Before you start making plans to evict your current rig, I want to explain how the Steam Hardware Survey actually works. Rather than representing every player that uses the storefront, the monthly census instead uses a small percentage of participants who’ve opted in as a sample. It’s anything but representative of all 154 million active users, meaning the statistic above isn’t an absolute.
Does the author know how *survey sample sizes work?
Do I?
Is it because it’s opt in or opt out?
This kind of article, that just stretches out a simple point over a few hundred words, is absolutely infuriating to read.
TL;DR : Steam Machine has a laptop-grade low consumption GPU and will probably be more console-class than desktop-class. (Also, author has likely never taken a statistics class)
Yeah why would valve try to place the steam machine at the gaming pc sector?
This sector is heavily contested by many sellers. And you can’t be cheaper than building your own rig. And on top of that, almost every pc enthusiast has already steam installed, there is no point to build a pc for gaming for valve.
However when you go into the console space things are very different. The steam machine has no problem competing with an Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo switch.
Now performance isn’t everything, now you have steam on a console like pc. People can play their already owned games and by new ones for playing on the TV.
If it’s cheaper than the top 30% I’ll think about it. I haven’t had a gaming capable PC in a long while and I HAVE wanted one, but I’m not paying $1000 for it
Approximate same power mini-pc - Minisforum HX99G, when being sold (discontinued as of today) used to be at a price around $800. Sometimes it was found to be sold at discount price of $700.
I want to believe that Steam Machines will be lower than that due to brand name recognition and mass production.
If it’s not cheaper than a PS5 I don’t think it’s gonna catch on unfortunately. Xbox is obviously defunct by now but the ps has much much more wide ranging awareness than Steam. And to compete with that they’ll need more than “it’s twice as expensive but a little prettier” to the layman.
I strongly doubt it’ll be comparable in price to the PS5. They’re sold at a loss by Sony. Valve has already made it clear they are not doing the same.
On my Linux box or steam deck I can play latest cuttongbedge games, random bullshit going back yo the 70s, and any indie game off itch.io
It’s got a pretty good back catalog advantage.
Twice as expensive? Cheaper than $700 is not twice as expensive as $500.
Sure, it’d be nice if it were $500 or less, but from what I understand, it isn’t possible (I’d love to be proven wrong). PS is able to sell hardware at a loss to then recoup that loss in game sales. The Steam Machine is a PC. You don’t have to buy anything from Steam to use it after you buy it. It cannot be sold at a loss - though I wouldn’t be surprised to see Steam Machine packaged with games during sales to make it a better value for the same cost or something.
Moving from fact to opinion, I think the steam machine, for under $700, could be considered a better value than a PS or Xbox, for two reasons. The first is Steam Sales - you’ll probably save a couple hundred bucks as compared to buying the same games on a console. Secondly, and more importantly, it’s not only a gaming console for your living room, but also a PC for your living room as, when combined with the Steam Controller, I can’t think of a better way to use a full desktop on my TV. The SteamDeck track pads make it totally practical to use a normal desktop without a mouse and keyboard. They’re amazing for mousing, scrolling, and typing. I’ll probably buy it for that alone - though the lack of support for DRM protected media might force me to continue using my Xbox as a media console - though I might also tell media platforms where to shove their DRM, becuase it obviously isn’t working if I can acquire their media from other sources.
Tl;dr: it will likely be more expensive, as it can’t be sold at a loss or tight margins - but cheaper games and the fact that it’s a full fledged PC for your TV could make the additional cost make sense.
You’re missing a big factor in value: PlayStation requires a subscription just to use online multiplayer. PC games don’t. If someone buys a Steam Machine, even if they were the same price and same specs that person would be saving >$100 every year
I haven’t used consoles for gaming in so long I forgot about that haha, good point.
You missed the point where I said for the LAYMAN. Average user. Idiot consumer looking for a console for their kid or whatever. That’s how things take off. Yeah it might be great for people who know things but if it doesn’t grab the suburban mom market even a little then it’s probably not going anywhere too far.
You probably do have a point there. The SteamDeck did manage to make it to the point where people that couldn’t give a rats ass about Linux have picked them up, so I’d say it’s possible, though maybe not likely.
If a customer is satisfied with their purchase then it is equal or better to anything else out there.
Oh no, will steam machine flop again? Sometimes I wonder I am being delusional, thinking steam deck and machine has any edge in today’s world where AI apparently reigns supreme.
One could argue that the Steam Hardware Survey being opt-in means that it’s likely to overestimate the power of Steam users’ computers, since people with fancy rigs are far more likely to want to brag about it.
I use it to show off me playing on Gentoo.
On the other hand, I suspect that some people with high-end PC specs might be more on the “privacy inclined” side of the spectrum, and might prefer not to share data on principle.
Though, if I were to guess, yours is probably the larger influence.
Perhaps, but a couple years ago when I still had a GTX 1050 I was happy to participate in the survey to show that a lot of gamers didn’t have fancy RTX cards. I suspect there is a lot more low-end hardware on the survey than high-end.
I’m just assuming but my assumption is that from the people that are active steam users, the ones that opt in on the survey are in general more involved in gaming than those who don’t, and if they are more involved, the chances that they invest more in gaming than those less involved are high, and part of that investment is the rig.
So, 3 assumptions there, but they make perfect sense to me. If those are actually true, then the survey has a overrepresentation of extra involved gamers, and those have an overrepresentation of better rigs. Thus the survey has a survivorship bias into better rigs, not worse.
If their conclusion is that, even with that bias, 70% don’t have that good rigs, I’d say that their conclusion is sound.
Mind you, I’m not saying that people who do the survey have good rigs, I’m saying that the amount of people that have good rigs compared to those that don’t is probably higher in percentage in the survey due to above.
My 960 using ass participated just a few months ago.
GTX 770 here!
This is very close I think to critics and movies. Critics will always be hyper critical of movies because, well, it’s your job. You go in and watch movies all day - you’re going to pick up on small details that most average watchers won’t notice and you will be hyper critical of that.
Similar here, if your job is to play games and review hardware I’m guessing the writer of this thinks more people than not have huge gaming setups, when in reality Valve is right, most have a modest setup. They know they’re not competing with ultra highend, those people are already in the bag. They’re going after the casual people who maybe haven’t updated their PC in 6 years and just want to play some newer games, getting them into the ecosystem. In short, it’s hard to be a critic of a system that wasn’t designed for you in mind. Hell it’s not designed for me either.
Its probably not designed for me in mind but I love my steam deck and depending on price I will probably buy a steam machine.
Edit: my personal reason is I want something to hook to my TV other than my deck I can play with my family on.
I use Bazzite on my TV, fork of SteamOS, and it’s been a gamechanger. It’s so easy to just have all of my games on the TV, so I think the machine will be a great investment.
Please tell me why you think Bazzite is a fork of SteamOS. They have completely different foundations: SteamOS is based on Arch while Bazzite is a variant of Fedora Atomic Desktop.
Am I missing something?
Fine it’s not technically a fork. It just consumes code from SteamOS and puts it onto Fedora. Happy? That wasn’t really the point of my comment, my comment was encouraging the person to try it.
Technically all surveys are opt-in. Gallup can’t force you to answer questions when they call you on the phone. You could just hang up. It’s rather silly to argue that opting in makes it an invalid survey.
That’s just not how statistics work. You never get 100% of the subjects to participate. But you get (in Steam’s case) an enormous sample size, that very likely represents the vast majority of gamers.
It’s probably skewed by how many of us have consoles more powerful than our “gaming” PC’s. I don’t know many PS5 or Xbox Series X owners that are bothering with a more powerful PC. Give us something that has a chance in hell of bringing-in some converts.
That said, I’m not talking about myself - my consoles are all at least a generation behind, but even then, beating those is not such a low bar once you take the smoothness and consistency of the user-experience into account.
I did the math during the GPU price insanity
It was cheaper to buy a steam deck, ps5 AND Xbox series x than a gaming PC
I’m fine with that and now I’m seriously looking at the Steam Machine vs Framework Desktop as my next “PC” for the two dozen or so games that are much better on non-console hardware and the Deck can’t run properly
The weird part is I think a lot of the disappointment comes from a lot of people with even high-end gaming systems wanted this to be the thing that replaces it just because they hate windows so much and because it wasn’t as powerful they couldn’t just buy this box and it would just do it
If they have a high end rig, they should be able to install the Steam Machine OS to it though, thus making it a high end Steam Machine?
The steam machine is also guaranteed to have official driver support for everything on the board which is definitely not the case if you install steamos on any given gaming pc
What drivers? I didn’t know steam made specific drivers for the steam machine? They only have it preconfigured?
Thankfully the Linux community is pretty active and just about everything is supported alreadh
I mean, true, and I am a Linux user. But my buddy managed to brick bazzite 3 times and has returned to windows, defeated.
I honestly don’t understand how, but here we are.
Yep but the common person doesnt want to install anything they juat want to buy sonething and plug it in. Thats why desktop linux wont happen untill they can go into a store and buy it on hardware and stream machine is the closest we have in this day and age for that to happen.
But the common person also does not have a top of the line rig because they would have had to build that. So for the common person this would be perfect.
So, I don’t know what information this is based on, but I’m questioning it.
High end gaming rigs come in pre built, for people who want that kind of warranty, or, more often in my experience, the people who own them build them. Which means they’re not super fussed about installing a different OS.
It’s more likely that some subset of them play games that require windows (VR, some racing sims, competitive online games that require kernel level anti-cheat etc), and won’t switch because of that.
There may be some subset of the gaming populace who wants that without the fuss, and usually they buy consoles. Computer gaming is what it is because people very often like control.
I’m a tinkerer at heart, and one of my older brothers used to build custom gaming rigs as part of his business back in the early 2000’s. Most of my family and quite a few of my friends have been computer gamers for decades.
I’d be willing to wager that a fair number of computer gamers aren’t bothered about the installation process of steam OS, but might be wary of limiting the games they can play using it.
The design looks so solid but it’s likely not more powerful than an RX 6750XT or RTX3080 so it’s not something I’ll need sadly.
It’s roughly two-thirds of a 6750xt or half of a 3080 so yeah definitely not
Why are they spying on my gear? Fuck off.
Hardware survey is opt in, so you should chill out.
Do you have a habit of reading things on Steam?
Lmao
Lol
