reconfigure new orders at will, and will prefer a tower, and they will prefer the quick repairability of a tower. Those who don’t are increasingly ok with using mini PCs.
799 and 999 are my best guesses for the two versions
It’s not a console, it’s a general purpose PC
Uh the same could be said for Sony, Xbox and to a greater extent Nintendo but they’d rather make oodles of noodles money at every interaction.
It’s likely in everybody’s best interest that this is a wild success. Not only will game developers be incentivized to actually optimize their games for reasonable setups; this will unseat Nvidia’s monopoly over gamers with their ridiculously overpriced graphics cards and also Microsoft’s monopoly of a gamer’s operating system.
Nvidia’s partnership with Palantir is incredibly concerning and any blow to Nvidia is a welcome one. Encourage these developments and hype this all up.
The article i saw a few days ago specifically mentioned that they didn’t really talk about the price but when asked if it would cost more than the ps5 pro they didnt really say no and only offered that it will be priced accordingly to the hardware used to make it. To me, that most likely means it’s going to cost around $1k. The absolute max is would ever be willing to pay is like $600. I have no doubt it will sell, but at that $1k price, they will severely limit the group of people that will be buying it. Honestly, if that is the cost, they should be shying away from even associating it as a console and just market it as a PC due to how people think.
Yeah, on announcement day people were adamant about it costing less than consoles, but one look at the specs and you’d know there’s no way of that happening.
I’d be shocked if it’s under $600
They did say that it’s a mini PC, not a console
Moore’s Law Is Dead thinks that Valve basically got a bargain bin deal from AMD, who had a bunch of chips they thought were going to be used in a MSFT tablet, but that tablet got cancelled.
So, Valve did some scrapyard engineering, and got a discount on these things that were otherwise never going to be used for anything.
He estimates a total cost to produce of $425, estimates MSRP between $450 to $600, depending on just how hard Valve wants to fuck MSFT with their own leftovers.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=sJI3qTb2ze8
If this ends up being remotely accurate, it would be basically a corporate demolition of Shakespearian quality.
Gabe… Gabe was once a MSFT employee, you see.
A disgruntled former MSFT employee, you might say.
Rumors is that the original Zen CPU SoC in the Steam Deck was also the leftovers from another canceled project by “a major OEM”, so it’s plausible. Sounds like Microsoft planned a handheld Xbox much earlier, which years after the Deck turned into the ROG collaboration, could have been related
I had not heard that before, but uh, extremely funny if true.
Its like MacroHard just keeps punching themself in the face.
Sorry but the people getting excited thinking this steam pc is going to do big numbers and hurt MS are delusional. The specs on this thing are worse than the current gen consoles, the base PS5 and the Series X. It is only RDNA 3 so it doesn’t get FSR4 either.
The PS5 and Series X render most games at sub-1080p and then upscale to 4K. This thing is going to have to render at sub 720p and then upscale.
MSFT? Microsoft?
Yes.
Sorry, its either/both their stock ticker, a fairly common way they refer to themselves internally.
I too used to work for Microsoft.
Wooo boy, being one of two people trying to make the multi hundred, maybe over a thousand node, call center / support tree node system work correctly, for the 360, during the ‘red ring of death’ (3RR was the code we used for ‘you are absolutely fucked’)… yeah that was fun.
That sounds interesting. Would you mind sharing a bit more of your experience, if you’re not bound by an NDA?
I have before in other comments in other threads… but I am about to pass out, and being on mobile with a shit tier phone makes searching my own comment history somewhat cumbersome.
Uh… reply to this in 10 hrs and I will probably be awake and find those old comments?
(Also, its been a while since I worked for them, but even if I was bound by an NDA, I wouldn’t give a fuck, I didn’t do anything that important, really. Just another V Dash amongst many.)
Thank you for taking the time to reply despite your situation. I’ll try to remember to ping you tomorrow, but don’t feel obligated.
Ok, I found one of my longer comments on ‘being an ex corpo from MSFT’.
I think the original post topic was basically about how the Windows kernel is now such a mess that MSFT can’t actually understand it.
Stunning 10/10 Glassdoor Review from Happiest Former Tech Worker On Earth
I used to do V Dash contracts for MSFT.
I knew that the Xbox 360 3RR, red ring of death problem… was so bad, that it actually would have been more cost effective for MSFT to give each buyer two 360s, instead of one, at the same price, because of how mismanaged the RMA process was… I knew a whole bunch of such details a almost a decade before the documentary on it came out.
Yay NDAs.
…
I was also there during the Windows 8 rollout.
Shut down basically everything for a month, because MSFT ‘dogfoods’ all their software: Every MSFT worker is beta/alpha testing all MSFT software all the time.
We spent weeks just, unable to have more than 3 windows open at a time, half the tools we used on a daily basis just not working.
We asked them to let us go back to 7, asked them if therr was some way to return to a 7 like GUI.
For weeks they said nope, impossible, Win 8 is an entirely new GUI, totally new OS, the Win 7 GUI isn’t there.
Oh then uh, weeks later, yeah, yeah it actually is there, you just have to follow this arcane override proceduren to see and use it.
… And then they just relented, put the non tablet UI fully back in, and called that Windows 8.1.
…
Windows is now layers upon layers upon decades of insane spaghetti code.
Even in Win 10, which was the last version I ever used… there are like 3 or 4 different eras of UI, for various settings menus, which people sometimes need to actually use… but they are considered legacy and thus not important.
Sometimes some newer era UI menus will have some of the options from some of the more buried stuff, but not all of them.
It is a gigantic fucking mess.
I guess I should clarify that I did sign an NDA, and back then, contemporaneous, when I was still trying to work at MSFT, I obviously gave a shit abiut it.
Now, now its like a decade later, I don’t like, still have a copy of it, and I also don’t fucking care.
I worked in the tech industry, now I despise almost all of it with a burning passion, left it entirely some years back.
I’m not in the market for the GabeCube but if I were, I’d find a price point of $500-$600 attractive, given it’s mostly just laptop tier hardware. I would prefer it over the current gen of consoles, although I don’t know if there’s gonna be the same level of optimisations for games on this as there is on consoles (most likely not really). It’ll be a ripper emulation box, though.
Upgradability would’ve been nice, too. Soldered in RAM is ok for a hand-held device but for this? Nah mate…Speaking of upgradability, I wonder if an egpu could be connected to that usbc port.
I think the RAM just uses laptop sticks, so it is upgradable edit: https://www.digitalfoundry.net/features/hands-on-with-steam-machine-valves-new-pcconsole-hybrid
Oh that’s cool, didn’t see that. I have no idea why Valve didn’t mention that in their reveal, that’s a huge advantage over consoles.
RAM being upgradeable is basically irrelevant for a fixed-GPU device.
There’s plenty of games today that use more than 16GB of system RAM on their highest settings and that’s only gonna become more common in the future… Besides, with this being literally a Linux PC, there’s more ways it could make use of the extra RAM than just games.
I don’t know what you’re on about, mate.
I don’t know what you’re on about, mate
I’m pointing out that a game that needs 12GB of VRAM on its GPU doesn’t care if you have 128GB or 512GB of system RAM, because the GPU can’t use that RAM. You’re not going to have games that require 128GB of system memory that also work on an 8GB GPU.
This isn’t controversial or hard to understand.
Yeah, that’s kinda obvious. I just don’t think that’s gonna be a huge problem for people who are in the market for this thing, Valve specifically choose the specifications to be an upgrade for most steam users.
Some upgradability is still better than none.
no way this thing costs more than 800
Get ready to be horribly dissapointed…
maybe lol
At $1,000 that’d be a hard pass for me even though I love Valve, I could easily build something better for less. I seriously doubt that’ll be the price too, it’ll probably around $600-800.
Could you really build something better for less? Not to mention all that plus OS install and stuff is already done so most people will prefer that I think.
Less than $1,000? Yes, why not? We’ll see what the price actually is, but I doubt it’ll be anywhere near that high. Valve was pretty smart about sourcing their parts for low cost and decent performance. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were closer to $500 even.
Why not? That answer is easy. Because maybe you can’t. That’s why I asked 😂
Yeah, but you can though. Go spec your own gaming rig if you don’t believe me.
Also, again, there’s pretty much no way it’ll be $1,000.
@cyberpunk007 @_haha_oh_wow_ can it produce steam? (And cook a coffee???)
That would probably require some modifications…
I’ve priced it out for myself, and I couldn’t get a build that’s as good at that price, not on new hardware at least. Not sure how they worked out their numbers
No
How constructive
For me it’s either this or Framework Desktop, I’ve got the money, just waiting for the email from Valve telling the final price.
Steam Machine is better for gaming, which is nice
But Framework can do Mac levels of AI work, which is also nice, it’s also not completely useless for games.
As long as it doesn’t run Win11
I’m sure it will be able to, but it will come pre-installed with steamOS (arch btw).
If you install windows don’t you lose FEX? You’d probably have to run it as a virtual machine so you were still getting x86 instruction code translation. But it’ll be able to run Windows applications via wine anyway so there isn’t a great deal of point.
I think you got a bit confused… FEX is used in the steam frame (VR headset) because it uses an ARM processor to save battery. The steam machine uses a normal x64 CPU and appears to be using some relatively standard pc hardware, so no compatibility layers are needed for windows (only drivers are needed) I doubt you’ll be able to install windows on the steam frame though, for the reason you say (arm compatibility is a mess).
I thought the steam machine was the one that used the arm chip
It definitely doesn’t.
Higher RAM price is irrelevant as it acts on the whole market, it’s not a disadvantage specific to the Steam Machine
It may act on the whole market, but it doesn’t have the same impact on every OEM.
It’s a bigger issue for Valve than the console competition, who have established supply chains potentially with fixed prices for certain terms or at least more significant volume discounts, and proprietary compatibility hurdles binding their customers, so they can sell hardware at a loss if they want to.
If Valve sells the computers at a loss they run the risk of people buying them for other uses, without generating corresponding Steam profits.
Here’s a gaming laptop for $700 that I think is similarly powered, except it also has a screen, keyboard, a trackpad and a Windows 11 license that probably represent like $200 of that. I’ll probably pick up a SM if it’s around $500 for the base model, but otherwise, I’ll probably build something instead.
FYI The Windows License is more like $20-$40. The OEM Version costs $40 retail and MSI has probably a better deal. That’s how Microsoft got Windows on nearly every prebuilt PC since the mid 90ies.
I guess they are including the screen, the keyboard and the trackpad with the Windows license in those $200 estimates.
Oh, yeah that would make sense. Thx
It has a midrange graphics card, it can’t cost more than 5 or 6 hundred
No way in hell. For $1,000 I’ll just build one myself.
Which is why all these analyses are stupid. We don’t need to do anything anywhere near as complicated as looking to market interactions and equivalent cost pricing. Because it’s obvious that at $1,000 it’ll flop and presumably valve know that.
I like the theory that they got the CPU and GPU at bargain basement prices because it was left over from some previously scrapped project of Microsoft or something. That would explain why it’s such a weird architecture.
If that rumour were true it would mean that there will only be limited amounts of this machine since they stopped making the chips long ago. The rumour makes no sense.
Not as in physically leftover chips. The rumour is that Microsoft or some other company but probably Microsoft we’re looking at making a gaming phone or something so they needed a powerful APU that was power efficient and didn’t generate a lot of heat. So AMD went through the whole designing process with them only for Microsoft to decide at the last minute to pull out.
Very few chips wherever actually made, but AMD still had to eat to the cost of the design process, so they were casting around looking for someone who wanted the chips so they could make their money back. Somehow Valve found out about this said to AMD that if they turned it into a CPU (because they wanted a laptop GPU not a mobile GPU) and made some other tweaks, they’d put in an order for tens of thousands. So that’s what AMD did. It’s unclear if they got a deal on the GPUs or not, whether or not they did will have a big impact on pricing.
This would explain why it’s a mobile CPU, as there’s very little reason you would go that route unless that was your primary constraint. So the theory is that they had a CPU and they had to build a computer around that. Which would mean that the Steam Machine was probably never actually going to exist, and we would have just had the VR headset and the controller.
If this is true then this would have all happened around 2021 so the run will be basically complete now, but valve can still putting orders for more if pre-orders exceed expected values.
It’s not an ARM cpu though……
I’m ready, but Amd is not. I want 4k 120hz on my TV via Amd videocard. But this stupid hdmi forum is blocking this.
Is it an HDMI issue or an AMD issue? Given Nvidia have no issues, I’d call it an AMD issue.
Its HDMI forum issue. Because AMD want to implement in their Linux drivers (which are open-source). But HDMI forum do not want them to become open source, see related issue: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417
In fact, AMD already invested several months in fully testing and developing 4k 120Hz. Its possible, but the HDMI forum people are blocking this, because the HDMI forum has the latest saying… Its all about money this world. And the HDMI forum is evil.
So it’s…….an AMD issue.
You know. Never mind.
Displayport to HDMI 2.1 adapter?
Regardless, fuck HDMI
I tried… it didn’t work…
I have one working from cablematters. It’s slightly finicky (maybe driver issues) but supports HDR, vrr, and 4k@120hz.
Could you sent me the exact product?
And on Amazon; don’t think it’s widely available anywhere else, unfortunately.
Ignore any commentary about Windows support, because unless something has changed recently, it has poor support on Windows and is missing most features. I have heard mixed things about whether it only supports Freesync on Linux rather than Freesync or VRR. Since my TV supports both and there doesn’t appear to be a way to reliably differentiate between the two, I can’t confirm either way.
I found it here as well in a local Amazon store luckily: https://www.amazon.nl/Cable-Matters-Unidirectionele-8K-kabeladapter-ondersteuning/dp/B08XFSLWQF
Thanks! I ordered it right away and will test it soon on my TV. I will also first check for firmware updates, since people saying to do first a firmware update.
since people saying to do first a firmware update.
I’d probably test it out first as it may already have newer firmware, and it gives you a baseline if anything gets better (or worse) after the update. I’ll add that Plasma 6 had the best support last time I checked, so test that if you have issues.
Was this an active or passive adapter?
The product description doesn’t mention anything about active or passive. Which makes its very confusing for me now.
It has display port as well, for the picky
Sure, but most TVs don’t, which is the main issue with wanting to connect any Linux AMD build to a TV
And your TV has HDMI, no?
Which doesn’t work with HDMI 2.1 if you use an AMD GPU on Linux. You know, the thing the first comment in this thread was complaining about.
Oh, my bad homie.
Nope. Not my TV. Only hdmi
Dunno who down voted you for this objectively correct take. But that’s exactly what I was saying.
I got you back to positive tho.
