It's strange how neither you nor seemingly any of your replies have heard of the Steam Deck.
Valve sold the Deck at a loss that GabeN himself described as "aggressive and painful," 3rd party estimates put it at $150/unit for the base model.
I see no reason to believe they won't employ the same strategy for the Machine. If I can lodge my own bet, I think they'll price it somewhere between a PS5 digital and pro.
An "entry level" computer which could mean anything. The first thing I did after the announcement was put together a micro atx PC with similar specs on PCPartPicker and came up with $800, so I consider that the ceiling.
Assuming they can bring costs down at scale and subsidize a bit, I don't think undercutting the PS5 pro is unreasonable.
> An "entry level" computer which could mean anything.
Perhaps but I don't feel like Valve going out of their way to specifically say that the steam machine will not be priced like a console leaves a ton of room for interpretation. With the current state of the industry & tariffs I would be shocked if its under $1000 USD.
"Id be shocked if Valve is so out of touch they would kill this thing with an unwarranted price tag"
It happened a decade ago. Wouldn't surprise me.
My bet is it will be similar to steam deck. The starting specs will be somewhat comoetitve to a PS5 Pro but with huge compromises (in Steam Deck'Deck's case, flash storage). A model that competently competes with a proper gaming oc will probably be 1000 or so.
Valve got popularity in the handheld space because everyone else except Nintendo gave up in terms of consoles. That plus seeing the handheld PCs from china pop up showed ample opportunity. I'm not sure the same will apply here.
The Steam Deck shows they learned every available lesson from that endeavor. Why would they retread mistakes they've already proven they know not to make?
> The starting specs will be somewhat comoetitve to a PS5 Pro but with huge compromises (in Steam Deck'Deck's case, flash storage). A model that competently competes with a proper gaming oc will probably be 1000 or so.
The specs are already public, the only thing we don't know is the pricing. RTFA
>TL;DR: The Steam Machine's specs are on par or better with the PS5.
So, a ps5 pro with huge compromises? What did i miss here? Comparing a console to a PC isn't apples to apples so just looking at raw specs won't give us the full picture.
>Why would they retread mistakes they've already proven they know not to make?
Because they think the road is different today, with more people willing to follow them this time.
You can take the wrong lessons from success and catastrophically fail next time. Gaming is rife with that trend because of failed experiments, being too early to market, or completely misunderstanding what consumers resonated with.
Valve sold the Deck at a loss that GabeN himself described as "aggressive and painful," 3rd party estimates put it at $150/unit for the base model.
I see no reason to believe they won't employ the same strategy for the Machine. If I can lodge my own bet, I think they'll price it somewhere between a PS5 digital and pro.