The Steam Machine was announced 2 weeks ago, but Valve has not revealed the price yet. The company’s engineers will not tell this, but they have indicated that its price will be as much as a PC.
In case you missed it, last week some engineers at Valve revealed that the Steam Machine is as powerful as or more powerful than 70% of PCs, according to Steam’s hardware survey.
Skill Up interviewed Valve’s engineers, Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais, you can watch video on youtube (From around the 1 hour 23 minute mark). The video is approximately 3 hours long, and touches on a variety of topics, including a topic that many people are curious to know more about. What will be the price of Steam Machine?
When asked about this, Griffis reiterated that the Steam Machine is like a mid-level PC. He mentioned that this is similar to building a PC from parts, providing similar performance to the device. For reference, the Steam Machine is powered by a 6-core AMD Zen 4 CPU, an AMD RDNA3 GPU, 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, and 16GB of DDR5 RAM.
This makes sense, although the news may disappoint some people, because as soon as Valve announced the device, gamers on social media were buzzing, and were expecting the device to be aggressively priced. That would be great, but it doesn’t make sense for Valve’s strategy. Consoles like PS5, Xbox or Switch are usually sold at a lower price to attract buyers. Companies recoup the cost of the device by selling games and subscriptions, and these are sold exclusively through console stores. But, the valve has steam, so the same principle should apply here, right? not necessarily.
Linus Tech Tips Released a video a few weeks ago in which they mentioned that Valve had told them that the Steam Machine would cost as much as a PC. Linus explained that the Steam Machine is basically a computer, you can buy it and use it like one. If Valve kept its price very affordable, it could attract corporations who could order it in bulk. This scenario is not ideal for Valve, as it will not bring in revenue from game sales. He is right. Valve itself mentioned that users can install whatever operating system they want on the Steam Machine.
Later, a wan show episode (about 38:28) Linus said that Valve was not happy when he asked if the Steam Machine would cost $500. Based on that, I think we can look at a price of $700 to $800 for the Steam Machine. That’s not too bad, considering mid-range gaming laptops cost more than this, and many of them don’t have an 8GB graphics card.
What do you think the Steam Machine will cost?
Thanks for reading..
