Technology

Moore's Law Is Dead thinks that Valve basically got a bargain bin deal from AMD, who had a bunch of chips they thought were going to be used in a MSFT tablet, but that tablet got cancelled.

So, Valve did some scrapyard engineering, and got a discount on these things that were otherwise never going to be used for anything.

He estimates a total cost to produce of $425, estimates MSRP between $450 to $600, depending on just how hard Valve wants to fuck MSFT with their own leftovers.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=sJI3qTb2ze8

If this ends up being remotely accurate, it would be basically a corporate demolition of Shakespearian quality.

Gabe... Gabe was once a MSFT employee, you see.

A disgruntled former MSFT employee, you might say.

It’s likely in everybody’s best interest that this is a wild success. Not only will game developers be incentivized to actually optimize their games for reasonable setups; this will unseat Nvidia’s monopoly over gamers with their ridiculously overpriced graphics cards and also Microsoft’s monopoly of a gamer’s operating system.

Nvidia’s partnership with Palantir is incredibly concerning and any blow to Nvidia is a welcome one. Encourage these developments and hype this all up.

As long as it doesn't run Win11

No way in hell. For $1,000 I'll just build one myself.

They can't sell this at a loss, or at least it would be incredibly risky. This is (intentionally) "just a PC". It ships with SteamOS but you can of course install whatever you want, including windows. If it is (much) cheaper than a roughly equivalent normal PC, companies might just start buying them in bulk but obviously not generating the supporting sales needed.

I’m calling $700 US price. Valve’s the only company that can get into the console space with console prices since the real revenue source is the game store they run.

Edit: I slept on it and decided $750 is a safer bet, at least on the base model

The article i saw a few days ago specifically mentioned that they didn't really talk about the price but when asked if it would cost more than the ps5 pro they didnt really say no and only offered that it will be priced accordingly to the hardware used to make it. To me, that most likely means it's going to cost around $1k. The absolute max is would ever be willing to pay is like $600. I have no doubt it will sell, but at that $1k price, they will severely limit the group of people that will be buying it. Honestly, if that is the cost, they should be shying away from even associating it as a console and just market it as a PC due to how people think.

At $1,000 that'd be a hard pass for me even though I love Valve, I could easily build something better for less. I seriously doubt that'll be the price too, it'll probably around $600-800.

Dude the switch 2 is $500. Having a general purpose computer that hooks just as easily to your TV as a gaming console for double that price is perfectly fine IMO.

I found this mini PC for $360 with a 780M, so 12 RDNA 3 CUs compared to Steam Machine’s 28. If Steam Machine is priced proportionally, it would be in the $800s. A 780M is about twice as powerful as the Steam Deck’s GPU. If I knew for sure the Steam Machine weren’t going to have 2-3x the power for only $200ish more, I’d buy something like this right now, because I’m mainly looking for a HTPC that can play couch-friendly games on a TV better than the Deck, which this type of machine accomplishes.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CB32HKC5/?psc=1

Edit:

As an aside, I recently experimented with Pegasus Frontend launching VacuumTube and the Jellyfin desktop client, and while the UX is not quite as refined as Android TV, I think I’m happy enough with it to switch to Linux on a mini PC while I wait for Plasma Bigscreen.

I'm not in the market for the GabeCube but if I were, I'd find a price point of $500-$600 attractive, given it's mostly just laptop tier hardware. I would prefer it over the current gen of consoles, although I don't know if there's gonna be the same level of optimisations for games on this as there is on consoles (most likely not really). It'll be a ripper emulation box, though.

~~Upgradability would've been nice, too. Soldered in RAM is ok for a hand-held device but for this? Nah mate....~~

Edit: The RAM isn't soldered, it uses standard SODIMMs.

no way this thing costs more than 800