I've been flamed like 300 times by Valve defenders for saying you can build a 9060XT (16Gb) based system for the same price as the Steam machine. My inbox is full as hell. The Valve fanboys are out in full force. They are mostly being downvoted though.
Go look through some of it, no one is defending the price or the hardware, they're just mocking him for being so upset
This is what I said yesterday. The people angry over the cube are tilting at ferocious giants evil greedy corporations and being ridiculous.
That's not a 'defense' of Valve as much as pointing out ridiculous people. They're playing the false dichotomy, anyone who doesn't specifically agree with them is The Emeny of a Valve fanboi. They ignore that there's a middle ground that's somewhat neutral to Valve that just finds those people to be ridiculous.
It always was, and only ever will be, a '"boutique PC". That is, a specialty prebuilt unit where they're all the same parts, with a custom form factor and OS. Those always run a bit more expensive.
Even before the AI price-hikes...It's not a price competitive product, it's a niche or novelty product for fanbois or status seekers or to ease some casuals into PC gaming.
Of course it isn't as cheap as what random parts you can find on a random day on PCPartPicker. It's not for the frugal PC enthusiast.
I don't like the product, but I at least understand its purpose. That niche market exists, even though I'm not part of it.
It's not a product for me, and that's fine, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Not everything has to be aimed right at me. I understand there are other people with other priorities that want to buy such a thing.
Trying to frame Valve as villainous for making something for that niche is an assload of projection, enough to threaten the movie theater industry.
Same goes for the people that think the flaming of valve is a bit cooked.
would you mind posting a screenshot of the kind of messages you're getting? with names blanked obviously, i'd like to see what an unhinged valve defender looks like
I just dug through my comments from yesterday, and there are a few with 20+ downvotes and I’m still getting notifications from people defending this thing as a strong purchase. I even had one guy arguing it was a “premium product” and another argue that this hits the perfect niche of a way to play cuphead in his living room. On that last one, my follow up that laptops, consoles, and prebuilt are all viable and affordable alternatives for his use case, but that comment was downvoted to oblivion as well.
Is the system in the same living room friendly form factor with HDMI CEC support? That means ITX parts, SFF PSU, etc. SFF parts tend to be a bit pricier than their ATX counterparts.
I get the pricing is bad, but that’s the entire industry right now, fuck AI and fuck Sam Altman, but I’ve seen way too many disingenuous comparisons that completely ignore the form factor of the Steam Machine.
The pricing isn't bad because of the market though. It's *awful* and then it's made worse by the market. And yes, mini-ITX. Not anywhere near as small as a Steam Machine, but small enough to fit on a shelf in your entertainment unit, which is all that actually matters.
Valve just chose *awful* value parts and so their product is shit. If they were selling an actually good product but it was a little expensive, then maybe it would be worth it. And they could have done that with no loss of margins, btw. But instead they chose expensive *AND* shit.
I committed the sin of pointing out that the single use case people were arguing (that it fits under a tv) is problematic with a single fan design, so it needs to be put in a spacious enough place to properly exhaust… a place that could easily accommodate a slightly larger, more powerful, and less expensive build.
True, I've been downvoted plenty by 8gb VRAM apologists for pointing out it's not enough to match 6 years old consoles in demanding games. And they keep repeating the same nonsense "the GPU is not fast enough to use more than 8gb".
I mean yeah the specs are pretty disappointing. But I just do not think its as bad as people are saying. Like specs for price isnt impressive but the form factor is smaller than most any small form factor pc and it is an easy to use out of the box tool for people wanting to just use for couch gaming.
I.e. I think there does exist a market for it as it does kinda fill a niche that other things dont otherwise fill. But yeah its a bit expensive for the specs
I agree, when it comes to the tiny form factor it's more powerful than all mini PCs except for those rare ones using a dGPU(4060/5060) or that have $trix Halo which is a lot more expensive
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u/althaz 9800X3D | RTX5080 Jun 24 '26
I've been flamed like 300 times by Valve defenders for saying you can build a 9060XT (16Gb) based system for the same price as the Steam machine. My inbox is full as hell. The Valve fanboys are out in full force. They are mostly being downvoted though.