I know the price for PC parts is terrible these days, but $1049 for a 6-core 16GB RAM, with a 512GB SSD, and no controller, is a terrible value.
For reference, the PS5 Pro has more than twice the number GPU CUs, an 8-core CPU, a 2TB SSD, a controller, and costs $899.
The PS5 Pro has 16 GB unified memory, the Steam Machine is 16GB + 8GB. That'll be where some of the price difference comes from. But most likely comes from Sony locking in long term contracts before price insanity.
Unified memory is a lot more flexible and efficient though. You don't have to have assets loaded in RAM and also VRAM for the CPU/GPU to use them. Don't forget about how much more RAM a general purpose OS like Steam OS can consume versus a gaming specific OS too. The PS5 Pro also has an extra 2GB of DDR5 system RAM too.
My old Ryzen 3700X gaming PC has 16GB of RAM and 8GB of VRAM (RTX 2070 Super) and there isn't any game that runs better on it than my Xbox Series X. And the GPU in the Steam Machine is slightly worse than an RTX 2070 Super.
> You don't have to have assets loaded in RAM and also VRAM for the CPU/GPU to use them.
You typically don't want to do this anyway in games. You're probably doing something wrong if you're reading textures/meshes on both the CPU and GPU.
> Don't forget about how much more RAM a general purpose OS like Steam OS can consume versus a gaming specific OS too.
SteamOS is meant to be a gaming specific OS first. It has a desktop environment but none of that loads unless you switch to desktop mode. That's just taking up some disk space while you play games.
>SteamOS is meant to be a gaming specific OS first. It has a desktop environment but none of that loads unless you switch to desktop mode.
I think it's fair for some of us to consider the resource usage of a core feature and not really accept "just don't use desktop mode" as a viable suggestion. Especially if half the pitch is "it's a mobile PC." You can't use many of the features it's capable of in gaming mode.
It's not "don't use desktop mode", it's "switch back to gaming mode before playing a game".
On any 16GB machine you're going to want to close your any ram heavy apps like browsers before starting a game. Switching to gaming mode is an easy way to do that.
> You can't use many of the features it's capable of in gaming mode
It is trivial to switch between gaming mode and desktop mode. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.
Different value props. The target audience for this already has an extensive Steam catalogue. To buy a PS5 Pro is going to require re-buying all of your games for it.
Also, you can build a decent PC for $1049, but getting it into a decent form/noise factor is going to ratchet that price up. Add in the proprietary CEC stuff that Valve has done for it and it's not as terrible as it seems.
>To buy a PS5 Pro is going to require re-buying all of your games for it.
Even if I didn't have a Steam Library, I wouldn't buy the PS5 anyway: no Steam Sales there. And Steam Sales are a godsend.
The sales are a nice thing but for me the biggest benefit of Steam is knowing that I can use my games library on other/future devices.
My games have been working on my desktop from 10 years ago, the SteamDeck, my laptop and likely any future computer I buy that runs Linux.
Console stores also have sales. Often with pretty huge discounts. I just bought a bunch of games on Xbox in the 1-5 dollar range. I see similar sales on PS5 all the time.
Honestly, these days, Steam, PS and Xbox game sales prices are pretty much in the same level now. Ten years ago it was very different. Recently I was thinking whether to buy Resident Evil 4 on Steam or on PS (had the same price 9,99€). Got it on Steam in the end. Though, Steam still wins on regional pricing as they support more local currencies.
Only the Nintendo store have games priced usually a bit higher.
> To buy a PS5 Pro is going to require re-buying all of your games for it
Why would I re-buy all the games I own?! The vast majority of people one-and-done games and movies. There are a handful they go back to, and that's it.
CHILDREN replay games cycling through them ad-infimum because their entire concept of time is like 3x less than we've been waiting for the next GTA.
And they don't have money! Adults are the majority of the market now.
Any other behavior from adults, who are seriously time constrained, is niche. And that's fine if someone wants to spend their adult time on earth replaying games, but let's be honest. It's niche.
> The vast majority of people one-and-done games and movies. There are a handful they go back to, and that's it.
Citation needed.
A slow gaming PC that is small and can turn on my TV is still... a slow gaming PC. And one of the main PC benefits, upgradeability is non-existent for the parts that matter (e.g. GPU, VRAM, etc).
You're firmly in the build-a-pc bracket. Nothing else will ever make sense.
I'm still gaming on a 980. I have never been chasing pixel perfection or the latest and greatest.
I would say I am the exception, but hardware survey says otherwise. There are a lot of people for whom the Steam Machine would be at worst a sidegrade.
> To buy a PS5 Pro is going to require re-buying all of your games for it.
No? You can plan all your PS4 (and regular PS5) games. Plus some PS3 and PS One (IIRC) other games.
* Not all PS4 games can run on PS5. Granted, it's only a few edge cases. But you still need to pay the PS4>PS5 upgrade if you want to avoid bottlenecks.
* PS3 games and the like require a 150+$ yearly subscription, and it's streaming for many of them. No thanks.
* No PS2/PSP/Vita compatibility, heck no emulation at all.
I think they mean rebuying all your steam games on PSN
But what if I have had PS3/4/5? anyway silly argument given how much of steam libraries go unplayed anyway.
Well, and you pay 120$/year for the privilege to play games online on that PS5. That is one of the reasons SONY can subsidize the PS5 unit price and sell under cost. Valve is not in that position, because people would buy it as office PC replacement.
Also a PS5 only runs PS5 games which Sony gets a cut of whenever you purchase one.
With this thing you could buy it and then install your favorite Linux distro on it and never give Valve another dime. If they ate the cost, businesses would buy them up as the best value for the compute and they're not buying Steam games.
> That is one of the reasons SONY can subsidize the PS5 unit price and sell under cost.
PS5 hardware sales started generating profit in the first year. Only for the first few month the sales were "subsidised".
> Only for the first few month
Yes, but we are in the unique situation that we saw actually increasing prices for RAM and storage over time due to AI craze. You (or me) have no idea what Sony's markup on consoles is right now.
Valve very much is in the position to subsidize the costs; they charge 30% royalty per game sold.
Valve often boasts that they have a very high Rev / Employee number.
> Valve very much is in the position to subsidize the costs;
They're not, because they don't lock down the hardware to only Steam.
If they subsidized the cost, people could just buy them as general purpose computers and not buy steam games on them.
Valve would only be in a position to subsidize the hardware if they locked the hardware down to just the Steam store.
Yeah but then people would buy them for non-gaming use. Remember the PS2 supercomputers?
*PS3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
From that very page...
> The National Center for Supercomputing Applications had already built a cluster based on the PlayStation 2.
I haven't heard of any others, and your comment said 'supercomputers'.
Not to mention that the NSCA was just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it would prove useful when it came to the PS2,[0] and their setup never worked reliably.[1] The PS3 had several supercomputers made independently.[1][2][3]
[0] https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/2003/05/27/playing-the-superco...
[1] https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/ps3-supercompu...
[2] https://web.uri.edu/gravity/ps3/
[3] https://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/701
and the fears that Saddam Hussein was going to buy a bunch of PS2s because the cpu was SO POWERFUL they would be used for missile guidance systems or something
This more a dig at Sony than a reason Valve can’t also sell their hardware as a loss leader. They are massively profitable from their cut of Steam sales anyway. And part of PS Plus is a catalog of games and monthly games, similar to Gamepass. Valve could easily have a profitable subscription model for games or services if they wanted to.
Playstation plus essential is $80 per year
PS5 sells at a loss & makes up the difference collecting rent on a closed system. With Steam you're buying an open system.
Does Valve take a cut of software sales on Steam? If so, why do we expect Sony to sell its consoles at a loss, while not holding the same expectation for Valve?
Valve cannot do that because they can't guarantee that people buying the Steam Machine will even use it for gaming.
Isn’t it just a mid-range PC for ~$1,100? Why would someone buy that just to use it like a regular PC and not use Steam? That just seems strange. I’m sure there are also many PS5 owners that bought the console but only got one or two games before the console collected dust.
Piracy and alternative storefronts don't exist on PS5. I could buy a steam machine and then exclusively buy my games from EA. They're also not charging you for the multiplayer access
I would guess that users of the Steam machine would mostly be as locked-in to Steam purchases as PS5 users are to PS Store purchases.
I stopped PC gaming about a decade ago and my current daily driver is a Macbook. I periodically play games on my a PS5 or XBOX, but there are a ton of great games on my Steam wishlist.
I feel like I'm the exact target market for this (although I'm not going to buy at this price point at this time). I don't want to bother with Windows and would love a 'console' allowing me to play most Steam games without a lot of hassle.
> I would guess that users of the Steam machine would mostly be as locked-in to Steam purchases as PS5 users are to PS Store purchases.
[pirate flag emoji].
Games from sources other than Steam are a bit more fiddly to get going, but it's far from impossible. Like Valve says, it's your computer.
Steam machine is not locked into the steam client. You can install whatever you want.
The steam machine is just a regular Linux PC, you can install anything you want on it.
I have the Deck and I mostly use it to emulate Switch & PS2 games.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...
That article is from 8 months after it released. Notably it doesn't count the Digital Edition, but I doubt it also got sold at a loss for that much longer.
PS5 NEVER in it's lifecycle sold at a loss. That hasn't happened for generations now.
All caps doesn't make it true.
Sure, the reality makes it true. The BOM for PS5 is very low.
And it is the first time in history where storage and RAM cost double or triple what it cost 6 months ago. So unknown if Sony makes a profit from todays sales.
Sony is selling off old stocks at old future prices. They've already started hiking the price up - it's unlikely they'll eat the loss on hardware here either.
It's happened before. Storage more than doubled after the thailand floods back in 2011. There have been RAM disruptions as well.
But a person can't really use their PS5 as a home PC.
> For reference, the PS5 Pro has more than twice the number GPU CUs, an 8-core CPU, a 2TB SSD, a controller, and costs $899.
PS5 Pro had a launch price of $700, which already felt steep. How is $900 not even worse value? Even if it's "better" than the Steam Machine, let's not pretend that it's actually a good value for the hardware.
Not that it matters as much for a gaming console but the PS5 Pro CPU is definitely the slower one.
For reference compare it to a PC.
SM: AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T
PC: AMD Ryzen 5 7600X 4.7 GHz 6-Core ($170)
-
SM: AMD RDNA3 28CUs 8 GB
PC: AMD Radeon RX 7600 8 GB ($280)
-
SM: 16GB DDR5
PC: 2 x 8 GB DDR5-5600 CL40 ($225)
-
SM: 512GB NVMe SSD
PC: Samsung 870 Evo 500 GB 2.5" SSD ($283)
-
Other parts the PC will need:
- CPU Cooler ($18)
- Motherboard ($100)
- Case ($60)
- PSU ($60)
-
SM: $1,049
PC: $1,196
That's pretty good. Even if the SM cost 20% more the cuteness factor of its small quiet aesthetic has its own appeal. Hope PC prices come down...
If Valve wants users to compare the Steam Machine to a PC, then it's going to be outdated in 6 months.
It is already outdated I think? 8GB of VRAM, and CPU and mobile GPU from 3+ years ago. Nobody would build a gaming PC right now with a GPU that anemic and 8GB of VRAM.
No one would build a gaming pc right now at all.
And yet my steam deck still plays everything I throw at it. Could I find a Crysis-type game that was basically designed as a GPU torture device that it would struggle with? Obviously. Is there a resolution difference? Yes. But there are a lot of games coming out only asking for moderate specs.
I wish PCs were still advancing that fast...
Dude still thinks it's 2003.
It makes more sense to focus on its value as a console platform than its price as a PC.
The lower the price, the more boxes sell, hopefully making the platform large enough for publishers to target.
The higher the price, the better specs the box can afford, increasing the platform's longevity.
The hidden value you don't see in the specs is that publishers will target this platform specifically for a certain amount of time.
Right, but it’s a PS5, not a PC - you’re paying less for the privilege of letting Sony 100% control what you use the device for, including not being able to play your own games that you’ve paid for. Try doing that on a PC. Try checking your email on your PS5, or steaming the media of your choice.
Even if you only used your Steam Machine to play Steam games it's still probably a better deal. Multiplayer and cloud saves are free so you don't need something like PlayStation Plus. Games are generally cheaper and Steam sales make them even cheaper. You also don't lose access to older games if you get a better system.
> You also don't lose access to older games if you get a better system.
To be fair, all the latest generation consoles are near 100% backwards compatible with their respective last gen. This has historically been more tricky due to architecture changes but it seems like all consoles have converged into more or less bog-standard prebuilt computers so it's less of an ask.
But still, I trust my Steam library to last longer than anything I've bought digitally on consoles.
I've recently played through all the Dragon Age games on the same PC. A PS5 can only do Inquisition and the best one, Veilguard.
Before that, I played Psychonauts 1.
We forget how many insanely good, solid games existed even in just the PS3 era.
I also played through all the Dragon Age games on PC recently! Origins needs a small patch to run on a 64-bit machine and it doesn't scale very well on a 4k monitor without 3rd party software but other than that it's a great show of backwards compatibility.
> the best one, Veilguard
I assume that's sarcasm or you're the first person I've heard to say that :)
Actually the reason I finally played the series is because my buddy worked on Veilguard. I'll give them credit for assembling something as cohesive as it is considering it went from a single player game to a multiplayer game and back to a single player game during development.
On Linux I can play games going back multiple generations as well as emulating other consoles
Ehh, but on Linux nowadays it's whichever gen, plus modding, multiple frontends and storefronts.
Sure, I have to use my gaming console as a gaming console, much like I use my smart thermostat as a thermostat and don't check email on it.
It's doesn't have to be non-gaming purposes. Say you want to install something not sold on Steam like I dunno, World of Warcraft, or Minecraft.
True! The Steam Deck LCD is a great retro gaming / emulator device and has outclassed many more focused competing devices for a while now.
And all you use your IPhone for is to make phone-calls, right?
You missed the point. If all I did was make phone calls on a $100 flip phone why would someone saying "oh but the $1000 iPhone can do so much more!" matter to me.
But in this case, they even say:
"...and it's a PC
Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?"
It's not just a gaming console.
I know what the Steam Machine is, I'm saying the compromise of the PlayStation being cheaper isn't a compromise because I simply don't care that my game console isn't a PC. I have a PC, and I don't want one connected to my TV anyway. I don't think I'm unusual in that regard and the market of people who want to check their email on their TV is pretty small!
It's less about "checking your email" and more about ' it's an open system and you can do with it what you want", in whichever domain.
The PS5 has an internet browser, you can do all that.
Can I serve my media library off of my NAS with the PS5? I am legit asking because I just got on the list hoping to use this thing as my home entertainment system
Not sure if anything has changed but back when I had one the only thing I found that was supported was Plex
> For reference, the PS5 Pro has more than twice the number GPU CUs, an 8-core CPU, a 2TB SSD, a controller, and costs $899.
Will it run my Steam library of games or do I need to also pay 5000$ again with inflated prices?
It will run your PS4 and PS5 libraries.
So a tiny tiny tiny amount of games, with the added fun that older games might just not be available, OR cost a whole bunch because they're collector items.
People love talking about console exclusives, but every game from before 2013 is basically a PC exclusive.
So no.
The irony there is that the Steam Machine can't actually run the full Steam library since most games aren't made for Linux. Most run on it via Proton, many even run well, but it is very far from "all the games play without issues".
Can you imagine if the PlayStation Store sold games on the PS5 that you couldn't play there because they were actually Windows games?
Steam clearly shows a badge showing if it runs on Linux. You can filter out stuff that won’t run.
Just filter out: Fortnite, Roblox, GTA Online, Call of Duty, Destiny, Valorant, PUBG, etc...
It isn't a short list of AAA games that don't run on SteamOS.
There's no game worth installing a rootkit for. The market is far more diverse and interesting than the handful of popular AAA titles , most of which are just shooters
There is a certain group of gamers who care about all of those games, but there is a not insignificant group who doesn't at all. So while it's not a non issue, it's not a show stopper that you can't play online shooter games. And that really is the only genre of game that won't work. Everything else has been flawless on linux.
Since it's not locked down I assume you could install windows on it
you don't even have to, you can do a single GPU passthrough to VM and integrate it seamlessly.
Steam Deck works just fine, so I guess the Machine will too.
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