alt Hacker News> Can't people see any usecase for the steam machine?
The only problem with the Steam Machine is the price tbh, and that's mainly Valve having a really bad luck with timing once again.
Having a custom-made "Steam Machine" for the past 3 years thanks to ChimeraOS, it really changed the way I play for the better. I can play on my couch with my son and wife, and it made my wife (who wasn't really into gaming) buy a Steam Deck and enjoy my 500+ library instantly.
Now, I can play CS2 in my office, my son can play Astroneer in the living room and my wife The Witcher 3 next to him. The Steam ecosystem is simply amazing, it's a real shame Valve had to launch their machine during a worldwide component crisis.
Replies
>The only problem with the Steam Machine is the price tbh
It's not just the price, it's more like the hardware that is dated on arrival(weaker than a 2020 PS5) and customers are expected to use for 6+ years into the future when more and more new games are demanding RT.
Is not a problem for Nintendo to ship dated HW, sine one it's cheap, and two, since developers will walk through fire to optimize games for the Switch but that's because they're Nintendo and they ship tens of millions of Switches while Steam Boxes will not sell in such numbers to warrant this level of extra developer effort.
Good if you're only intro playing older games or are willing to stomach a lot of upscaling and low graphics setting or must have a just-works linux PC, but given the price and performance this isn't gonna be a mass appeal product.
>and that's mainly Valve having a really bad luck with timing once again.
You know the saying "you make your own luck? Or the saying "luck is opportunity meets preparation"?
So, no, it's not bad luck, it's that the problem with Valve is they just take forever to launch a product. Which is fine for stuff like Steam or games that you can keep delaying and delaying until you get it just right exactly the way you want it, but HW has a limited shelf life where it's most valuable and once you lock in a BOM, you're on the clock to get it out the door and need to haul ass. See the titanic efforts Microsoft put into launching Xbox and Xbox 360 on schedule, it was a rootless bloodbath, as all consumer HW is, but if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
So there's no bad luck here, just bad preparation on their part. Valve could have easily launched this earlier if they just spent less time trying to engineer everything from scratch with custom parts just to fit the HW inside a cube as small as possible just to flex their HW design skills, and instead just focus on quickly getting the HW in another boring VCR box into consumers hands ASAP the way MS did it with the first Xbox.
The whole point of the Steam Box is the Steam ecosystem centered around just-works Linux emulation of windows games, not the box being an engineering and design marvel, so speeding so much time on perfecting the form for a first gen product, was pointless endeavour that cost them the product launch.
That's where I am at, but I think me and you ARE the audience the Steam Machine is aimed at.