If you want a steam controller included. You can use also PS4&#x2F;PS5 or Xbox controllers easily on linux (and thus steamOS) nowadays. I use a Ps5 controller on my setup, even though I never had a ps4 or ps5.

I mean, it is $1200 if you want a controller included

$1049 for the base package? Much better than I thought it was going to be. I figured minimum $1200.

Component pricing is bad. As even Valve can&#x27;t get half of the hardware while other half is semi-custom...And this likely goes on until AI really dies or stabilises...

I hope that&#x27;s the case. Seeing Steam Controller reservations pushed into 2027 tempers my optimism.

Eh, it was the exact same system for the Switch 2 and no one I know waited more than a week for theirs.Given it requires a Steam login of a certain age to register, I suspect this is just to limit the scalpers.

I was expecting $1200 for the base model, so $1,049 without a controller is nice to see.Having to enter a lottery to buy one makes it feel like Valve doesn’t have new stock in the pipeline for the foreseeable future.

No need to rush:&gt; In an effort to improve the purchase experience and limit resellers, we&#x27;re implementing a reservation system.&gt; Starting right now, you can sign up for the Steam Machine model&#x2F;bundle you&#x27;re interested in.&gt; If you&#x27;re busy now, no problem: You can sign up anytime before Thursday June 25th at 10 a.m. Pacific.&gt; At that time, we will close signups and do a one-time randomization to determine the reservation and waitlist order.

I feel like there&#x27;s a midrange of &quot;not particularly techy&quot; gamers who will strongly appreciate - &quot;I don&#x27;t care about putting anything together, I just want to place PC games like a console.&quot;

Prebuilt machines have a terrible reputation, I could see people wanting this for a PC that you don&#x27;t need hardware expertise to boot up. If you&#x27;re reading this you could probably pick out your own parts and assemble them for cheaper, but for people who want a console-style plug-and-play type experience I could see the market for it.Pricey, but so is any other sort of electronic entertainment hardware these days.

Ok but why not buy a cheaper or more performant machine and install SteamOS on it?

I wanted a gaming computer (read: an airgapped system that I could install arbitrary software on without fear), and I was sick to death of Microsoft&#x27;s bullshit and resolved to never buy a Windows machine again, so I&#x27;ve been using a docked Steam Deck as my main gaming rig. It&#x27;s performed far better than I imagined on the software side (has never failed to run any game in my library, though some have required minor settings tweaks), though the hardware is a little on the lighter side, which is perfectly acceptable for a handheld, but if the Steam Machine had been available at the time I&#x27;d probably have gone for that instead.

I think there&#x27;s a middle ground of people who just are not interested in building or upgrading a gaming computer (or just don&#x27;t like their typical form factor in the ready to go out of the box gaming PCs) but also don&#x27;t want the completely closed off ecosystem of a console.I think if the Xbox ended up being more like the Steam Machine (i.e. more like a PC) then this middle ground that the Steam Machine sells to would probably go away as I don&#x27;t think the group of folks who care that it&#x27;s Linux based is high enough to support production.

I&#x27;ll probably buy one. It&#x27;s small so it fits under my TV, fits in with my furniture. Since it&#x27;s all vertically integrated I know I can just connect it to the TV and it&#x27;ll boot quickly and work well, and it has all my Steam games. I value my time and lack of frustration more than a few hundred dollars.

do you know fans or people who don&#x27;t like to tinker computers?take a sip at GamingOnLinux community... they don&#x27;t seem to care about stuff running perfectly on Proton and not natively or that Gabe is buying another 600 million USD yatch. they love the Steam ecosystem more than developers crafting games and abiding to 30% of fees that are a clear sign of monopoly power

Falcon gaming computers start at $3K, I don&#x27;t think Valve is after that level of consumer with this, it&#x27;s more of a &quot;Bring the console players into Steam&quot; move imho.

I thought about it, but don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ll push the button. I have a falcon nw gaming rig in my living room right now running windows &#x2F; steam big picture and an NVIDIA 3060Ti -- and it&#x27;s .. fine, but long in the tooth. I wouldn&#x27;t mind a more console-ish hardware experience for steam gaming, and compared to a new falcon box, this thing is cheap. I experimented with just running SteamOS on the falcon hardware a few years ago, but it was a little fussy, and I wanted to also use the system for local inference, and, and, and.All that said, I don&#x27;t think this is a good value. I&#x27;m presuming if I did a little work SteamOS 3 would be workable for me, and I have significantly more RAM, and possibly a better GPU? Not exactly sure where the GPU falls out, but I definitely believe I could buy a better GPU for less than the new box.If it gets preferred shipment for the controller, you could buy it and sell the box and keep the controller. :) I think my controller ship date is estimated in 2027 right now.

I&#x27;m sorry but a Steam Machine is a horrendous choice for a workstation, and so is SteamOS.I really can&#x27;t think of a single use-case where the Steam Machine is the right choice actually, unless your one and only wish is to make a donation to Gabe.You can have the same performances in the same form factor with the same OS (but more upgradability) for less, or you can improve on any of those points for the same price.

I want a simple UNIX workstation that &quot;just works&quot;. Apple broke this promise to me with Tahoe, where horrific design decisions compounded the bugs on essential peripherals (Tahoe began spinning up and down my external raid array to sleep constantly, for no reason, making extremely loud noises as the drives repeatedly if it&#x27;s idle, forcing me to constantly touch files in a while loop over dozens of partitions -- also I have a few petabyte of storage and it now takes ages to mount every reboot, as now with Tahoe Spotlight indexing is done as part of the mounting process and I can&#x27;t opt out of this behavior and I&#x27;m in a warzone where power outages necessitating shutdowns are frequent). I have since used a docked Steam Deck as my daily driver and everything I want just works! It&#x27;s now my UNIX desktop OS of choice. I&#x27;ve been on the Mac since OS X but Tahoe was so bad that now I consider an operating system designed for wasting time gaming a more serious and less disruptive option to my daily workflow. Heck of a job you&#x27;re doing, Tim Apple!

I know they will sell, but at this price point I don&#x27;t understand who is supposed to be the target for this.Either you want a gaming computer, and you&#x27;ll get a much better one that can be upgraded in the future for the same price, or you want a console, and you&#x27;ll never pay a grand for it.4 years old hardware and poor connectivity.

Are you using the stock cooler? I’m going with an AIO for the APU, but I worry that the little heatsinks I’m planning for the VRMs aren’t going to cut it.

I got impatient waiting for the Steam Machine to come out and grabbed a BC-250 on ebay that was already set up with a case, fan, and power supply. Works great for reasonably demanding games (CONTROL, Elden Ring, etc.).Now that I see the final price of the Steam Machine, I&#x27;m gonna be recommending the BC-250 more strongly.

Last I checked the idle power consumption of the BC-250 was on the higher side to make me not want to use it as a media center, though that could be my PSU. No hardware decode&#x2F;encode (yet) either.And lack of DRM makes a PC in general a mediocre experience for official streaming services if you want more than 720p streaming. If you care about that.

I&#x27;m tempted to go order yet another BC-250, even though I haven&#x27;t gotten the first one going. Sure the Machine is considerably more modern, has great new features, probably vastly better power efficiency (even though it&#x27;s only 6nm vs 7nm surprisingly). But 288GB&#x2F;s memory bandwidth? Versus the BC-250&#x27;s 448GB&#x2F;s? 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techpowerup.com&#x2F;gpu-specs&#x2F;steam-machine-gpu.c4373" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techpowerup.com&#x2F;gpu-specs&#x2F;steam-machine-gpu.c437...</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techpowerup.com&#x2F;gpu-specs&#x2F;playstation-5-gpu.c3480" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techpowerup.com&#x2F;gpu-specs&#x2F;playstation-5-gpu.c348...</a>Honestly tempted to buy a couple for relatives, who do some phone gaming and one who owns a 3DS they use, and see if they find anything interesting in PC gaming. Also make it a decent media center of course too.

Oof, that price point is rough. I hope this does well for them, but I&#x27;m not sure who this is for.

Even with similar specs you can still get more performance from a PC because Valve is throttling the Machine to keep thermals down.

For me, size and aesthetics play a role. A PC like that is huge and, imo, much uglier. I know a lot of people do not care but I am sure I am also no the only one.

I would have probably picked an Intel B580 for the additional VRAM (at $250), and a case with better airflow like the Bequiet Pure Base 501, but your point stands.

It&#x27;s still missing wi-fi, bluetooth, sc dongle, sd card reader, (frugal) led bar, the hdmi cec functionality and whatever you value yourself for assembly, installation, troubleshooting and tweaking time (between half an afternoon to a whole day). Dealing with pc bioses is tedious and tweaking fan behavior and thermals could take a whole other day, which you are gonna need because the cheapo case you&#x27;ve picked up only comes with a single loud fan and poor ventilation for pc case standards, so you either gonna have a loud motherfucker or a cooked to perfection unreliable rig.Let alone having to put the PC on the floor because it won&#x27;t fit anywhere else in the living room.

I think you would struggle to NOT build a more performant PC for the same price.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcpartpicker.com&#x2F;list&#x2F;brbFsK" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pcpartpicker.com&#x2F;list&#x2F;brbFsK</a> This is $50 more but it has 1TB of storage and a newer generation of both CPU and GPU and will absolutely destroy it.I&#x27;m sure you could get actually easily cheaper and better even, I haven&#x27;t followed the market a lot lately.Prebuilt are likely to be even better deals because they will use some cheap noname parts for the RAM and the PSU, which is mostly fine.

I think with reasonable and somewhat common sales and picking right machine probably could find even better prebuild. Size not withstanding.

This. Game companies will probably test their games on a steam machine.

Plus support and packaging. Can you make your own PC of equivalent specs in that size case? Would it have swappable face plates you’ll probably be able to buy on Amazon?

If you stay in the Steam ecosystem. Similar to the Steam Controller. Works great with Steam, not so great outside the ecosystem.

You pay a premium for “it just works”.

Only about 65 dollars cheaper for a comparable build and it wouldn&#x27;t be small.

Can&#x27;t you build or buy an equivalent (in performance) PC for cheaper? All with upgradable standard parts? I get the appeal of a small form factor, but I am afraid it may not sell well at this price.

Worth watching for the Steam OS problems part

More information here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;66QzlDewigE?is=WC9vt6LBtdWFPqfp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;66QzlDewigE?is=WC9vt6LBtdWFPqfp</a>

PS5, Xbox? They&#x27;re almost PCs and are in the same space as Steam Machine.

This is more competing in the game console market than the PC market though.

A lot of machines ship with secure boot locked to Microsoft&#x27;s key. Usually there&#x27;s a way to turn it off, otherwise you need the shim loader Microsoft signed in 2015 whose signature has just expired and who knows if Microsoft will sign it again.

I can&#x27;t believe all the replies who see no problem with a company completely controlling their device like it makes no difference.

Every iphone, ipad, playstation, xbox, android phone (though there are ways of unlocking), smart TV, smart Fridge. These are all devices that run a full web browser, these aren&#x27;t appliances they&#x27;re full personal computers. You can write and run software on them, even if arbitrarily limited in hardware access.

Isn’t this industry standard? How many PCs have locked boot loaders?Edit, reply to Rohansi as I am rate limited, I’m talking about gaming PCs not consoles.

&gt; who are we trying to tell you how to use your computer?Valve is still great.

Find me a PC in this form factor that is as well tested and supported as the steam boxes are, with the specs they are claiming to have, at this price. Its a little above the curve but a little is not a lot, and you get a fully supported Linux box at that price......and if you think this is expensive just wait until the PS6 and new Xbox are released.

You can install a SteamOS-style console experience on any old PC, including handhelds or mini-pcs with integrated graphics. Bazzite is a great choice for that, even my RX560 handles it without issue.&gt; a Nintendo Switch would provide much better bang for you buck.A secondhand Steam Deck would also be better value, but this isn&#x27;t a value-focused product. The Steam Machine is Valve&#x27;s second stab at the premium couch-based PC gamer market, this time with Proton and a bigger focus on controller usability for ordinary PC games.

This seems very expensive for what a PC can do :(. A PC can be fully customizable with price ranges that are lower than the steam machine.  The &quot;hardcore console gamers&quot; live on PS, and Xbox, and for &quot;casual gamers&quot;, a Nintendo Switch would provide much better bang for you buck.

Downloading those giant game installs and updates

It&#x27;s a living room pc - using it to stream from a media NAS is one application that comes to mind

It&#x27;s a bit niche, but Steam can download games from another PC running Steam on your local network. 2.5GbE on both PCs makes that a lot faster.

Interested in hear the justification why you would need more than 1GbE in a machine built specificly for gaming.

Probably :) However, as I mentioned elsewhere, one doesn&#x27;t need fast internet to benefit. The &#x27;Game File Transfer over Local Network&#x27; feature in Steam has been a boon, personally, even with 2G Fiber.

I bet at least 90% of people buying this connect it to WiFi and never think about connection speed again!Personally... my internet is only 300 Mbps. My WiFi connection is roughly on par with 1GbE. I have a very small pool of 2.5GbE capable devices, but overall I&#x27;m just not fussed about making the switch.

Mildly disappointed to see 1GbE when spending [at least] a thousand dollars. Stupid datacenters squeezing all the chips.

&gt; is there a specific reason that the XSX is harder to homebrew than the PS5?Xbox 360 was notoriously hard to reverse engineer at the time. Maybe for similar reasons.

For some reason I never considered this route, despite following the PS5 Linux developments... is there a specific reason that the XSX is harder to homebrew than the PS5?It would be incredible to convert my dusty XSX to a linux box

I have a Series X with a very similar spec just sitting there collecting dust. I hope one day it will run linux like the PS5 and run Steam lol.

You can get a Miniforums PC with the Radeon 780m for $699 US, but I don&#x27;t think the graphics performance is on par with the SteamBox. I&#x27;m not sure on the reliability of these tiny PC&#x27;s either<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;MINISFORUM-Desktop-Computer-Output-Graphics&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B0DRVSK2T9&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;MINISFORUM-Desktop-Computer-Output-Gr...</a>

Can you check how much that mini pc costs today?

Are they crazy to ask for this price? Few months ago I have bought a minipc with amd 8845hs 8&#x2F;16c, 32GB RAM, 512GB NVME for €519

Yes, so many people were claiming that it will be around that price point. That seemed straight up delusional to me. Memory price has roughly quadrupled and 32GB DDR5 basically cost the same as the original cheapest steam deck.

It’s not just the ram now, it’s also the storage. A double whammy.

I think a lot of people expected it to be in the ~$600 price range, maybe ~$800 at worst. RAM prices made it quite expensive...

And there&#x27;s a valid market there, but as someone who just spent half my Saturday morning debugging a CPU throttling issue on my kid&#x27;s 2020-vintage Lenovo Legion laptop, I feel like a pre-built is in some ways the worst of both worlds, like you don&#x27;t get the savings and fine-tuning that is something you assembled yourself, but you still get all the fun of debugging driver issues, weird performance stalls, and who knows what else.That said, I&#x27;ve never had a Steam Deck or tried to seriously game on Linux, so I may be out of touch with how much smoother the picture is in an all-Proton world.(the laptop issue turned out to be something in the firmware asserting BC PROCHOT for some reason; for now we can periodically clear it with the ThrottleStop utility, but who knows what the actual underlying problem is)

Custom gaming PCs are huge and ugly, which is a concern for me (and my partner). Size and comfort are the main advantages.

My guess are people who want to PC game but don&#x27;t want to deal with building a PC themselves - there&#x27;s a decent market of pre-built gaming PCs that this would be competitive with.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newegg.com&#x2F;Gaming-Desktop-PC&#x2F;SubCategory&#x2F;ID-3742" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newegg.com&#x2F;Gaming-Desktop-PC&#x2F;SubCategory&#x2F;ID-3742</a>

Indeed, they are hitting a weird spot, their pricing category is stuck in between people who just want to play without breaking the bank account, who will go for a PS5 or XBox, and hardcore gamers who will go directly for their own custom build PC

Mass market success doesn&#x27;t mean overnight success.

The only thing about price mentioned during announcement, before rampocalypse, was that it would cost much more than a console.

I&#x27;m sure they were originally hoping for mass-market success, but given the RAM drought and ensuing pricing, I&#x27;m guessing the best possible outcome at this point would be to break roughly even and learn, so that they can put out a more competitive revision if and when prices ever return to Earth.With Windows becoming increasingly hostile, I do think there&#x27;s room for a hardware&#x2F;software integrated &quot;just works&quot; offering in the Linux PC space. Plus software pricing is probably a lot more competitive than console (dunno, never had anything to do with consoles, but my impression has always been that hardware is a loss-leader there).

Now that Bloodborne is &quot;on PC&quot; (wink wink) there&#x27;s kinda no reason to own a PS4 or PS5 in my opinion. Persona 5 was the only other holdout, but now P5R has a great PC-native release.

Unlike a PS5, a PC has all the games that I want to play. And to drive home the irony, right now I&#x27;m actually using my Steam Deck to play a game that was originally for the PS3 (Valkyria Chronicles). Legitimately purchased, even!

More properly, this is competing with prebuilt gaming PCs, surely?

At best it&#x27;ll take over Steam hardware survey as the standard spec of PC gaming.I can&#x27;t see anyone other than enthusiasts buying it over a normal console or Windows laptop.

Reviews are saying it’s actually similar to base PS5 in performance.

It got messy but pretty much all ps4 games work on ps5, and all ps5 games run on the ps5 and ps5 pro. On Xbox, everything runs on series S and series X.

They still are. Any PS5 will play PS4 games. The PS5 Pro is a mid cycle spec bump that allows some newer games to have slightly better graphics. The games are still hard required to function within the expectations already set for the first PS5 model. I played Ghost of Yotei just fine on a non-Pro, and it targets the newer model.We&#x27;re also nearing PS6 time in the next year or two. It&#x27;s already six years old.

They make different performance playstation 5s?! What happenes to the console compatibility story? You used to expect any game to work on any console because they were all near identical.

has that still been accurate in the last half decade?indie devs have easy access to release on PS5, latest Xbox, Switch alongside Steam simultaneouslythe subscription any of those users have (a prerequisite for online or multiplayer access) also comes with many many free games, games that are otherwise $4 - $25 without the subscriptionpeople already in those ecosystems have been accumulating (unplayed) titles just like Steam users meme about, and as soon as they sign in on their new console all are available

Except that unlike a PS5, games are plenty, cheaper, and you probably already have a huge library even before buying it.I’m not the target but I can see the point.

yeah i wonder if SteamOS gets a more official generic release or if it stays pointed at Steamdeck and Steam machine directly
the only differences between this and a &quot;Gaming PC&quot; are the OS &amp; tiny form factor (which are both quite relevant)but youre exactly the target market for this it sounds likeI think you could kind of get there with a gaming pc that boots up steam big picture immediately? but it would feel hacky vs this for sure

Games at a certain point in their life are cheaper on console. At least, physically. I remember being shocked at this years ago, because I expected PC to be cheapest. But, a few years back, I went through and looked up a bunch of AAA games that were about 6 months old, and a lot of them were cheaper to buy physical, on console, from Amazon or another retailer. Cheaper than they&#x27;d ever been available for on PC, according to IsThereAnyDeal.I think it&#x27;s partly because, on console, the sellers &#x2F; devs have an incentive to reduce the price of physical copies, because they need to compete with used copies. They killed used copies on PC, so they don&#x27;t need to compete with that market.

How do you find time to play 500 games?Even if a game takes 5 hours that’s 2500 hoursThat’s mind blowing to me

I have about 500 games in my Steam library and maaaybe 20% of them are available for the PS5 (which I own).And I&#x27;ve paid full retail price for maybe two of them, the vast majority is from 50-90% sales. You don&#x27;t get those for the PS5 that much.I also don&#x27;t have any need for a &quot;Gaming PC&quot;, what I&#x27;ve always wanted is a console but with my Steam games. This is it.

The Steam Machine makes sense if it costs the same or less than a current-gen console, but a whole grand for this feels icky. I paid around $300 for the original Steam Machine (Alienware Alpha) in 2014. It played Fallout 4 better than the PS4 and Xbox One which cost about the same. The &quot;tradeoff&quot; was that you had to maintain the PC&#x27;s OS, which at the time had to be Windows 10.

I think it was supposed to be priced in below the PS5 Pro but due to ram supply issues and just general silicone allocation issues it was not to be. The steam decks $200 price bump tells as much

Zen 2 vs Zen 4 though. pS5 probably slower for CPU tasks

The PS5 base has 2 more physical cores (4 more threads) than this Steam Machine so I&#x27;m not optimistic that the Steam Machine outperforms the PS5.(both &quot;semicustom AMD&quot; so probably effectively the same architecture)

This is completely untrue and was based on some weird TikTok rumors.

Doesn&#x27;t Steam do that too? For a long time, offline mode in Steam didn&#x27;t work for many people, and, when it did, it wasn&#x27;t reliable for being offline for long periods of time. Is that all sorted?

A PlayStation 5 also requires you now to be online every so often (30 days?) for even your single player games.

I picked up a PS5 Pro before Christmas on sale for $599. It seems I made out like a bandit. I assumed prices would go out due to all this AI mess and knew I’d want one for GTA.Watching the LTT review of the Steam machine, it also reminded me why a console holds a lot of value. A lot of their video was about fiddling with settings per game to get a good balance of performance vs visuals. Something I never have to think about with the PS5, especially the Pro.While I like the idea of PC gaming, and even more so what Valve is doing, trying to move the industry to Linux, the reality of PC gaming has always felt like a huge pain. As much sys admin as actual gaming.If the Vavle platform are popular enough, they could get presets with a lot of games, but that remains to be seen.

The Steam Machine is likely slower than the base PS5 in terms of GPU performance. As a proxy, the memory bandwidth is 448 GB&#x2F;s on the PS5 and in the range of 256 GB&#x2F;s for the Steam Machine&#x27;s VRAM

Right now, noone that can avoid it should be buying ANYTHING with RAM or SSD in it.We&#x27;re truly screwed if things don&#x27;t calm down at least a little....

Curious as I’ve been thinking about doing the same, what are you running on your Linux box for your TV? You have to deal with family and little kids too?

For reference, a PlayStation 5 is $600-650 for the base models (lower performance than Steam Machine) and $900 for the Pro model (likely higher performance). I know this is a PC and thus an open platform, but for most buyers in living room gaming, that&#x27;s the competition. I don&#x27;t think this will reach mass market success, but I&#x27;m not sure that was the goal. Who are they selling to?Note: I ask as someone with a Steamdeck sitting on the desk in front of me and a custom-built computer under my TV running Linux.

At least it&#x27;s repairable so unless you break the motherboard you can probably fix it.

The prices I think a lot of us expected. I know Valve is being pressured by the market, but I can&#x27;t imagine buying one for this price, even if I&#x27;m really excited for the Steam Machine. That said, the Steam Deck is now so expensive I don&#x27;t think I can justify replacing mine when it breaks.

&gt;You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.&gt;Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries.Seems like they have chosen some reasonable options here. 2 months ago having purchase and trying to detect households. Likely also including phone number, Steam Guard client and family sharing.

Steam accounts newer than April do not qualify, plus I think you need to have spent at least $5 to qualify for the reservation queue (i.e. not community limited)

The account has to have bought something on steam before April 27th. They also are verifying addresses via the accounts.&gt; Are there any criteria for signing up?&gt; Customers must meet the following criteria to be able to sign up:&gt; You must have a Steam account in good standing.&gt; You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.&gt; Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries.

Do you really think a fresh steam account will have equal footing? I&#x27;d be surprised if that was the case.Even Nintendo has been setting fairly strict requirements to pre-order some of their products, like requiring 50 hours of playtime on the original switch to pre-order the Switch 2

It&#x27;s not worse than a traditional launch, but it&#x27;s also not much better. Make 1,000 Steam accounts, which are entirely free, and you get 1,000 times more chances of getting one than others.To be fair I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;ll be scalped a lot because the price isn&#x27;t attractive already and alternatives are plenty.

It also reduces the DDoS effect of telling all your customers to repeatedly hit your web servers at a specific day &amp; time.

Scalping is a good thing, because it gets consoles in the hands of those who want them the most, as evidenced by willingness to pay.

So what you’re saying is we should see an increase in account hijacks and spamming account creation as scalpers now try to optimize for max s.Show me the incentive structure and…

This is also possible because they are only selling through their website, while other consoles go through retailers.
I&#x27;d actually prefer a retailer just for doing this over one that was first come first serve.

Fusion Festival (happening this week), aka European Burning Man (but not exactly) does this.

Does it solve scalping? It seems like there is still money in sighing up with the goal to resell. Granted this is better in that I don&#x27;t have to race the scalpers.Till the sales price matches the market value scalping will exist. The best way to address that is a vickery auction. Till then scalping will continue.

It&#x27;s surprising that the whole Western world is discovering the threat of organized or scripted scalping just now, when it&#x27;s been a problem in places like Japan for over a decade. Account age requirements, lotteries, quick subject matter quizzes to chase away hired line-sitters, hidden ID code on tickets to ban scalpers on auction site pics, randomized queues for sales page etc etc has all been in use for years. It&#x27;s been so commonplace that various city-run COVID free vaccine programs had different forms of them.

so i think you&#x27;re a bit off. it&#x27;s s&#x2F;g but g is legit accounts who want to buy the steam machine.we could say it&#x27;s 5000 scalper accounts, and 50000000 gamer accounts. but it&#x27;s not 5000&#x2F;50000000, it&#x27;s like 4500&#x2F;20000. which isn&#x27;t bad! but scalpers will still be way over-represented, because they&#x27;ll be trying to buy it when most steam accounts won&#x27;t.now one fuzz factor is the queue system, as you&#x27;re not putting down money to get in line i expect a lot of people who wouldn&#x27;t otherwise sign up will, in case they decide to buy one when given the chance. so we might have 40000 gamer sign ups, but only 50% will pull the trigger. this also gives scalpers an out should the resale not be worth it.(obviously all numbers made up)

Scalping is much easier to solve, people just wouldn&#x27;t like it: Lock the device to the purchasing Steam account for a year.

&gt; scalpers and their bots would claim a large share of themIs there any actual data on this? I know people don&#x27;t like scalpers but I wonder what the actual percentage is.

Japan has done this for concert tickets for years. It works great.

I&#x27;ve never understood why anti-scalpers just don&#x27;t work backwards from shipping address. Are these scalpers all really keeping hundreds of actual physical addresses they can receive packages at? Like if you see the limited product has 100 orders going to the same building, or apartment, or whatever then flag it before it goes out. Limit PO Boxes, etc.Sure they can find mules to buy+receive one and then sell to the scalper, but the more steps you put in the better. Same for the people scamming Sam&#x27;s club by buying memberships, ordering limited items, then refunding the membership. Just lock orders to members older then &gt;1yr and make sure it only ships to the actual physical address attached to the membership. Flag multiple memberships at the same address.I&#x27;ve run a modest shipping op and the second I saw even a couple orders of the same product going to the same address I would halt it and do additional verification.

Scalping?  What kind of scalping market will there be at these prices?

I would be careful granting that s is less than g. There are lots of incentives other than scalping for people to create extra illegitimate accounts on Steam, and one individual can often control hundreds of bots, whereas a legitimate user almost never has more than one or two accounts.

Yeah, this is a promising solution to scalping. Previously, if you had only small numbers of consoles available at launch, scalpers and their bots would claim a large share of them. With Valve&#x27;s new policy, that share is reduced to s&#x2F;g, where s is the number of verified Steam accounts controlled by scalpers and g is the number of legit gamer accounts. Since s is likely to be much less than g, s&#x2F;g is close to zero, and scalping is dramatically curtailed. Almost all of the initial batch of consoles will go to legit gamers.

For €1039 you can even get a mini-ITX PC that fits nicely in your living room. Install SteamOS to get a similar experience. Only thing you will not get is the HDMI CEC functionality.

I get to support people that are very involved in making sure that a long list of x86 win32 software that I want to be able to run plays well with linux and osx (not-quite-directly, but the crossover folks are on it) - regardless of whether it&#x27;s on steam or not. Plus general linux desktop work in the &quot;make games play well&quot; department.Meanwhile, MS is trying to push copilot again.

People value convenience differently.A huge number of people would rather pay a few hundred bucks more to have a plug and play appliance with a warranty from a reputable company show up on their doorstep. They don’t have to learn anything about hardware, or how to install Linux. It just works.Some people are happy to save the money and take the risk on used hardware.The Steam Machine is for the former, Steam the platform is for the former and the latter.

if i was 10 years younger, sure I’d build my own. my roommates and i build our own gaming PCS, router, nas, home theater pc, we ran our own ethernet through the house. we ran openbsd on the router and freebsd on the nas, for fun.i’ve changed. i really do not want to spend any extra time on yak shaving outside the job.i am happy to pay $1500 for someone i trust with a fantastic track record to do it for me. plus its so cute!!! it will look great in my new apartment with the red faceplate. most gaming things are not cute.

It is neither cheaper or easier to get this build?

In Australia, it wouldn&#x27;t even need to be a used PC. The Steam Machine is $1600 AUD here, you can get a brand new gaming PC for that. Not a particularly amazing machine of course, but you can walk into a shop and buy it right now.

I am more surprised there&#x27;s people lining up to buy this when it&#x27;s genuinely cheaper to get a used PC off a local marketplace. I feel like this is unnecessary as I am pretty sure they&#x27;ll be able to fill it in one shipment.

Seems weird to base a FOSS reservation system on... Google Sheets?

Would love to know if you decide to work on this, or if otherwise, want to collaborate. feel free to email me hello@mannan.is - or maybe I&#x27;ll begin work on this before you and we can share notesedit: I don&#x27;t particularly care for Google Sheets, just the idea of solving the underlying problem.

I would love to see a generalized FOSS reservation system that could be used for just about anything that would help address the issues Valve listed. It could be as simple as a short lived deployment (1,3,7,14 days) that writes out the entries to a Google Sheets. I have encountered so many people trying to come up with their own approach to this problem that I think it would be worth solving. Maybe I can find time to work on it later this year.

because the less wealthy get mad about it

Holy fuck, not everything in this life needs to be profit maximized.

Most companies need customers that don&#x27;t hate their guts, that&#x27;s why they don&#x27;t do this

Because it damages the brand and many people will remember the product as being heavily overpriced and never come back.

Because they want to maximize longterm  profitability and believe (which makes sense to me) this approach would harm that

Because public image matters. Steam has built a reputation for being customer friendly. Coming up with a Byzantine pricing system for your highly anticipated new hardware will not be well received by the steam users. The extra short term earning will be a drop in the bucket compared to what steam is already making from taking 30% off most game sells, but the reputation damage will linger forever.

The funny thing is, someone paying $3,400 for a Steam Machine would be an idiot.Internally, it&#x27;s equivalent to a mid-grade PC from 2018. You&#x27;re not playing AAA games in 4K on this thing.

Because long-term this destroys goodwill.

I don&#x27;t get why companies don&#x27;t take advantage of the demand.For example: Start the bidding at BASE_PRICE (BP) + 2400. Then reduce the price by $1 every 3mins over the course of 5 days. Until the BP is met and then just carry on queuing.You could buy it early if you want it that much or just wait an extra couple of days and end up in the queue at the BP.I don&#x27;t know if it would create pressure on that second it ticks over to the BP, so then its BP+1 - well I guess the nash equilibrium would be pushed up.

The problem with a dutch auction is if you don&#x27;t know how a dutch auction functions, it looks like you&#x27;re getting royally screwed. That&#x27;s why they&#x27;re usually reserved for professional settings.

This basically makes the vendor the scalper, and the public would react accordingly.

I would be curious how the public would react to a Dutch auction, where Valve launches the console at a $10,000 price tag, and every ~hour drops the price by $100 until they are sold out. It creates the illusion that buyers are &quot;breaking the line&quot; when buying high, so it&#x27;s their fault (not valves) for the high selling price. This would also eliminate scalpers.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sortition" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sortition</a>In governance, sortition is the selection of public officials or jurors at random, i.e., by lottery, in order to obtain a representative sample.[1][2][3]In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy.[4][5] Sortition is often classified as a method for both direct democracy and deliberative democracy.

While it sounds nice in principal, it basically just means cashed up people get it first. But there is also the fun side of it becoming a status symbol I guess. Drive up future demand.

In my limited experience of seeing Dutch auctions in practice it actually has the opposite of the intended effect, as the people that are willing to pay the highest are also the people that will have a way to profit, just on a lesser scale.For example, Panini (sports card manufacturer) did Dutch auctions on boxes of new card sets during the peak of pandemic collectible mania. The majority of customers that were willing to pay the highest prices on Panini&#x27;s website were card breakers, which are people&#x2F;companies that sell &quot;spots&quot; in livestream box openings (i.e. customers buy the right to all cards containing players from a certain sports team before the box is opened).

Interesting, as it sounds like a lottery reservation system, which is kinda a neat way to deal with many issues.I&#x27;m always supprised that companies don&#x27;t do a tiered price release, offer it at 200% price, you get it, 150%, you lower down the list and then 100% lottery time, that way they gain from those who can afford to pay more(maybe able to subsidise other sales later and price cuts down the line). Why feed scalpers when you can coin it directly and then offer a lower price to those who are prepared to wait a few more months or so.

I moved to New Zealand recently from the US and am now seeing that everywhere. A lot of the time some local ecommerce platform imports the Australian version of most electronics with a markup, but we don&#x27;t have official retailers for a lot of products, most notably Pixel phones. Also no Apple stores, though there are official retailers for Apple products.

&gt; This is niceBut this is not nice:&gt; This item is not available for purchase in your region

This is how tickets for sports and concerts should always be sold.Entertainment tends to compare with airline tickets, except that with air travel, there are regular flights and competition. There is no such thing as a single flight from Paris to New York on one Saturday at 9pm on a window of a few years.

&gt; they just want to protect themselves from the German Tank Problem type of analysisHow could you estimate that when they don&#x27;t let you know your position in the queue (with or without randomisation)?&gt; we&#x27;ll send you an email with the option to purchase. You&#x27;ll then have 72 hours to complete the purchase.

I thought about this, and can not tell if you are being serious or not. I can see arguments for either.

&gt; Why a randomized reservation order?Lies, they just want to protect themselves from the German Tank Problem [0] type of analysis.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;German_tank_problem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;German_tank_problem</a>

Living in Japan, most popular concerts are handled this way. It really really sucks to not get a ticket, and it sucks even more that we need to do it this way because of scalpers. But hey, if it means I overall have a better chance of getting tickets (at list price at that), hey, I guess it is worth it.I wish there were better ways of defeating scalpers.

Exactly, get the devices in the hands of real users instead of ebay traders trying to get rich.

This would also be a very good idea for university course selection systems

&gt; Why a randomized reservation order?
[...] we wanted to create a system that would be less frustrating and more fair for everyone. A launch that starts at a specific day and time tends to reward bots, people with fast internet connections, talented gaming fingers for quick F5&#x2F;refresh reactions, and those who can schedule their life around that moment. By accepting reservation signups over the course of a few days, without any incentive to be first, we&#x27;re hoping to take away some of that friction.This is nice.

$1049 .. Damn.Here&#x27;s hoping my $135 BC-250 arriving tomorrow works without any issue.Either way, congrats to Valve!

I assume they are referring to the general tide of improvements valve has brought to gaming working generically on linux, and that they are using omarchy to experience it

Care to explain what Omarchy has to do with Valve?

Gaming just works for me with Steam and Ubuntu. Steam no longer filters out Linux games to its own category, it simply assumes most games work now (and they do!).

Same. Gaming exclusively on Linux (openSUSE Tumbleweed) for the last 2 years or so and also loving the Steam Controller.

Thanks to Valve, I&#x27;ve now been using Omarchy as my operating system for months now. Gaming just works on Linux now. It&#x27;s crazy, used to be a pipe dream!I&#x27;m buying the Steam Machine as well to game on the couch. Give me 4k 60fps and that&#x27;s all I need. The Steam Controller is also fantastic shape on my hands, very comfortable.

I think that was already in the RAM crisis, so that was priced in. I think it would be a lot cheaper w&#x2F;o the whole price boom.

LTT was only speculating, they did not know the actual price as far as I remember. (They had a video doing some educated guesses, or maybe a WAN show, can’t exactly recall).No doubt the price was lower before this hardware shortage, but the $800 is not a reliable number afaik.

Don&#x27;t use LTT as a source for anything. They are mainly an entertainment channel with a giant track record of fuck ups anything data related.

And Amodei, and Satya, and Pichai.., don&#x27;t forget about them.

According to LTT the original price was in the $800 range, but thanks to Sam Altman it increased to what we saw today.

The original price target was $800, so you probably were never going to buy this thing.

Plus GPU prices. They absolutely got screwed by their launch timing, unfortunately. And they’re not big enough to negotiate better terms though that probably isn’t really an option right now anyway.I’m not sure I’d want this at $550, but maybe. At $1050 without controller it’s a solid no.I’m sure some people will want it. I have no interest in maintaining a PC so if I wanted to play PC games this is probably how I would do it. But the price just absolutely kills it for me.

It doesn&#x27;t have to be everybody or nobody, it can be as simple as &quot;a lot of people buy lower end gaming equipment instead&quot;.

There is no guarantee that these prices are here to stay...

&quot;killed&quot; is a bit of a stretch. High prices on all gear is here to stay. This is the new normal. Unless that simply means that nobody buys consoles&#x2F;pc&#x27;s.But you cant compare the price point with what it used to cost and imagine that its overpriced now and that people will seek alternatives. There aren&#x27;t any cheaper alternatives.

No way. $1100+ to play games with medium&#x2F;high settings at 1080p? You can probably buy a prebuilt tower that does better than that at that price.

It also killed their ability to make lots of units. They say so themselves. Selling out isn&#x27;t a good thing.

If you make 5 of a product and put a bunch of marketing behind it you can sell out too. People are going to use &quot;selling out&quot; as some sort of barometer of success but its like the lizard-man veto in politics. You&#x27;ll always find some small percentage of people who will vote for the motion &quot;the nation&#x27;s leaders are a group of lizard people&quot;, but you can&#x27;t use that as any sort of signal regarding the validity of the claim of the motion.Valve could have priced this at 5k and probably found a couple thousand buyers, and if they only made a few thousand boxes they could claim it sold out then too. This thing is DOA in terms of having any major success or impact on the gaming market when I can walk down to my neighborhood PC store and either build a better PC myself for less money (at off the shelf markups no less!!!) or get a pre-built with better specs that costs less. I could buy a P5Pro and a Switch 2 combined for less money than the 2TB version, and the PS5Pro has 2tb as well!Its actually mind boggling that Valve is coming in with a less economic product that a fucking hand-built premade at my local PC store.

It&#x27;s objectively a terrible deal. It has console specs for double the price of a console.In fact you could literally just buy a separate PS5 and Macbook Neo and spend less than most Steam Machine configurations, so even the &quot;it&#x27;s also a computer&quot; selling point is not that big of a deal.

I don&#x27;t know what you mean by &#x27;killed.&#x27; It&#x27;d be sold out faster than hot cakes.

&gt; However it might actually be the inferior gaming machine for CPU&#x2F;main RAM intense strategy or simulation games (e.g. Stellaris).On Stellaris: I remember having a pretty good experience (not stellar) playing on a 2012 AMD FX-8350 desktop cpu. The six year old midrange laptop cpu Ryzen 4650u smokes that desktop cpu.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cpubenchmark.net&#x2F;compare&#x2F;1780vs3766&#x2F;AMD-FX-8350-Eight-Core-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-PRO-4650U" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cpubenchmark.net&#x2F;compare&#x2F;1780vs3766&#x2F;AMD-FX-8350-...</a>Just to draw out the fact that with the Steam machine you will have a better Stellaris experience than what I had 7-8 years ago. (Because I assume even better performance than this laptop class cpu)My thoughts go more on the question if 15GB ram 8GB VRAM is enough for the next 7 years. And if Steam verified will all be split up, and become more confusing, between the 3 different devices they have.

They show a 1080p&#x2F;high benchmark of Stellaris on Gamers Nexus and it took 63.9s on Linux OpenGL and 67.4s on DX11 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;66QzlDewigE?t=2021" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;66QzlDewigE?t=2021</a>). I would guess the AMD R9 HX 370 in your GT37 will smash that.

I bought my own version of a &quot;Steam Machine&quot; i.e. a mini-PC powered by an AMD APU for just €676 right before the RAM prices exploded.It is an AOOSTAR GT37 which actually outclasses the €1,039 Steam Machine in most areas except graphics. One cannot blame Valve here though, the hyperinflation of RAM prices is too blame here.AOOSTAR GT37 (€676 a few months ago [now vastly more expensive if you can still get one at all]) vs Steam Machine (€1039 right now)CPU: 12x Zen 5 vs. 6 Zen4
Graphics: 16x RDNA 3.5 vs. 28 RDNA 3
RAM: 32 GB LPDDR5X vs. 16 GB DDR5 + 8 GB GDDR6
HDD: 1 TB vs. 512 GB (both NVMe-SSD)I expect the Steam Machine to run graphically demanding FPS games quite a bit better due to the extra RDNA cores and faster VRAM. However it might actually be the inferior gaming machine for CPU&#x2F;main RAM intense strategy or simulation games (e.g. Stellaris).

I still think it&#x27;s a great concept and a really accessible way to get a great computer. But I agree, I thought this was going to land in the $500 to $700 range. That said, I also bought a mini PC for $250, and that same PC is now going for $600. So I don&#x27;t really think steam can be blamed for that

You may be unfamiliar with the colloquialism. This one is exclusively for unreleased products.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dead_on_arrival#:~:text=In%20another%20context%2C%20%22dead%20on%20arrival%22%20may%20be%20used%20to%20describe%20an%20idea%2C%20concept%2C%20or%20product%20that%20is%20considered%20to%20be%20fundamentally%20flawed%2C%20and%20therefore%20viewed%20as%20an%20utter%20failure%20from%20the%20start." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dead_on_arrival#:~:text=In%20a...</a>

&gt; killed this product on arrival sadly.Rather odd to talk about an as yet unreleased product failing in the past tense.

Over $1000 for a machine with only half a terabyte of storage, especially for gamers, is just brutal.

I&#x27;d like to buy one, but its a bit pricey for those specs. $1600 AUD?

I&#x27;m simply impressed they&#x27;re releasing at all. This has to be literally the worst 6 month time window in the last 20+ years to launch a new computing device at scale and have to build the vendor contracts and inventory from zero.

Why dead on arrival though? If you want to buy the same kind of pc, price is the same.You can buy a PS5, of course, but that&#x27;s a different walled garden.If you are in the market for a 3k pc, sure do it, but if you are in the market for a 1k pc, why not a steam machine?

I imagine Valve Software wanted to release the Steam Machine for $549-$699. The great RAM hoarding of 2025-2026 killed this product on arrival sadly.

It&#x27;s GPU&#x27;s VRAM or some sort of shared memory? I have never seen mixed ram before.

It is 16GB plus an additional 8GB for graphics.

Interesting with the memory. It is 16GB plus an additional 8GB for graphics, or is it just 16GB with 8GB reserved for graphics?

Naw. I think they&#x27;ll sell every single one they&#x27;re able manufacture for the next couple years. The pre-order list will probably fill most of those.

Unfortunate for them on the pricing of components. This won&#x27;t do so well (right now), but I think the Frame will exceed expectations.

And since for AMD it is an open source driver Valve can also hack on it and squeze more performance out of it for their own specific hardware configuration.

It was kind of expected since Steam Deck (obviously) had an AMD APU, and AMD works much better with mainstream Linux projects in general.

valve themselves also personally employ multiple major contributors to the amd linux drivers<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phoronix.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;AMD-Marek-Joins-Valve" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phoronix.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;AMD-Marek-Joins-Valve</a>

Interesting that they went with AMD for GPU, but not too surprising.  My experience with a nvidia 5060 on my laptop is that nvidia&#x27;s drivers on linux still have no idea how to reliably wake from sleep.  Fixing that just not the priority for them I guess - datacenter GPUs doing AI probably never sleep and just idle at 50 watts or whatever.

My hope is this is just a soft launch that people who really want can get now, but that they revise it in the future to either be massively more powerful or much cheaper.

Yeah. But they’re only other choices to just sit on it for a few more years, which point they would need to put different hardware in and it would just increase costs.This may be the best option of a couple of terrible ones.

Yeah. I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re gouging, I totally understand how expensive RAM and storage and GPUs are, but...oof. I just can&#x27;t justify it as a &#x27;fun&#x27; purchase.

Same, I could have maybe justified $600 to my wife, $800 would be really pushing it. But 1k+ with a controller? There&#x27;s no way when we have other things to save for. I am sure young single people will still buy it and it will sell out, but my Series X was $550 a few years ago and ill enjoy that in my living room for a while longer.

I understand why it costs that much, but it&#x27;s too much.Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I&#x27;m not commenting on the value, but rather the markets ability to handle it.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;sale&#x2F;steammachine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;sale&#x2F;steammachine</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lttlabs.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2026&#x2F;06&#x2F;22&#x2F;the-newell-nucleus-steam-machine-ltt-companion-article" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lttlabs.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2026&#x2F;06&#x2F;22&#x2F;the-newell-nucle...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=66QzlDewigE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=66QzlDewigE</a>

Steam Machine launches today