Technology

A new Steam Deck OLED is $650 right now. Y'all are absolutely delusional if you think Valve is gunna sell the new Steam Machine with 6x the power of a Deck for $600.

Personally, I think $800 is the absolute lowest these things will go for, and that is a stretch. Unless they are planning on cutting the price on Decks by 20-30% which would be ludicrous considering they are already selling them at a loss and making up the difference on the game sales.

Valve has already said they are pricing the Steam Machines as entry level gaming PCs. And Idk what world some people are living in, but this ain't 2010 anymore. Entry level PCs are $750+ nowadays, unless you are buying some parts used.

I'm not happy about this. I remember back in highschool building some nice entry level gaming rigs for $500, but those days are long past. I probs won't be getting a Steam Machine, but that's because I am a tinkerer and I'll just jank one together for my own use, but for somebody who wants a solid entry-level gaming PC that has a really great ecosystem around it and is no muss no fuss, the Steam Machine is a pretty good option.

My prediction: 512GB Steam Machine will be $800-$900, the 2TB one will be $1,000-$1,200.

Whatever the price, I most likely will buy it.

My biggest complaint about the Steam Deck is that it's too underpowered, so yes, I would in fact love a $1000 Steam Machine. Can we have a $3000 one too, please? I want a luggable PC that can handle games with RT in 4K 120Hz.

I have a desktop, but would buy it for the bespoke compact hardware to fit in the TV console. The dedicated antennas are a clear sell as well.

Right now I Steam Link via Shield, but I need wired or a better router to do any low latency play.

I really would like to upgrade to a steam cube as my current PC is about 15 years old just with upgraded RAM, storage, and graphics but i also only play games that came out over a decade ago too

$1000 is still less expensive than my next PC I would need to buy after Windows 10 ends.

If it can run the Epic Games Launcher, too, I would use the Steam Machine for gaming, some cheap laptop with Windows 11 for my tax software and everything else that forces you to use Windows, and a Mac for work.

There are two red flags on the new Steam Machine — the fact that it still includes USB-A ports and the 8GB of VRAM. Anything under 12GB is a major problem in 2025. While there are adapters for USB, I hope they offer a version that includes 12GB or 16GB VRAM.

I was pricing out an entry level gaming PC for one of the grandkids for Christmas and the price of parts has gone mad. It’s even worse if you want to make a smaller ITX build. How does less material and complexity translate to higher costs? And storage and memory are ridiculous. With a few small upgrades, even at $1,000 these would be a steal. It’s a shame they won’t ship before the holidays.

So right now, we’re discussing Steam Decks with some third party docks and accessories so they can be used like a PC. I can’t find anything better.

I can’t guess at what the price will be or what makes sense for Valve, but I’m not interested at $1000. I can do a Linux box on my own for much less, or for about the same amount, a Windows box that can run all games without tinkering.

Becsuse they said the Frame was gonna be less than a Index complete kit ($1200) I kinda wondered if the GabeCube would be $1200.

Which, since I haven't built a PC since just before COVID lockdowns but keep hesring about soaring costs, I'm not sure if that is actually a decent price, a low price, or a high price.

From everything we have heard... I would be shocked if it wasn't pretty damned close.

Gamers Nexus touched on the pricing info they were given. Go watch the video to confirm but off the top of my head:

• The Steam Machine will be priced competitively with an entry level computer
• The Steam Frame will be below the price of an Index

So what that translates to is

• The Steam Machine will likely be in the 800-1500 USD range
• The Steam Frame will be up to 1000 USD

Which... sounds about right. The Steam Frame is going to use a comparatively cheap Snapdragon processor but it still needs all the HMD tech. The Facebook Quest 3 is around 500 USD and considering economy of scale... that is probably the price floor for the Steam Frame.

And the Steam Machine? That is rocking a proper Zen 4 with 16 gigs of DDR5 and 8 gigs of DDR6. Considering how expensive RAM already is and how that probably ain't going down until late 2026 at the earliest... And it is worth noting that people lost their shit over the ROG XBOX ALLY X S 45 WHATEVER being 1k but... spec wise that lines up with similar laptops. The display is a decent chunk of that, which the Steam Machine won't have, but.. yeah.

Computers is expensive. Especially in a Post Liberation Day world. It will be a miracle if the base console price (because you can bet the PS6 is gonna do the same stupid bullshit MS did with the Series S...) is below 900 USD with the "real" price being well over 1k. And the Steam Machine is going to be priced along those lines because Valve (presumably) doesn't have a bunch of warehouses full of parts from five years ago.

The good news is that if you already have a gaming PC, and don't need the Valve branding, you can get a pretty solid AMD NUC for 300-600 USD that will run Bazzite perfectly and play a lot of your games locally with the rest streaming over Moonlight or Steam Link. GMKtec pretty much have this market on lock and I personally love my K11 (overkill but also really nice to not have to walk upstairs to wake my desktop for every single game).

You'll have the same nonsense with HDMI 2.1 as the Steam Machine will (so VRR) and AMD but there are workarounds for that (basically you flash a displayport dongle to be REAL sketchy). And you'll be able to take advantage of most of the software improvements Valve are pushing for SteamVR, SteamOS, and Steam Link that are going to be coming rapidly for the launch. MUCH less oomph but... people who are expecting proper 4k experiences out of a Steam Machine are lying to themselves.

I bought a fancy desktop PC recently so I'm not in the market. Otherwise I would consider it, but only if the desktop environment was usable for general computing. I believe it is, but I'm not sure if its version of Linux would be best for like software development.