Honestly, I’m not the target audience for it, but like what steam is doing. It’s giving me confidence to plan my next build as a linux pc.

I just want a Gabe Belson signature Steam Box.

Yeah but the Steam Box comes with steam already inside. If you build a PC you need to get your own steam and then someone put it all inside yourself.

I dunno, that sounds like like Sisyphean task to me.

Is your pc a box though? Boxes are much more stackable, in case you want even more boxes.

I’m not the target audience for this, but I’m still happy to see GNU/Linux installation numbers getting pumped up in the near future. That’s why I like it.

I want an unmolested computing experience, and the more people use said unmolested computing experience, the better for the entire platform.

There’s a hidden advantage here apart from moving away from Microsoft, or having 1st party controller support.

Game devs will have a precise target to optimize for.

If enough steam machines and steam decks are out there, it simplifies porting software since you have a handful of fixed targets to hit. A studio could easily buy a few of these appliances for testing and development, and know for certain the product will run as intended. It’s a luxury currently enjoyed by consoles, and it really does help their dominance in their respective niches.

This also helps smaller studios since the bare minimum means targeting a known steam platform, rather than pulling machine specs out of thin air and taking their best shot. It’s a much easier problem to solve and takes a lot less time and money.

I think there will always be room for high-end gaming, but as long as you’re “steam machine 2025 compatible” or whatever, you know what you’re going to get.

Something like a Steam Deck or Steam Machine that “just works” is definitely worthwhile.

I recently bought a cheap mini PC with a 780M for like $380. It’s 2x the GPU power of a Steam Deck but probably half the GPU power of a Steam Machine (likely half the price too).

Anyhow, it’s running Mint and my XBox controllers randomly disconnect. I’ve spent a few hours troubleshooting with no success so far, and my next steps are buy a USB Bluetooth dongle and see if that works or switch to Bazzite. On the other hand, I never had any problems like this with my Steam Deck. I also don’t use Steam and use Lutris instead, which sometimes requires time spent troubleshooting and jacking around with dependencies / GE Proton versions / etc., whereas Steam games would “just work”.

It’s worth the extra time to me to avoid Steam’s data collection and to be able to run alternative versions of games without DRM that I can run semi-sandboxed in the Flatpak version of Lutris with network permissions revoked so the games can’t collect data either. However, I certainly understand people not giving a shit about any of that and just wanting something that works with no trouble.

95% of the time when my best friend and I want to play together (and that’s 3-4 times a year these days with him having a family and my starting one), we end up trouble shooting for a decent portion of our gaming time.

I’m not going to fool myself into the steam box never having any issues, as I am truly cursed (so much so that we even have unique problems with our decks), but taking Microsoft issues out of the picture would probably reduce our tech fixing instances by half.

He has the money for a full gaming rig, I don’t have the means to get one going (believe me I used to, but I don’t any more), this has already been agreed on to be a day 1 purchase in my household, and the wife gets full custody of her monster train 2 machine (“my” deck)

It’s steam. They could sell turds with their logo on it and gamers would call it genius.

I mean you’re not wrong. It’s basically just a prebuilt pc. I’m kinda hoping that they’ll have put some thought into using it as a console though. The ability to wake it with the controller for example. That’s something I’ve never gotten properly working on PC

Get the wood and nails boys. Time to nail up another one.

Many people seem to ignore the fact that its a 3.7l case :D I love small PC’s. My PC case is 20l with a 4070. I could go down to maybe 15l if I wanted but that would be pushing it. This thing is small af!
You can always build a PC yourself. You wont be able to get it this small with the same performance.
Not gonna buy one, but I just think its neat!

I was so up for getting one until I heard the strategy on pricing, now I’m thoroughly disinterested in owning one, but am still hopeful that this will help open up the latest Steam OS builds for custom devices

GabeN:

Edit: why all the downvotes lol? It’s not like he didn’t just set sail on a new $500mil dollar mega yacht or anything… I love steam as much as the next guy, but like the others, he’s just another billionaire taking from the penny tray and not putting any back in.

I imagine it also has conveniences like hdmi cec and turn on by pressing a button on controller. Not gonna get one, but I think there are valid reasons.