Steam Machine finally launches as Valve reveals $1,049 starting price - Dexerto

10 hours ago by sanitation to c/pcmasterrace

Valve has officially revealed pricing and availability details for the Steam Machine, its new living room-focused gaming PC, with pre-orders opening ahead of a June 29 launch.

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tal 6 points 10 hours ago

I think that they should have deferred it two years for component prices to drop. I had a graphic showing inflation-adjusted console prices a while back. Aside from the Atari 2600, no console has had a price near that level and been successful.

goes looking

https://lemmy.today/...

The highest-priced successful console was the PS3, at $778 in 2024 dollars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3

At launch, the PS3 received a mixed reception, largely due to its high price—US$599 (equivalent to $960 in 2025) for the 60 GB model and $499 (equivalent to $800 in 2025) for the 20 GB model—as well as its complex system architecture and limited selection of launch titles. The hardware was also costly to produce, and Sony sold the console at a significant loss for several years. However, the PS3 was praised for its technological ambition and support for Blu-ray, which helped Sony establish the format as the dominant standard over HD DVD. Reception improved over time, aided by a library of critically acclaimed games, the Slim and Super Slim hardware revisions that reduced manufacturing costs, and multiple price reductions. These factors helped the console recover commercially.

But we'll see.

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Telorand 10 points 10 hours ago

The thing to keep in mind, too, is that this isn't a console; it's a Linux computer with a focus upon gaming, so the comparison isn't exactly 1:1. You can only play games on a $1000 console. You can do much more with a $1000 computer that runs Linux and plays games.

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tal 4 points 9 hours ago

True. And maybe there will emerge a new group of people who use a living room computer in a new way, and that might really mix things up.

But I still think that the principal market here is most-likely going to be people who are looking to use it in basically the same way that they have a console, and will probably have roughly the same price sensitivity.

EDIT: One factor in the Steam Machine's favor is going to be the vastly-larger existing launch library compared to the other consoles listed. The Steam store currently has 115,106 items in the "Game" category listed. Hard to quantify the impact of that, since we don't really have data points for anything on that scale (though maybe someone could still try to look for correlation between launch library size and sales --- consoles have had varying level of backwards compatibility).

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fartsparkles 4 points 9 hours ago

I know three console-only people who have signed up to the list/queue for the reason it’s both a PC and a console.

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