I’m curious to see how the price will be affected as consumer PCs get stronger every year. Will they update the Steam Machine every couple of years, or will they decrease the price? I have to assume they are targeting a neutral price because their primary goal is to assemble a linux box with as little margin as possible and put it in front of you for an actual fair price, but “fair price” is a moving target.
Personally, I’m all for getting what I pay for. People who sell to you at a loss are up to something.
As it says in the article, it’ll be smaller and quieter, so less offensive for most people’s living rooms than a full-size desktop. It’s not meant to replace your existing PC if you have one, unless it was getting old and you were about to replace it anyway. If you don’t have a PC, or don’t have one in the living room, then it might be a better option than anyone else’s prebuilt.
it could become the new standard for industry benchmarking/testing
Exactly. We are already seeing game companies specifically mention the Steam Deck in patch notes. This will give them a standard item to validate compatibility against. Any game company that wants to make sure their game works well will have a Steam Machine on-hand to QA with.
And I fully agree with you on benchmarking. It will be a very standardized system to point to in game reviews.
I mean, it’s fine to do so, as long as you have PC hardware that meets your needs. Valve would be fine with it too. As long as it can run Steam, all good. For Valve, I expect that the Steam Machine is to provide an easy-to-set-up option a la consoles that let them move into the living room for people who have an issue with that. If you can already use/configure a PC and have one, then that option is gonna work too.
The biggest advantages it has over other PCs is CEC and Wake on USB(controller) enabled out of the box. Those are the two features I miss the most on my HTPC.
Standardized design, sure. I would argue you could get something more powerful at a comparable size for not too much more. My HTPC is about the size of a shoe box yet has a R7 7700X and a RX 6900 XT.
That’s a lot for someone who doesn’t understand computers beyond Windows and MacOS. People also don’t realise that since the PS4 and the Xbox One every console is just a X86-64 machine. So, I think it’s a good move from Valve. Also it will be easier to manage and optimise for Valve if all their hardware is the same, a bit like Apple.
There are people who exist between “I build, format and otherwise manage my own gaming rig,” and “I don’t need a PC for games.”
My partner is a perfect example. She has my old PC shell, with some $500 of GPU, internal memory, and accessories, hooked up to the TV. She uses it daily, almost exclusively for Steam games and streaming services that she finds more comfortable to navigate with a keyboard and mouse. A smaller, quieter, streamlined, “this more or less will do the things you want to do straight out of the box” product would have saved both her (and I, because that thing has had some troubleshooting) a lot of headache, while looking far more presentable to boot.
Maybe she’s the odd one out and the target audience is more niche than my bias’ recognize, but I guess we’ll see for sure when this thing releases.
At least for me, a Steam Machine would be the ideal use case for my brother, since the literal ONLY game he plays is CS2. He used to play Fortnite, but he hasn’t done that in years… and even then if he wanted we could just swap places between my current real computer and the Steam Machine. It’s also really small so it wouldn’t occupy much space on the other room of the house.
If its a decent price I’ll want it. I love the freedom PC gaming allows but sometimes I do miss the convenience of a console. It would be great for my kid as well. No fidling with the display, having the PC not wake properly from sleep, controllers not connecting, etc. It would just work. Our current setup inevitably something doesnt work right first try.
“on your machine” requires you to have a machine. This isn’t for people with computers already. This is for people who are already looking for a new machine, and this becomes the “ready out of the box” option.
IIRC from an earlier article, they’re still looking at factors and don’t yet know for sure (I suspect that it might be that Trump tariffs and whether they will stand is an input).
That’s the thing I find amusing in this thread. Consoles are a known quantity and it needs to either compete or undercut them. I have a Steam Deck that I paid £320 for (brought up to £400 by the SSD I added). I would most definitely not pay more than £450 for a Steam Box. It may well cost more than that but it is a luxury and I would seriously struggle to justify more than that.
Not every project works out and he seems to behave like they weren’t so fair enough. He did put out three shitty card games on Steam and that NIER mobile gacha game, so it’s not like he’s incapable of making stinkers too.
Just give the man a budget and leave him be to create. He has his own cult at this point. Yes, it’s going to be weird, and full of pretty women, but that’s what Taro makes, and we’re here for it.
Good showing for E33 but I’m not convinced it’s a shoo-in for GotY. It’s a media-run event and the press adored Hades 2. Plus there’s always the Kojima factor and it would be the first time TGA’s ever given it to a studio’s first game.
Looking at the sheer number of nominations e33 has gotten, I would be absolutely shocked if it didn’t win game of the year.
It’s defined as “Recognizing a game that delivers the absolute best experience across all creative and technical fields.”
While that’s pretty nebulous a definition on its own, the fact that seemingly every other creative and technical field has its own award category, and E33 is nominated for most of them, speaks to it being a shoe-in for the GOTY category.
We’ve gotta figure out some rules for what “indie” means. E33 is a great game, but that budget is estimated to be least $20 million. How many small teams are not being honored because a spot is being taken up by a game that has the same budget as a small AAA project?
Indie has always been a way to define a category for creators without access to the same amount of money that publishers had historically provided. Now publishers are both no longer needed to release a game and are very rarely taking chances on original games from first time developers.
A small AAA production in 2000, maybe. E33’s was only a fraction of a small AAA budget today.
TGA calls it “a game made outside the traditional publisher system,” which fits. I’d agree that we’re looking at wildly different scales of production in the same category, though.
Must have been a really slow year given nearly every category has Expedition 33, Death Stranding 2, and Ghost of Yotei. Or the people that came up with the nominees only heard of those 3 games all year and decided to sprinkle in a few randoms to make it look like they have heard of more than 3 games this year.
They’re just games that favor those categories. Even if Peak pops off, it’s not going to win a category like art direction or narrative, ever. It was far from a slow year.
videogameschronicle.com
Najnowsze