Is The Return of Valve Steam Machines Inevitable?

[djpep]

I would absolutely consider buying a living room Steam console

Love my steam deck

[miguelpereira]

This is something Valve should 100% do, it just makes sense

[timothylewis]

Console gamer my whole life. Grabbed a Steam Deck about two years ago. Opened my eyes to PC gaming and a the Steam ecosystem.

FINALLY bought a gaming PC two weeks ago but I'd still buy a Steam Machine. Even without the parity in power, PC gaming just offers so much versatility.

[Agumon]

Considering that Xbox has all but abandoned console gamers ... Yeah, I think it is time for steam to give it another go. They have shown they can do solid hardware with the deck.

[TheFuriousPickle]

A console with steam deck mentality would do really well. Personally I don’t think steam need to go after power, keep that steam deck mentality. If it can hit a power threshold of a base ps5 that would be a solid win (but to be honest, it doesn’t need to be that powerful) given the amount of customisation with graphical settings you’d get by being on the PC platform. I think they’d sell really well

[rybateman]

Assuming Oliver is talking about "not seeing a subsidy" from Valve on a potential Steam Machine, remember that in some of the early Steam Deck interviews, Gabe described the Steam Deck price as "painful", and it's pretty clear that they subsidized the price of that device to incentivize purchase and hopefully sell a higher volume of Steam games. I agree it would be pretty hard to imagine a Steam Machine on performance parity with PS5 pro, but I feel like Valve certainly would do subsidy on the MSRP. It seems incredibly unlikely that they would switch back to working directly with vendors like Alienware, CyberPower, Zotac etc like they did on the first round of machines. They've built out all the infrastructure and logistics for doing their own direct to consumer hardware sales, and it seems like they would want to continue to leverage that for any sales of a new Steam Machine.

[persondude]

At first I was skeptical since Steam Deck being a portable device is a huge selling point of it… then I remembered that Steam OS makes a really good replacement for the dumpster fire that Windows 11 is quickly becoming

[deadrift]

i'd take a steam box over a ps5 pro any day

[MechAdv]

A Steam Machine powered by an SOC with 6 ZEN4 cores, 40 RDNA4 GPU compute units, and 32gb of unified system/video memory, running on steamdeck OS for 700-800$ would slay in the current market. Especially if they could keep the form factor down to like a 5” cube, or like 8”x5”x3” (HxDxW”) so that the device could be super portable. I’d buy one in a heartbeat for travel.

[tontonyoyo]

I could see a steam machine replacing the xbox and relaunching the competition with sony, that would benefit everyone

[Grandeur]

If a Steam machine can play literally anything between high/medium 1080-4k at 60-120fps, that would likely be a good enough experience for most. I’d be happy to see a game run at a consistent frame rate at a little lower graphics.

[MLPRainbowFantasy]

Microsoft would go in complete panic mode if Valve ever releases a commercially sold Steam Machine that works with a Desktop mode that supports all Office software.

[pimpstick]

I am interested in valves work on ARM proton, I know it's for their headset. I think it would be an interesting idea if the steam machines were ARM based. Use a beefier version of their headset SOC and crank the wattage up, have great performance while also being super efficient. If you want a decent ARM machine you need to buy a macintosh or a X elite laptop and both are over 1k, if the steam machine is $500 and ARM based that would fill the hole between a raspberrypi and a mac. Please give us a good ARM machine at a reasonable price.

[TotalGeist]

PC and Switch gamer here. I think a new Steam home deck/next-gen Steam machine from Valve would be great but developers would have to their crap together with kernel-level anti-cheat.

[Holammer]

The console form factor PC is just waiting to happen. I have a lot of friend that would buy one for themselves or their kids.

[SayWhat]

I've been using PlayStation since the release of the PS1, but a high-spec Steam machine would be really tempting as my main gaming system. With more PlayStation exclusives making their way to Steam, and my disappointment with PlayStation’s greater shift towards live service games, switching over to Steam seems like a great option

[bitnation]

I can see a Steam Console selling especially well on a world wide scale.

[SaltMakerE]

Still have my original Alienware Alpha which I still adore to this day. It provided me with better than PS4 performance for many years. My particular model having an i7 4785T, 16GB Ripjaws ram, modified case and a custom VBIOS that allowed +335 overclock on the core and +750 on the VRAM allowed it to be quite the little powerhouse for the time. I would LOVE to see another released.

[biIl]

Right now buying a PC is often a huge commitment and hurdle, even prebuilts you need to research to try and find something good. The fact that a steam user could open steam and click the steam machine button and buy something that they know will work is extremely alluring. A steam machine buyer either wants their steam library in their living room, or they just want to buy a pc that works without having to think about it. in that sense, they dont need to compete price/performance with consoles

[lucax]

A steam machine would be so amazing. 60 fps and qhd would be a minimum though..