The Steam Machine Launches: King of Bad Value

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It was already official that Valve employees had lost their marbles when they massively priced the Steam Deck up not too long ago. Now we know for sure it was not an isolated accident and they have lost complete touch with reality. Have they hired too many ex-Apple employees? Who knows? In any case, they seriously believe they can sell obsolete hardware at premiumn pricing (more than 1000 dollars) just because they slap a Steam sticker on it. At this pricing and for the performance this delivers, there’s no way they are going to sell many of those.

These are specs of the new Steam Machine:

  • CPU: AMD Zen 4 (6 cores / 12 threads, 30W TDP)
  • GPU: Custom AMD RDNA 3 Laptop Chip (8GB GDDR6 VRAM, 110W TDP, 28 Ray-tracing cores)
  • RAM: 16GB DDR5 SO-DIMM (upgradeable, located under heatsink)
  • Storage Expansion: User-swappable NVMe SSD tray + microSD card slot
  • Ports: 2x USB 3.1 Gen 2, 2x USB 2.0, 1x USB-C, Ethernet, DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI-CEC 2.0
  • Wireless: Wi-Fi 6E & Bluetooth 5.3 (separate antennas to reduce interference)

And then, depending if you want a controller or not:

  • 1049 USD without controller and with a 512 GB NVME drive. With the controller, 1128 USD.
  • 1349 USD without controller and with a 2 TB NVME drive. With the controller, 1428 USD.

Ouch, seriously?

Welcome to Last Gen

The GPU for this Steam Machine is weak as hell, and already old by all standards. RDNA 3 is 2022~2024 tech, and behind most recent developments in mobile chips since we have RDNA 4 and RTX 50-series hardware mainstream at that point.

This means this hardware will struggle to hit good framerates at decent graphics settings in most modern games, and is certainly NOT future-proof. Nothing tells you that this performance is going to enough in one or two years down the road to play the latest AAA games when they release.

Dave2d made released some native game figures, and this is far from being impressive.

Ouch ^2! A RTX 4060 beats this thing!

Bad Value Galore

Not only is this Steam Machine weak, it’s also overpriced! You ordered a double-whammy, here you go! I guess everybody at Valve must be overpaid with 6 figure salaries, there is no other logical way to explain how out of touch they are with the actual market otherwise.

Compared to consoles, a PS5 will typically provide better performance in most games, at 600 USD. The PS5 Pro model is more expensive but will completely crush the Steam Machine at 900 USD.

For 1000 USD, you can make some custom PC builds that will be superior to the Steam Machine in every way. A RTX 5060 GPU is not too pricey (less than 400 USD) and will absolutely make a huge difference in games performance inside a sub-1000 USD configuration.

So, if you can buy parts off the shelves, make a cheaper PC than Valve, and still get way better performance on top of that, why do we need the Steam Machine exactly? Because I forgot!?

This thing has absolutely no reason to exist. Only museums are going to want one to document the market failure of Valve in 2026. For posterity.

The only good thing is that it comes with SteamOS pre-installed, but that’s hardly a selling point as you can install Linux anywhere now, and even the official SteamOS if you use an AMD GPU. And that’s just a few minutes of extra setup at the end of the day.

What were they thinking?

Costly by Design

Mini-ITX builds are not really mainstream and making something that small is nice on paper, but nobody really cares. This means less space for peripherals and extensions, and kind of defeats the purpose of being a PC in the first place. PCs are great because they can be upgraded in many forms and shapes. replace the CPU, the GPU, add more RAM, etc… With the Steam Machine your options are meager: install more RAM or more storage, and that’s it. When the day comes (and it will come very soon) when the CPU/GPU combo is not good enough to most most modern games, you end up with a brick that needs to be disposed of - which is not really the PC Ethos. So yeah, it’s a PC on paper, but it’s nothing like a PC in reality. It’s closer to how consoles are built.

From the price it’s fairly clear that Valve is not even trying to break even on the unit cost: they are actively trying to make profit off each piece of hardware they sell. Maybe this will work with paid influencers and zombies that follow them, as well as Steam fanboyzzz, but once you distance yourself from the weak minded there is no reasonable human who’s going to look at this and think “this is a good deal, completely not a waste of my hard-earned money!”.

That customer does not exist.

The Mole

In an parallel universe, there is a mole at Valve, pretending to be a long-time, faithful Gabe-loving employee but actually secretely working for the competition. That mole has military-grade persuasion training and has managed to convince everyone else at Valve that pricing stuff above 1000 dollars for the Steam Deck and the Steam Machine was totally going to work and steal the market. In reality, that dude is actively trying to kill the Valve hardware business from within.

Step by step.

And that dude is killing it, literally.

I know, I know… the reality is probably more straightforward: Valve guys just too invested in their own cult, drinking Kool-Aid day and night, completely unaware of how crazy this pricing looks, and of how unimpressive this piece of hardware is.

But the mole theory is more amusing, if anything.

Last chance: the Steam Frame

I have no doubt whatsoever that the Steam Frame will follow the same out-of-touch pricing - now they have a brand and track record to build upon! But at least, with the Steam Frame, they have a new product with specific features, meaning less competition, and more arguments to justify that it’s better than the rest.

One can only hope they don’t fuck that one up, or this might very well be the last Steam hardware we will see in a long time.