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Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open
(store.steampowered.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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I imagine most of the more tech savvy people on Lemmy would scoff at this and say "Might as well build a PC" (me included, which I already did), but this is aimed at the consumers who do not have that skill set and are willing to pay that price point for a Steam gaming system /shrug
I was hoping for a miracle that I could recommend it to a friend's son as a good entry into PC gaming. But they're on a tight budget and I guess they could do better for the same money.
If their budget is tight enough yeah a Linux build-your-own is likely the cheapest way to go. It probably won't be able to play high end games without getting close to the steam price point but you can go much cheaper and still play the majority of steam games.
Plus if you're trying to start on a shoestring budget, you probably can do without the extra cost for something with this small of a form factor
Or people that just don't want to bother with building another machine to put downstairs in the livingroom or whatever. There are a lot of middle aged people who have been PC gaming for decades, are perfectly happy to build their primary gaming machine, and have hundreds of games in their library, and the means to consider the couple hundred dollar price difference between $1000 and whatever they could spend to build a machine to be worth the convenience of not having to do it.
It’s also a fundamentally different user experience. Sure you could load SteamOS onto a machine you built. But the point is that this targets the couch players, instead of the desktop players. And very few PC players will build a new PC just for their couch.
I love my Steam Deck, because it has caused my wife’s complaints about gaming to dry up almost completely. When I’m at my computer desk, she can’t snuggle with me. But by moving to the couch, we can snuggle while I play. Her complaints weren’t really about my gaming; they were about my physical unavailability. And the Steam Deck allows me to access the vast majority of my PC games on the couch, so we can both be happy.
I wanted the tiny box format for playing my steam library on the TV without needing to run a cable from the PC. Wasn't sure I could build one this small so I waited to see how much this was.
Around $800 for the 2TB model was my hope when it was announced. Stupid AI data centers screwing over memory prices.
I built a PC last year for my living room and I'm running bazzite on it. Works great. Slightly larger than a console but this is the case I used.
https://a.co/d/09asiNdc
Exactly, the small form factor is a huge draw. I’ve built as-small-as-possible cheap gaming PCs before and never gotten close to this size.
I currently use one with no video card that just streams my main PC, but the streaming sucks.
I think $800 for 2 TB was still a bit overoptimistic, but I suppose we'll never really know.
You could probably build a comparable machine for $800 or so today, but from that perspective you are paying a couple hundred bucks for the form factor and the convenience of not having to source all the parts.
Not by the outlook at how cheap a 2tb drive would have cost by now if AI data centers didn't fuck it up. A 2TB nvme drive 3 years ago was ander $110.
With today's prices how much cheaper would you get building similar yourself?
I heard from a trusted colleague that the difference is about $70, but you also get a possible steam controller discount + a sweet-ass form factor + better compatibility guarantees.
I think he got that from Gamer's Nexus. But that is when you use similar components. You can also easily find components for the same price that are better. Especially when you use the 2 TB model as your base.
But you won't get CEC or the integrated Steam Controller dongle of course.
Still, while it's not a great price it isn't a bad price either.
Or the small form factor.
I admit, I was hoping Valve's production numbers would have brought economies of scale to make the smaller form factor a non-issue, but that doesn't seem to be how it turned out
Don't forget all the time you save not having to configure stuff and fight with drivers. I enjoy dealing with that stuff because I like to learn, but others might not.
I was going to mention that driver support for known hardware is pretty huge. I am not a tinkerer at all, so I personally find this appealing.
Tbh, it's not a big issue for Linux in general. Device drivers are all baked into the kernel and get automatically updated alongside system updates.
I made the switch from Windows to Nobara a few weeks ago, and normal tasks have been fairly smooth
I'm gonna say that's next to nothing, especially when you consider driver support.
Agreed - that's part of what I meant by "compatibility guarantees," but I should have called out drivers more explicitly.
I think it depends on how much time and effort you are willing to put into sourcing and building everything and how important the form factor is. Lots of guys build pretty capable livingroom computers out of old Small Form Factor business computers, but once you have it all together its not a LOT cheaper than this.
It really comes down to how you value your time. You could beat this price, but if you value your time in doing so (i.e. if its not something you think is fun on its own) its probably not worth the effort.
I wonder how many people there are that fall in that category but who wouldn't just buy a much cheaper console instead though.
Honestly that makes me like Steam even more. Any company that is willing to put up that much money to serve a niche market earns my respect. Sure they're doing it for the simple reason of Steam machine owners being guaranteed Steam gaming customers but it's still serving a subset of their customers like few companies do these days.
Tbf, they can't sell it at a loss because they aren't guaranteed Steam customers.
If it was sold at a loss, businesses could easily buy a bunch of them as workstations. Plus, it's just a PC with no lockdowns. If you buy a Steam Machine, there's no reason you couldn't reflash it with Windows and exclusively play games via EGS and Ubisoft Connect.
That isn't even the most important reason, IMO. I think they're doing it mostly to actively push Steam OS and thus normalize Linux for gaming. Not because they care about Free Software in principle, mind you, but as a hedge against the existential threat of Microsoft locking them out of Windows.
Shit I'll take that as a reason too and gladly back them for it.
An existing PC game library, better pricing and flexibility for PC games, wider and more robust controller support ...
I just gave the neighborhood kid my xbox-s (with expanded memory), my switch hasn't been touched since my deck arrived. I have everything I need already purchased on steam, I'm not building a second library, or paying 50% more than when I started for a rotating library, I'll buy a few more games on steam but my catalog is insurmountably full as it is. And now I'll get to enjoy it with slightly higher graphics on a much larger screen!
There are things this does that would be very difficult to achieve in a custom build. It's very compact and quiet and has very good driver support without any tinkering. It's a machine you hook up to your living room TV and for that it works very well, including CEC support which is not standard on PC hardware. The price is of course hard to swallow and performance isn't great but i think this thing will definitely sell all the units they can possibly make.
Think about how much time and effort can go into selecting hardware, optimizing it, managing drivers, tweaking OS to play nice. I'm a masochist so I enjoy learning all that stuff - can't really blame those who don't. For them it is actually a bargain