The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility.
The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility.
Haha. No it’s not. At $500 it might do alright. North of that it will fall flat. People into PC gaming will build something better. This is an attempt to get into console gaming. If it costs more than a PS5 or XSX, being able to run Steam games won’t save it.
I suspect it will be moderately successful but less so than the Steam Deck.
It will open PC gaming to people who couldn’t access it before. It isn’t for people who know how to build their own PCs, although even people who are tech experts would still want this sort of device.
This makes it easy for tech and tech adjacent people to recommend PC gaming to people with no tech ability.
That’s why it will be a blowout success. The Steam ecosystem is superior to every console gaming platform. Now we will have hardware that competes and exceeds current gen consoles with no maintenance or tech-nerd complications.
The steam deck was great but its specs made it a difficult sell when recommending it to people. You have to tweak a lot of settings and mess with stuff that most people don’t want to do.
This will change all of that.
Remind yourself in two years, and let’s see where it goes. I should still be here. Let’s touch base in 2 years.
Who couldn’t access PC gaming before? Best Buy has always had a few “gamer PCs” on the shelf, with a lot of LED lighting and flashy parts for people who don’t know any better. My brother in law is a car guy, does gaming on an Xbox. Got a little extra cash, so he bought one of these. Wondered why he wasn’t getting good performance. He had his HDMI cord plugged into the motherboard — he wasn’t using the 5060 it came with at all! I moved the cable down and his performance shot up. He said he’s since replaced it with a 5080. He gets 120FPS in Cyberpunk at 1440p with high settings and ray tracing on high.
He reached out to a friend of mine who does custom PC building and my friend helped him upgrade a few things. He’s got 64GB of RAM, which he definitely doesn’t need, but it’s nice he’s future proofing. I think his CPU is a 9800XD or XP or something like that. It’s AMD. Nothing at all wrong with his setup. I’m just saying, a gearhead can get into PC gaming pretty easily with a prebuilt rig. Valve isn’t inventing shit with the Steam cube thing. They might be making PC gaming a little more accessible to console gamers, but I think the limitations, the tweaking, will put people off.
You answered your own question.
By that logic all prebuild company will die. Are they?
Not steam, any. Can create link to random exe in steam hub.
No because most prebuilt computers are sold by companies like Dell, HP, and Lenovo. Their bread and butter is corporate machines. They sell just enough enthusiast PCs to justify doing so, and they’re typically either sold for more than they’d cost to build, or right about the same, subsidized by cheaper, mass produced parts that “may or may not” be as good as the parts you buy a la carte from Amazon (e.g. Corsair et al).
And of course it can run GOG and pirated games, but Valve doesn’t make any money from GOG sales (or your pirated games) so they aren’t going to care about that.