a 1200 dollar prebuilt is, generally, a much better deal than a steam machine if your interest is in gaming. It will have more power, more performance, better repairability, and actual upgradability. We’re not talking low spec/budget gaming here, we’re talking more about a luxury good, so saying “spend an extra 200 dollars for a vastly superior product” isnt so much of an ask.

If you care more about form over function and want an interesting piece of furniture, then I think thats where the steam machine excels. Its not a powerful gaming rig, almost any 3d game you play made in the past 3 years will probably have to rely heavily on FSR to get decent framerates above low settings on anything higher than 1080p, and any 3d game that comes out after this point will probably be even harder on it than that… but if you’re cool with that and just want a neat glowy black cube in your entertainment stand and can accept the limitations, then Valve has you covered.

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it would be just as plug and play as any other computer.

Theres nothing magical about the steam machine, it will go through the same plugging in, the same first time startup setup, that any other computer will go through.

Yeah, not everyone wants to build their own PC, and thats fine. But for a couple hundred extra, you could get a prebuilt system thats a better performing machine, is more servicable, and more easily repaired, and better upgradability.

And I don’t feel bad, in this case, saying that spending a couple hundred would get you an infinitely superior product here, because we’re not talking about limited budgets/best bang for buck builds here. We’re talking about a luxury good thats rather form over function.

Ultimately, Its up to you if you want to buy it or not, and I’m not going to give you shit if you do choose to buy it. Just do your research, and understand what you’re getting… because a lot of people think they are gonna be getting an amazing gaming machine, and they really arent, they are getting slightly more powerful steam deck, thats permanently attached to a TV, that wont run most 3d games well without using FSR even at 1080p, especially above 1080p where it probably becomes mandatory… cause the numbers I’ve seen, for native 1080p gaming on the steam machine, have been decidedly not impressive for a 700 dollar machine it was meant to be, much less the 1050 dollar machine it is.

not to mention, AAA games, for all their bloated budgets and ridiculous number of people working on them… often come out broken messes that are released 6-18 months too early and require a massive crunch campaign of panic patches to stem the bleeding once its released and the hype dies from the shit show.

I dont think its a good value even at the originally desired price, but it definitely would have been easier for people to swallow for what they get than what they’re paying now.

They hold back the hardware significantly for thermals and to stay within the paltry power supplies 300w limit, and uses FSR to pick up the slack. This is not a steam machine, its an FSR machine. Its basically a updated non-portable steamdeck.

And that was fine for a steamdeck. People accept limitations and concessions for a battery powered handheld, but if these concessions get accepted for a desktop PC, its just going to ultimately be another thing that damages PC gaming.

I said during the shortages that every idiot and their mother paying 2000 dollars for shitty scalped cards was going to show nvidia/amd how stupid consumers are and its gonna lead to skyrocketing prices… and thats exactly what happened. nvidia and AMD both doubled their prices as soon as stock stabilized… and as expected, idiots kept buying them in droves, driving prices higher. scalping them for even higher.

Letting the steam machine prove to developers that FSR is acceptable even for 1080p is just gonna lead to shittier games, that play worse, and even at 1080p wont be usable without resolution scaling. . . Which is bullshit. We’re at the point in time now where native 1080p gaming should be crushed by almost any modern card, but as FSR/DLSS becomes more popular, that crutch is going to become increasingly used to avoid optimization and efficiency.