this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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13
Steam Machine Hardware Has Me Worried About the PS5’s Long-Term Future (gamerant.com)
submitted 2 days ago by alessandro@lemmy.ca to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[–] calliope@retrolemmy.com 41 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

Oh my god the child journalist can’t even get the successes of console generations right and I’m supposed to care about his analysis?

Nintendo became much more experimental with its hardware—an approach that would eventually pay off with the Nintendo Switch.

“Eventually”? It paid off handsomely with the Wii in 2006, a full decade before the Switch. Literally Nintendo’s first big experiment with console hardware since the Virtual Boy in 1995 was a runaway success.

The Wii sold 101 million units, the Xbox 360 sold 84 million (and eventually copied the Wii with the Kinect) and the PS3 sold 87.4 million.

It took me a whole minute to find this information and the journalist didn’t even bother.

Also don’t just throw this out and not explain it.

Granted, Valve's first attempt at a home console was a bit of a blunder

What? ~~Do you mean Steam Link? Wasn’t really a console, was it? The Deck is closer to a console and it certainly hasn’t been a “blunder.”~~ Oh, the earlier Steam Machine?!

Do you know anything about what you’re writing?

[–] Limerance@piefed.social 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Nintendo‘s experiments with novel features has paid off very often. The N64 brought an analog thumbstick and a new controller layout for 3D games. Wii was more radical with motion controls as the default input. The DS with dual screens, pen input, stereoscopic screen, wireless networking, was super innovative as well. All of these were super successful.

The Wii U and GameCube were the only less successful consoles of the last 20 years for Nintendo.

[–] calliope@retrolemmy.com 4 points 1 day ago

Legitimately! It’s been Nintendo’s whole thing and they’ve been amazing at it.

With handhelds especially, they have been wildly successful experimenting since the original Game Boy in 1989. Which makes the Switch’s “eventual” success mentioned in the article even more short-sighted.

The interesting thing to me about the GameCube and Wii U is that they were followed up by incredibly successful hits. The less successful consoles had to walk so their more radical follow-ups (the Wii and Switch, respectively) could run.

[–] Screen_Shatter@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Original steam machine came out in 2015. This is why big picture mode was introduced. People liked them but they werent a big seller, and was generally considered a flop. Apparently enough of a flop that some people don't remember it.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 11 hours ago

I’d like to point out, the “Original Steam Machine” does not exist. Valve never made hardware, they simply released an OS and let other companies release hardware. This IMHO is why the original attempt was doomed to fail from the get go; dozens of hardware configurations each with slightly different spec and driver setups.

[–] ITGuyLevi@programming.dev 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

A lot of people forget stuff easily. Remeber PSTV? While not a crazy or amazing device PSTV was pretty awesome (to me) before they nuked it, just another in a long line of forgotten tech.

[–] Screen_Shatter@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Im surprised I never heard of that. Playstation was my console of choice for several generations before I switched to PC. I used to really pay attention to everything they did.

[–] sbbq@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago

Steam boxes never really got off the ground, pretty sure they were pre link.

[–] agentTeiko@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think they are talking about the first steam machine from 2014 not the link

[–] calliope@retrolemmy.com 2 points 1 day ago

Thank you! I genuinely was like “help me out here journalist, explain yourself”

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

In fact, Valve reports that the Steam Machine is "six times as powerful" as the Steam Deck, and while this is mostly marketing speak ("power" is a vague and complex concept in gaming tech, and isn't a linear spectrum), it's not unfounded.

The Steam machine APU can perform 6x more operations per second than the Steam Deck APU.

This isn't vague, nor complex. The reasons why the Steam Machine APU is more capable is complex, but the results are not.

Quit making mountains out of molehills

[–] verdi@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

On the subject of treating compute like magic, as the author does:

People who grew up in the iPad generation cannot fathom understanding the intrinsics of anything beyond direct input - > output. For those privileged few, a pez is indistinguishable from a tiktok video, they only go as far as understanding that action - > dopamine. It's a wild généralisation, but after 10y educating the "elite" is one I cannot refute with the data points I have.

[–] CaisideQC@lemmy.ca -1 points 1 day ago

lol Calling the Steam Deck, the Ste. Deck sounds appropriate 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 9 points 1 day ago

Ehh, x86 SoC consoles will always have an advantage vs x86 SoC PCs, because PCs need to treat iGPUs as PCIe peripherals rather than co-processors, which has significant performance penalties and a low ceiling due to bottlenecked heat dissipation.

The Steam Frame should get you worried about x86 consoles, because if devs start publishing native ARM builds for desktop then this whole accidental iGPU performance moat goes away.

Buuut it should also get you excited about ARM consoles.

[–] mp3@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Personally I am for the Steam Machine, mostly because of its size and that I could also use it for another purpose than gaming, and the GPU seems decent enough for casual gaming (I'm not looking for Ultra settings at 4K, 240 fps, etc)

I read conflicting info regarding RAM upgradability. 16GB nowadays is the bare minimum IMO, I'd rather bump that to 32GB or 64GB, at least if the price can come down.

[–] DebatableRaccoon@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

So long as it doesn't follow the trend of stupid prices, more actual competition is only a good thing.