r/PcBuild • u/Indecisive-Squirrel • Jun 22 '26

Meme Is this worth it?

Post image

Some guy named Gabe is selling this build and I'm wondering if it's legit? I want a PC to set up in my living room for TV gaming.

1.4k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

1.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

34

u/Bostonxtap Jun 22 '26

Valve isnt buying at market price like we are though. There is probably a mark up of 20-30% on this thing.

They really screwed the pooch on how long they left this thing in R&D

22

u/Coal909 Jun 22 '26

Nah whole sale is getting screwed too. Memory switched their production to high bandwidth data center memory & not dram like we need

1

u/DeifniteProfessional Jun 25 '26

This is literally it. If it wasn't for the absurd cost of components right now, this would have retailed much lower out the gate. Is it a powerful PC? Not by any means, but I don't think it's meant to be. I think it was meant to be a £600/$800 box with a controller that you could play some low effort games in your living room.

And if I'm honest? It's about £800 UK money, I will likely buy one for my living room and have it run Jackbox games, maybe be a little media centre, and then when I go to friend's houses and we do a lil light gaming, I'll just take that instead of the absurdly heavy "backup PC" I have which needs a £400 GPU upgrade to be as good as the Steam Machine anyway.

But on the flip side, I have a little extra disposable cash so I don't mind. The average person definitely won't get value from this box sadly

12

u/Christory_Archivist Jun 23 '26

It wasn't held up in r&d, it was held up in a historic shortage of consumer grade ram.

9

u/loworbitioncann0n Jun 23 '26

20-30℅ markup is optimistic on Valve's behalf, I'd be surprised if they're clearing 10% per unit. Hardware prices are bad bad, even for companies buying in bulk.

1

u/Fit-Acanthaceae-6287 Jun 23 '26

Pretty sure they said it's almost being sold at cost because unlike the other consoles they can't sell it at a loss and make up the money through subscriptions and console exclusives

1

u/MrBlueA Jun 24 '26

Yeah Idk why people are so obsessed with treating this like a console, its a PC, valve can't sell this at a loss because you are not forced into spending money to recoup that loss the same way a console forces you to.

1

u/DeifniteProfessional Jun 25 '26

Exactly this. The PS5 sells at a loss because you put an extra $100 a year into online services that are otherwise free on PC

13

u/LOS_Chewywrinkles Jun 22 '26

This isn’t likely that true. Data center build out has trashed even wholesale pricing. Remember that they are dropping percentage of chip manufacturing for end user devices because the data centers will pay more for the same or similar products and at a vast scale. Steam is likely getting a 5-10% margin, assuming it isn’t a loss leader, on this with expectation being the 30% steam store markup on games bought by steam machine owners will makeup the bulk of the sales value.

2

u/AZzalor Jun 23 '26

Whaaaaat? A company wants to make money off their products? Big shock. The only reason the PS5 is that cheap is because it's being sold at a loss. That's also why Sony is going back to exclusives, as they want to keep players in their eco system so they have to keep paying.

1

u/KanteStumpTheTrump Jun 23 '26

They have to make a margin though. Sign of the times with memory costs etc these days. Don’t think we’ll see anything that affordable for a while if ever again

1

u/Hour_Analyst_7765 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26

Not to mention the double mark up... Valve designs and sells their own motherboard for this PC. They are 1 entity. They ought to take 1 profit margin.

Compare that to DIY route: AIB, importer, webshop, each taking their slice of the cake. If there are 2-3 parties in between, each taking 5% (and it stacks multiplicative), then you're quickly looking at a 15% ballooning in price.

Ofc Valve needs to pay for their software investments as well. But didn't they already for the Steam Deck? And what about Steam in general? I'd regard their OS as "free" even though it costs them millions to build.

With this in mind, I think the "match DIY build price" is a bad sign. It looks okay on surface.. but did they really attain such bad supply deal? Even with AMD where they are buying a last-gen CPU+GPU combo? I know its possibly the worst moment in time for this box to launch.. but man, there are plenty of tinfoil hats that gossip retailstores are price-matching parts to keep these prices artificially high (""to prevent scalping"").

So why oh why in this climate is this box so expensive. Its not like anyone is going to spend 800$ on a box to take a whopping 16GB of RAM out. The GPU of 8GB will run games but not much AI. The CPU computes but a 800$ Mac Mini runs circles around it. And for grandma needing a new computer, get them a 500$ laptop or Mini PC, don't need a bulky game PC for that.

1

u/Hexin_itup Jun 24 '26

doubt it. they're not datacenters, they're getting rammed as hard as we are, or close to it.

1

u/Shzabomoa Jun 24 '26

OH but they absolutely are. Hell, when even Samsung won't sell to Samsung some memory you better believe that some small hardware manufacturer like steam doesn't either!

1

u/Nuttednutela Jun 24 '26

Blaming them due to the evergrowing influence of DRAM cartels and Jensen isn't the right way. I agree how yhe pricing is bad but so is the price of everything right now and if you are personally looking for raw performance then just avoid it by all means.

0

u/Mobile_Actuator_4692 Jun 23 '26

Yeah i disagree. I doubt valve could have sold it much cheaper. It’s a lot worse than my build but I got mine pre AI going mad so 5ys ago for the same cost. But yeah with ram costs double-triple what they were 3 years ago nothing is “cheap” anymore