this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2026
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Steam Hardware
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A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
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Congratulations! Even though they are overpriced, they are the right size and wife approved aesthetically. They are also more functional than a console. I still want one. But I got waitlisted hardcore. I hope you enjoy yours. Do write up your first impressions and a detailed review after you’ve had some runtime with it. It’ll help us less fortunate souls decide to wait out the waitlist, or go build something on our own cheaper but less slick looking :)
I will not call it overpriced because the current PC market is crazy because of AI. Even Valve isn't happy with the price.
Overpriced would mean that Valve would be making a significant profit. They will not.
Yeah, the fact that they are using bespoke parts, but still barely come in above the independent build cost tells me that they aren't raking billions off of this. I'm fine with the price. Expensive, yes, but so is everything else.
It is 'overpriced' compared to a desktop in the same way laptops are 'overpriced' compared to desktops. Making things smaller increases cost, especially when there is a lot of heat dissipation needed.
Is this overprice compared to laptop I seriation still valid with the current AI driven price peak?
Yeah the real money is on the backend when people can now impulse buy games from their couch
My main issue with it is that’s it’s not upgradable and does not support eGPUs.
It's console like pc like the Playstation for the average gamer that just want to connect and play.
Yes, but it’s marketed as also just a PC. Yet, it cannot be upgraded and you cannot use an eGPU. This makes it a terrible choice for PC gamers.
The thing about consoles is that they can be guaranteed to play all the games that are available for them at 30 fps minimum, but more often 60 fps or greater. The thing about the Steam Machine is that it certainly cannot play all the games available to it even just from the Steam store itself. On top of that, it is not at all upgradable so you’re stuck never being able to play those games on this “console.” The whole point of the Steam Machine was to be a dedicated gaming PC that also feels like a console. They have thoroughly missed the mark on that.
You will soon see people who “just want to connect and play” complaining that they cannot play the game they want to on the Steam store, and cannot even upgrade their PC to be able to play it.
This is a pretty ridiculous take if we're being honest. Saying the Machine misses the mark for all gamers assumes that all gamers want to only play the latest releases at 4K60, meanwhile, many are more than happy to play at 1080p or 1440p, and most buyers of the Machine will have preexisting libraries that they want to play (especially as reservations were gated to existing steam accounts). Most of those games will likely not be the most demanding titles available. For instance, I've yet to actually find a title that hasn't ran well at 1080p (and in many cases 4K) out of my 1,000+ game library, especially since not every game is ideal for couch gaming which is what the Machine is intended to provide.
Additionally, anything that ran on the Steam Deck will run even better on the Machine. Plus it gives a fixed hardware point for devs to target, which is likely to happen similar to what we've seen since the Deck launched.
Sure the Machine is expensive, and it may not be the perfect device for some customers like yourself, but for many it meets enough criterias to more than justify the price.
That’s not at all what I said.
I made the claim that it’s not a good choice for specifically PC gamers. I then gave a few reasons why.
It can’t play all of the games in its own store (even at 1080p, some games do not reliably hit at least 30 fps on it). The CPU and GPU are not upgradable. It lacks USB 4, so cannot be upgraded externally with an eGPU.
If the argument is that it’s good for people that want a console-like experience, I’d still disagree, because with a console you are guaranteed to be able to play all games that support the console. SteamOS is great for people who want a console-like experience. The Steam Machine really is not.
Well technically it is upgradable: you can add more ram to the Steam Machine. But that’s me being pedantic, the rest of the device is absolutely not upgradable.
Something can be overpriced and the company can still be losing money on it. How much profit the company making it makes is entirely irrelevant to the usability for the end consumer.
If they made a bunch of poor choices that made the cost of the product go up that doesn’t change the fact that I could’ve gotten more for my money from a better designed product. Like they could make the entire chassis a solid copper cube and that could cost say $1000 alone. And it could cool like shit. If they did then this $2k copper steam machine would be extremely overpriced.
They are overpriced and the current PC market is also overpriced.
I want to see what Sony and Microsoft price theirs at and how much of a loss it will be for them.
I got mine yesterday. Copying my thoughts from a comment in another thread:
Don't mind my essay here. TLDR: I love this thing.
I got mine yesterday. It's the 512GB with no controller since I already got the controller separately and the 2TB version felt like an especially bad deal.
I was initially on the fence about the price and reserved just to get into the queue to make the actual buy decision later. I was expecting more people to have thoughts on it out before my spot in the queue came up, but I ended up getting my purchase email very quickly on 6/30. I let the email sit for a day but ended up deciding to pull the trigger for a few reasons:
One, I've owned every first-party Valve device so far, and all of them have been more than the sum of their parts. Two, I wanted a HTPC, travel, and LAN party PC that's a bit less restraining than a laptop. Three, being a bit of a performance snob has been distracting me away from actually gaming and I wanted to get back into the no nonsense side of PC gaming again. And four, I don't mind spending a little extra money advancing Linux, repairable hardware, etc.
I feel like I have to acknowledge reviews from the PC space have been largely negative, but they seem to be undervaluing a lot: the form factor (a 6" cube is still tiny compared to almost all other SFF builds), performance per volume (almost the entire cube is a heat sink), and the benefits of more standard performance targets we've already seen with the Deck.
As for first impressions, the device is packaged well, and unboxing was very satisfying. I did have some trouble getting my controller paired since it was already paired to my existing desktop PC and plugging it in directly wasn't enough to get around that like I expected, but looking up how to pair it to multiple PCs got me past that.
I spent a few hours testing a mix of light to demanding games, and I'm more than happy with what it can do. I haven't tried gaming beyond 1080p yet, but I'm going to be very selective about when and how I do that. 512GB is proving to be plenty of space for what I'm playing at any one time, and I think that would still be true if I didn't have other devices acting as additional storage.
I feel like all my expectations above have been validated, and now I'm really looking forward to getting the Frame. I want to make a travel backpack or suitcase with foam cutouts for the whole set.
Have fun fixing it when anything other than the ssd or ram breaks.
wtf who says this to people? Who raised you?
Lol. Thank you.
Smart people that taught me how to be objective in my decisions and plan ahead.
Dude can be proud of being a fanboy and a consumerist that buys everything and anything Valve makes, but no one can point out that that's kinda dumb? Ok.
Read the room buddy, this is a celebratory thread. We're excited the machines are shipping. This is a happy place. (With some gentle joking out of jealousy.).
You threw a big 'ole damper! OP is happy they got a thing and you respond with "have fun when it breaks!" You're going to get some funny looks when you do that.
While I am not one to shit on peoples excitement and personally I kinda want a steam machine (and especially want the controller), I do also think its fair to say the fediverse absolutely loves to be anti-consumer until its consumerism that appeals to us as a group 😅
Still not gonna be antagonistic about people's joy though 🤷🏻♂️ I kinda want one, I'd be jazzed if mine just showed up too
I feel sorry for anyone that doesn't have at least one area they are enthusiastic enough about to splurge a little in. Still, can we really call it consumerism when Valve releases hardware so infrequently? Seriously. 11 years between controllers? 7 years between VR headsets? 6+ years expected between handhelds?
You can hate on facts, they'll still be facts. Have fun ignoring reality, I guess.
I mean you could have made your comment about that and not “lol I hope your $1k cube breaks.”
Same goes for literally every comment in social media. Solid argument there bud xD
Also, electronic devices always break. It's not a matter of "if", but rather "when" and "what". I didn't say that I wish it breaks, just that it'll be a pia to fix when it does.
Someone here never got a single quality toy from their parents. That explains some things.
Electronic devices aren't toys and them breaking is a fact, not an opinion. Literally nothing lasts forever. Accidents happen too.
That's evident, there's still no reason for you to be raining over their parade. Only people with hate in them come out and do shit like that out of the blue, generating more hate, of course, which seems to be your intentiin now that I said that.wao, and I fell for it too. Good job.
"Objective"? Any objective person would have come through the thread, and then move on. There's nothing objective about you except for the fact that you're and objectively sad individual who is probably going through some bad life situations. By the way, I'm being as objective as you, in case you're wondering.
What a fucking moron 🤣
That's literally a subjective opinion. You might need a thesaurus dude.
Lol. Don't assume I'm going into these purchases on blind fanboyism, and don't confuse "niche" with "bad." I just have very good experiences with their hardware going all the way back to the OG Controller, Link, and the Vive (which I consider theirs more than HTC's), and that informs decisions that follow.
Repairability isn't an absolute scale, and smaller form factors need to make more compromises in modularity. It'd be silly to judge this on the same metric as a fully modular desktop PC since it's not trying to be a substitute for that use case.
However, you can build a pc with what the steam machine costs, and the steam machine is not that much smaller than an itx pc. So yeah, I think they can be compared.
The PC won’t be the same size. Or have CEC.
Side note: Seriously how the fuck do normal ass PCs not support CEC?
Not having cec control is such a minor inconvenience that I honestly don't even care. Regarding size, between tiny, unfixable and unupgradeable and small but fixable and upgradeable, the choice is pretty simple. Heck, the steam machine is not even better value than a similarly priced pc. It performs worse. Hopefully v2 will be better, if there is one.
"Not that much smaller" is doing some heavy lifting. Every SFF build or mini PC compromises something, price, size, thermal performance, whatever. Physics necessitates it. It's perfectly fine for you to not value size so much that a 3.8L case isn't compelling to you over let's say a 6L ITX case (or the 8L you really need for a discrete GPU), but it's also okay to feel the opposite.
Except that it's not just that. You build something larger but still pretty small and you can upgrade whatever you want, whenever you want. You can also have the same software experience by just installing bazzite. What valve has done for linux gaming is wonderful, but the steam machine simply does not make sense.
I think you're just not seeing outside the bubble of the use cases that make sense to you. I already have great daily driver PCs currently running a mix of Bazzite and CachyOS (and Windows, ew), and I have built a couple SFF PCs before, so I'm no stranger to all of that. I can't speak for anyone else here, but part of why I find the Steam Machine compelling is it covering the opposite end of that spectrum to a degree other SFF options haven't reached.
If you already have a gaming pc then this makes even less sense. Just stream the games to your tv using a laptop. Or even better, a steam deck. See that is a device that justifies its compromises by offering an actually unique form factor that lets you game on the go. The "form factor" of the steam machine is "itx but smaller, impossible to repair and just as expensive". Yeah, no thanks.
Well, I never claimed it filled a necessary niche. It's a luxury good by definition. I just don't mind having multiple options, redundancy, and overlap in hardware roles even if that means some of it gets underutilized. That said, I'm not planning to keep the thing under the TV indefinitely. It's going to justify its standalone performance at least occasionally.
Fair enough.
Some people just don't have enough of a life to be happy for others. How sad your life must be.
Lol. If I wanted a steam machine, I would've bought it.