Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Controller] - Steam Controller related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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I share your skepticism, because Valve is definitely in a damned if you do/don't situation. But...
I'm not sure it was ever a large market. Like I don't think based on Valve's comments during the launch that they were thinking "bigger than the Steam Deck". It really felt like "for the subset of Deck users who want this too, and maybe it'll surprise us." The commentary around price has ALWAYS been "it's going to be too expensive", from the second it was announced, so it's hard to know how much the price will actually impact sales, because so many people want to talk about how they'd buy a thing if not for this one factor who were never ever going to buy the thing.
The pricing is definitely going to be a problem now, there is no way around that. But because I'm the person you are describing, I will say... I'm just over building PCs and the inherent compromises (nevermind that the component prices are crushing that market too). The guy who did the video a few months back was a) in Canada, b) buying shit in parking lots from FB marketplace, c) doing this 6 months ago, before the war. I'm not convinced it could be done reasonably today at some remarkably lower price than whatever you or I think the Steam Machine will cost.
I don't want the ecosystem lock-in of consoles, I already own tons of PC games. I want exactly what Valve is cooking, and not really anything else. Even if it's an alleged better value.
The Steam Machine was always going to have a relatively small market, and that market is only going to get smaller and smaller as the potential price increases.