Didnt they already try this and it flopped? Is my memory playing tricks on me?
It would be a pretty dumb business move. It’s going to take a lot to unseat Sony and Microsoft, and the people familiar with Steam likely already have pretty powerful PCs. Case in point, the steam deck. Novelty product, it’s pretty cool, but it’s nowhere even close to unseating Nintendo Switch, let alone PS or Xbox.
Steam Machines flopped for a whole bunch of reasons. Many of those have been fixed over the intervening years. Consoles are now all basically PCs, and the market leader runs a variant of BSD (iirc). That makes native Linux gaming a much easier thing to pull off. Then, there’s Proton which is apparently basically some kind of black magic where Windows games can run better under Linux than under Windows. There’s also much better peripheral device support than there used to be. Valve has also created a basically fixed platform with the Steamdeck (and its AMD-basef competition), meaning developers have a defined set of features they can target for a good experience.
I’m here for this. If they can overcome the Nvidia issues, I’ll just stick my gaming rig in my loungeroom and build something smaller and cooler for my main workstation…
Why is everyone assuming that you can only make a profit if you are the market leader? Even if you have a percent of Sony and Microsofts market share in the console market, you can still make a shit load of money of it.
Their original steam machine failed because Steam OS didn’t have Proton yet back then, so devs had to create dedicated linux versions of their games, drastically reducing steams catalogue. Now that they have perfected proton, they beat PlayStation and Xbox with their massive amount of games across way more niche genres.
It could easily target people that don’t want to tinker with hardware or settings on PC but still want to have all of the games that steam offers.
What a lot of people don’t realize though, is those consoles actually sell for a loss. 2025 is going to bring some crazy shit with it in regards to hardware pricing. Like in one aspect, ok if this thing is a decent price, and has decent performance, then yeah. But that is going to be really really hard to pull off right now. Meaning the thing is either going to be pretty crazy priced or it’s going to have lacklustre performance. In order to have good volumes of sales, you’ve got a very well established dominant two, that’s going to be hard to unseat. I dunno, I’ve been wrong before, and I’m sure I’ll be wrong again, maybe even here. But to me, that’s going to be hard to pull off.
But they don’t have to unseat them.
Even if they sell their hardware with a profit for a higher price than the PS5, there are still plenty of people that have a large catalogue of games or people that aren’t willing to pay 60-80€ for two year old games. As long as they don’t sell at a loss, they just have to get back their R&D cost, which are significantly lower than with the steam deck, since they can just scale up their existing mainboard with a better processor and more ram.
I’m sure a stationary console targeting high settings 1080p for current gen games with 4k through FSR could very easily be made for 300-400€ and would fit right in their lineup.
So, kinda. “Steam Machines” was the old initiative from 2013(?). The idea was to build a coalition of 3rd party machines with a branding and hardware guidelines for Asus, Acer, etc to build a ton of console-likes. Basically trying to replicate the PC market of diverse hardware from a bunch of OEMs to create a new market segment in the console space.
The difference here is that Valve is allegedly building a console themselves, fully 1st party with their own hardware and software, like they did with the Steam Deck. I imagine if this one has enough market traction (as determined by Valve), they’ll iterate on the software hard for a couple of years (and possibly the controller, too), then expand with guidelines for OEMs to make their own versions of the console using SteamOS. Basically, just follow the Steam Deck playbook and hope it works like last time.
However, I would suggest with the current gen consoles, the market is different. Also, you don’t need to unseat Sony and Microsoft to be able to turn a buck.
You are not misremembering. It did give us one of the most hilariously awful controller designs (though I applaud them swinging for the fences), and it it was the precursor to the steam deck, so it wasn’t completely worthless.
If they can take the lessons learned from their recent successes with the steam deck, I could see them making something that sticks around for a bit. There’s a market for people that want the steam ecosystem but are intimidated by PC builds or the toxic sub culture that sometimes permeates PC gamers. Having a pre-built PC with proper backing that just works out of the box with minimal tinkering could be an attractive option for some.
I still have 2 Steam Controllers and 3 Steam Links at home, one of the Links and one Controller are for streaming media to my TV from my PC (the rest are spares). I very much like the Controllers for Desktop use, but they aren’t great for classic twin stick games. They excel at stuff like RTS, FPS and Simulations tho!
The bast majority of steam users have lower end hardware. I could see this being a good companion box for a recent steam deck owner looking for a bit more graphical grunt for their TV set up.
Didnt they already try this and it flopped? Is my memory playing tricks on me?
It would be a pretty dumb business move. It’s going to take a lot to unseat Sony and Microsoft, and the people familiar with Steam likely already have pretty powerful PCs. Case in point, the steam deck. Novelty product, it’s pretty cool, but it’s nowhere even close to unseating Nintendo Switch, let alone PS or Xbox.
Steam Machines flopped for a whole bunch of reasons. Many of those have been fixed over the intervening years. Consoles are now all basically PCs, and the market leader runs a variant of BSD (iirc). That makes native Linux gaming a much easier thing to pull off. Then, there’s Proton which is apparently basically some kind of black magic where Windows games can run better under Linux than under Windows. There’s also much better peripheral device support than there used to be. Valve has also created a basically fixed platform with the Steamdeck (and its AMD-basef competition), meaning developers have a defined set of features they can target for a good experience.
I’m here for this. If they can overcome the Nvidia issues, I’ll just stick my gaming rig in my loungeroom and build something smaller and cooler for my main workstation…
Why is everyone assuming that you can only make a profit if you are the market leader? Even if you have a percent of Sony and Microsofts market share in the console market, you can still make a shit load of money of it.
Their original steam machine failed because Steam OS didn’t have Proton yet back then, so devs had to create dedicated linux versions of their games, drastically reducing steams catalogue. Now that they have perfected proton, they beat PlayStation and Xbox with their massive amount of games across way more niche genres.
It could easily target people that don’t want to tinker with hardware or settings on PC but still want to have all of the games that steam offers.
What a lot of people don’t realize though, is those consoles actually sell for a loss. 2025 is going to bring some crazy shit with it in regards to hardware pricing. Like in one aspect, ok if this thing is a decent price, and has decent performance, then yeah. But that is going to be really really hard to pull off right now. Meaning the thing is either going to be pretty crazy priced or it’s going to have lacklustre performance. In order to have good volumes of sales, you’ve got a very well established dominant two, that’s going to be hard to unseat. I dunno, I’ve been wrong before, and I’m sure I’ll be wrong again, maybe even here. But to me, that’s going to be hard to pull off.
But they don’t have to unseat them. Even if they sell their hardware with a profit for a higher price than the PS5, there are still plenty of people that have a large catalogue of games or people that aren’t willing to pay 60-80€ for two year old games. As long as they don’t sell at a loss, they just have to get back their R&D cost, which are significantly lower than with the steam deck, since they can just scale up their existing mainboard with a better processor and more ram.
I’m sure a stationary console targeting high settings 1080p for current gen games with 4k through FSR could very easily be made for 300-400€ and would fit right in their lineup.
Late stage Capitalism burnt their brains
So, kinda. “Steam Machines” was the old initiative from 2013(?). The idea was to build a coalition of 3rd party machines with a branding and hardware guidelines for Asus, Acer, etc to build a ton of console-likes. Basically trying to replicate the PC market of diverse hardware from a bunch of OEMs to create a new market segment in the console space.
The difference here is that Valve is allegedly building a console themselves, fully 1st party with their own hardware and software, like they did with the Steam Deck. I imagine if this one has enough market traction (as determined by Valve), they’ll iterate on the software hard for a couple of years (and possibly the controller, too), then expand with guidelines for OEMs to make their own versions of the console using SteamOS. Basically, just follow the Steam Deck playbook and hope it works like last time.
the way I see it, steam machines led to SteamOS, which will lead to a true steam living room console.
They made the Steam Link, which was a local network game streaming machine, not a full blown console that ran steam games independently.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Link
They did, and it did.
However, I would suggest with the current gen consoles, the market is different. Also, you don’t need to unseat Sony and Microsoft to be able to turn a buck.
You are not misremembering. It did give us one of the most hilariously awful controller designs (though I applaud them swinging for the fences), and it it was the precursor to the steam deck, so it wasn’t completely worthless.
If they can take the lessons learned from their recent successes with the steam deck, I could see them making something that sticks around for a bit. There’s a market for people that want the steam ecosystem but are intimidated by PC builds or the toxic sub culture that sometimes permeates PC gamers. Having a pre-built PC with proper backing that just works out of the box with minimal tinkering could be an attractive option for some.
I still have 2 Steam Controllers and 3 Steam Links at home, one of the Links and one Controller are for streaming media to my TV from my PC (the rest are spares). I very much like the Controllers for Desktop use, but they aren’t great for classic twin stick games. They excel at stuff like RTS, FPS and Simulations tho!
The bast majority of steam users have lower end hardware. I could see this being a good companion box for a recent steam deck owner looking for a bit more graphical grunt for their TV set up.