Phoronix article: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Machines-Frame-2026
Also listed here: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/hardware
Valve has already sent support for the new Steam Controller upstream: https://www.phoronix.com/news/New-Steam-Controller-SDL
For the cube I expect 1k USD minimum.
I don’t see that being the case, it’s relatively low end silicon, with meh levels of RAM and very poor levels of VRAM.
Seems to me like they’re targeting a lower price point, which I think is a good idea if they want to take market share from Microsoft.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for lower end system, something I could by for my kids. But given the price of other consoles, I’m a bit nervous about the final price, hence I mentally prepare myself for 1k USD so I can be (hopefully) pleasantly surprised.
Yeah, I was very surprised to see the only upgrade is a generous storage from 512 GiB to 2 TiB… I would rather build my own PC, spend a little extra, cover other needs I have (zfs pool for videos), and get a good GPU that I can always replace for a newer one in a few years… But of course, that’s just me. That new GPU could easily cost as much as the Steam Machine itself, hehe. Of course, it would be way more powerful…
If you’re comfortable building your own PC, its probably always going to be the best option for you because you can get exactly what you want and skip the stuff you don’t want and you don’t pay the markup for prebuilts.
Steam machine is targeted at people who don’t want to build their own system but are interested in the bigger and cheaper game libraries on PC and maybe some of the additional functionality and flexibility you get over a console.
I stopped building my own PCs over a decade ago because I was barely getting the parts at the same rate they would’ve come in a pre-built, ram was always hard to get, good deals “sold out” so quickly, and if a part goes bad it’s easier to take it to a warranty repair than it is for me to fight with the vendors myself.
My main machines recently have been low power laptops, my steam deck, and my phone, using GeForce now has allowed me to play most of my games on shit hardware, and my 10 year old games run just fine (mostly) on my 5 year old laptop.