Valve on the pricing of it:

Steam Machine, like our other hardware products, is made up of many components that we source from manufacturers around the world. The price at which we sell our hardware is a direct result of the cost of these components. We felt like we had a good understanding of how those costs might change over time when we first started sourcing them for Steam Machine back in 2023. That understanding was born from the many years of data we all have about the evolution of PC hardware prices – primarily, that it tends to get cheaper over time as new technology arrives.

Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components. There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we're sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price of the components as we've secured them over the past 6 months.

Price wasn't the only thing impacted by all of this: availability was as well. There were periods where we found we couldn't source some of our components at all, at any price. More than anything else, this has impacted the number of units we've been able to produce for launch.

Also:

If I don't get a Steam Machine right away, is there anything else I can do?

Thanks to the openness of the PC platform, there are lots of options for devices that will allow you to run games natively or streamed to your TV. There are many PC sites and communities out there that can help you with that. For our part, we are continuing to work toward enabling SteamOS to be used on more hardware than just ours. In fact, with the newly-released SteamOS 3.8, you can run the same code and operating system as Steam Machine on your own living-room PC using whatever PC parts you want:

https://help.steampowered.com/... . Right now, only AMD GPUs are supported, but we're working on expanding support for the future.

It was a surprise drop, as far as I know. We knew it would be soon due to rumors.

To be fair, windows hibernates a lot without telling the user (hibernates when shutting down, hibernates after sleeping too long). Hibernating when shutting down was largely meant to help with slow boot times on HDDs, and it maybe shouldn't be default now that everyone is on SSDs that both boot faster and receive more wear from hibernating.

Normally sleep wouldn't affect it, because it just keeps the ram powered and doesn't write to the SSD.

However I think windows will quietly hibernate if the computer has been asleep too long. At least on laptops it will automatically hibernate after a few hours of sleep, or after a % of battery is used.

After the recent attack, I setup aurscan (mentioned in the article) with a locally hosted Gemma model to scan package builds and install files.

Hard to know how well something like this will actually work. So far it's cleared most updates I've thrown at it, with one false positive/warning.

You actually need 4, two to race each other, and two to control them.

You have to love all the enthusiasts coming together to find the best ways to not play games with their controllers.

The steam controller has 4 different "HD" vibration motors, I'm assuming a phone has a single motor. So while it is possible to move a device this way, it wouldn't work as well or be very controllable on a phone.

Do you really think a website that was created to cover the steam deck, shouldn't also cover steam machine/controller/frame? It's already pretty niche, and I think most people interested in the Deck will also be interested in other steam hardware.

The current Deck pricing is probably out of their hands, memory prices are crazy. It's not just Valve, the Lenovo legion go handhelds went up by about $400 for the 16GB models and $600-700 for the 32GB models. The Asus ROG/Xbox handhelds haven't increased in price yet, but I suspect that probably means they either overestimated demand or were able to negotiate a fixed price contract before prices got crazy. Either way they'll probably shoot up soon as well.

The controller has less reason to be expensive, although it does have several premium features beyond your normal controller. They priced it between something like an standard xbox controller ($65) and an xbox elite controller ($150-200), so in that context it doesn't seem that bad.

Trackpads are crucial if you want to play strategy games or anything mouse based. They also offer a lot better aiming control in fps games (although I think using gyro for aiming is even better than that). They also can be used for fancy touch menus and things like that.

The back buttons are also extremely nice.

For FPS games, I'd rank it Mouse>Finger Trackball>Gyro Aim>Thumb Trackball/Trackpads>>Thumbstick

So yeah, if mouse+kb is available, use that. But that's not a good option on my living room couch.

I started to add sc-controller, but stopped when I saw the last commit was 3 years ago, well before the new steam controller.

Not surprised there's a vibe coded fork.

Without steam it defaults to doing a combination of keyboard and mouse inputs, meant to let people use a desktop. Idea is you could boot up computer, and then be able to navigate the computer to launch steam/etc.

You do have options for playing games from outside of steam:

• add games as a non-steam game to steam, allows managing inputs/etc.
• any games that use SDL will have native steam controller support (many emulators etc)
• software like Steamless controller (windows) or SISR (windows or linux) allow you to use the controller outside of steam, allowing different levels of input customization.

edit: removed sc-controller because it's apparently not updated for the new steam controller yet

I'm pretty sure it does

My issue was that by default it wasn't sensitive enough, requiring a much longer time and lots of lifted thumb time to move the cursor across the screen, especially across multiple monitors. But when I turned the sensitive up a lot, I started having trouble having the precision needed to click small buttons. A nicer trackball might have enough weight and smooth enough action to "fling" it, which I could see working, but the one I had didn't work for that.

The deck trackpads have a larger contact surface that the thumb ball I used, and have pretty predictable "fling" ability which helps them move large distances easily while still being reasonably precise.

The fingerball I used was much larger, and I found it easier to have a suitably high sensitivity while still being accurate enough. Although over several months of use I never quite got to the same ease of use as my preferred mouse setup, and the actual shape of the fingerball body was too flat which was ironically unergonomic for extended use.

In the end I went back to using a mouse. I did realize that I kinda use my mouse like a big trackball though, I keep the base of my palm in a fixed location on the desk, and do the majority of moving the mouse by moving it around with my fingers. The sensitivity is pretty high, but using it this way gives me pretty precise control without any ergonomic issues.

Good to know!

It's a really good controller, if you want trackpads/backbuttons/gyro/etc it's hard to beat. That said, it is just a controller. If you don't need those features you can definitely find other options.

I have actually, I tried using a thumb ball for awhile before swapping to a 52mm fingerball.

Felt like the ball was too small and my thumb lacked the precision to make it a good alternative to a regular mouse. Your mouse looks to have a larger thumb ball than the one I was using, which would help but wouldn't be enough (I think). To be honest, I prefer the deck trackpads to that thumb ball mouse I was using.

That works, but my preferred setup for controller shooters is gyro+flickstick. I don't think the trackpad would be as good for flickstick.