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Steam

The Machine honestly sounds like what I wanted the Steam Deck to be -- I don't typically play games outside of my living room, and part of the reason I never bought a Deck is that I was told that TV support was kinda iffy. I just wanted something that would let me play my Steam games on my TV. Depending on how expensive the Machine turns out to be, I can see a universe where I eventually pick one up.
 
With the way Xbox is headed and the fact that hating playing games at my computer has been a barrier to me fully enjoying Steam, I have been interested in looking into a PC to hook to my TV, and if this price is good, this might have stepped into contendership for that spot.
 
I might be the only one here interested in the Steam Frame, but even if it does nothing to nudge the needle on VR adoption, if it can provide a halfway decent pointer control experience for running the PC Metroid Prime Trilogy Emulation and similar motion control experiences I'll be happy. Same goes for 3DS/Stereoscopic 3D content. Or light guns games, a good portable experience for mouse based games...

Just give me something that can potentially run legacy oddball games good, VR and/or not VR.
 
I don't care for handheld gaming so I'm far more interested in the Steam Cube than I ever was in the Steam Deck. Having said that, as a person that primarily buys physical media, this machine would always be a tertiary choice behind my PS5 and Switch 2. It'd still be nice to round out what lives at my TV. Really depends on price at this point.
 
If I were to get into VR, Steam Frame would certainly be the way to do it. But it's not something super appealing.
 
Bongo said:
If I were to get into VR, Steam Frame would certainly be the way to do it. But it's not something super appealing.
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The really interesting thing about Steam Frame is that it is running on ARM architecture, which means that it'll be possible to port SteamOS to Android devices. I am not super knowledgeable about this kind of thing, but from what I've read everyone's Retroid Pocket 5s, Odin 2s, etc. are all going to be able to become mini-Steamdecks.
 
R.R. Bigman said:
I wish I would have saved my money for this Steam Machine instead of getting the Steam Deck, honestly.
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For me, the Deck has more utility since it's a portable. I just bought a new PC, so I'm not the target audience for this anymore, unless it comes in super cheap. And from all the rumblings, it's apparently not. I'm expecting $600 minimum at this point, and if it shoots under I'll be pleasantly surprised. For anyone that does need a new machine, though, I think this will be a fantastic option.
 
Yeah, $600 is about what I'm figuring and about the most I'd want to spend for a compact PC I can't upgrade. If it's more than that, might as well piece something together myself! I think Valve is probably canny enough to know who they're targeting with this.
 
Some professionals have tried to make a best guess based on the component cost, and it seems they've landed in the $500 - $700 range. Just in terms of raw compute - which isn't the end all be all but provides a good idea - the Steam Cube is somewhere north of an Xbox Series S but less "powerful" than a PS5. The X factor would be how the system utilizes frame generation.

For me personally, most of my Steam library is indies and smaller games, so all that horsepower shit doesn't really matter to me.

Oh, to finally have a modern console (or whatever this is) that can play Final Fantasy 13. :love:
 
If it can run things at roughly PS4 level, like the Deck and Switch 2 approximately do, but with better monitor resolution than the Deck likes to do without tinkering, then that's all I really need. Our five-year-old computer has handled almost everything at decent enough levels to look nice.
 
Steam says the Steam Machine is six(!) times more powerful than the Steam Deck. Considering I paid nearly six hundred for my OLED Steam Deck, which I do enjoy, I can’t say what the price the Steam Machine will be. Will it come in different models at different price tiers down the line?
 
Steam Year in Review is up and wow I played 64 demos this year? Steam is definitely not my go-to for purchasing games but it is the case that I often try games on it first. Just didn't realize it added up to be so much!
 
I played... 3 games on Steam! They were all good though. Tactical Breach Wizards, Deep Rock Galactic Survivors, and Case of the Golden Idol.
 
The R2 button on my Steam Deck is wonky. It was always a bit off ever since I got it, then a few months ago there was a spine curdling twang sound when my hand slipped and winged the button. It still works, though it doesn’t feel the same as the L2 button when pressed. From reading online a bit, it seems the shoulder buttons are problems for some people. Top drawer console design, Valve. Looking forward to paying a grand or more for the Steam Machine.

Is Valve’s repair service good if it comes to fixing the problem?
 
R.R. Bigman said:
The R2 button on my Steam Deck is wonky. It was always a bit off ever since I got it, then a few months ago there was a spine curdling twang sound when my hand slipped and winged the button. It still works, though it doesn’t feel the same as the L2 button when pressed. From reading online a bit, it seems the shoulder buttons are problems for some people. Top drawer console design, Valve. Looking forward to paying a grand or more for the Steam Machine.

Is Valve’s repair service good if it comes to fixing the problem?
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The twang sound you heard suggests to me that something is off with the trigger's spring. It seems like they're relatively simple to replace on your own, people in the comments of that link say that you don't even need to do all of the steps. I don't own a Steam Deck but that'd be my first option (unless you're still under warranty, in which case that's on Valve).
 
As the list of steps on that guide continued to grow, my confidence in my abilities to pull this off shrank. I’ve never fixed electronics before. My warranty has expired, so maybe I will contact Valve to see what it would cost me for them to fix their faulty product that I paid over five hundred dollars for. If it’s too much, I’ll try to fix it myself.

Thanks for the link.
 
Alright Next Fest...

Denshattack! I want to like, but couldn't get far due to a bug with it not registering the right analog stick in the Steamdeck correctly and not being able to perform tricks the way it wanted me to. Maybe the demo will get patched before Next Fest is over...

Curse Chapter: Dawnthief is more Curse Crackers, which should be good, but I want to see more before getting too excited.

The Eternal Life of Goldman looks like a lovely platformer in the vein of Ducktales meets Rayman and Donkey Kong Country.

Alabaster Dawn has been the stand out to me so far. Action RPG controls are super fluid and I'm a sucker for the "faux 32 but trying to be faux 16 bit" art style.

Still need to try Little Nemo, Vampire Crawlers, Replaced, and Wild Blue Skies.
 
Becksworth said:
Still need to try Little Nemo, Vampire Crawlers, Replaced, and Wild Blue Skies.
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...And I wasn't particularly impressed by any of them. Little Nemo is way too slow paced for its own (pretty sure this is the other Little Nemo, not the one a fellow forum member was working on, so I don't feel too bad about it being mediocre...). Vampire Crawlers is surprisingly sedated from what I played, and doesn't really have the same addictive loop of, honestly any of its influences. Replaced seems to be entirely spectacle, and the gameplay just feels like an Arkham game on a 2D plane combined with a very light narrative Platformer. Lastly, Wild Blue Skies is a little too like Star Fox 64 for its own good, and honestly Star Fox already has a problem of repeating the same game over and over again.

Noticed Scott Pilgrim EX and Super Alloy Crush where in the Next Fest, so got to give those a whirl too.
 
I tried a pretty unusual demo this morning, Fireside Feelings, which is asynchronous chats about all sorts of topics, but clearly focused on finding the positive. The chats look very sweet.

I'm intrigued by the fact that you can so easily leave and come back later.

 

the Steam Controller is receiving a standalone release on May 4th, for one hundred dollars.
putting aside the other reasons. apparently they were considering releasing it first long before this.
"From the beginning, these were all different products," Cardinali said. "We had always thought, obviously we want them to work together well — especially the Steam Machine and the Steam Controller, they're in a lot of ways a pair made in heaven — but we saw no need to ship the Controller at the same time as the Machine. The really only hard deadline is we didn't want to ship the Steam Machine before the Steam Controller. We want to have that out for the Steam Machine… It wasn't really ever the plan to ship them together unless it landed nicely that way. So there's no point in holding it back while we work through the other stuff."
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personally i prefer the more experimental original.
Steam_Controller_%2825483452893%29.png
 
Haven't had as much time to play demos as part of the Story Rich Showcase, but just played about 10 minutes of Burn9, where you're deploying soldiers and deciding tactics and such. Seems interesting so far and will have to play more later.

Hoping to try out a few more of them. And there's a NextFest starting next week too.
 
The Steam Machine will become available very soon. They're doing a waiting list raffle kind of system; you have until June 25 to get on the list, and then eventually you'll get a chance to buy as supplies become available.

There's a lot of discourse on the price: $1,049 for the 512GB model or $1,349 for the 2TB model, and similarly high numbers in other currencies. I was prepared for it to be higher, but that's still a pretty eye-watering number. The price mostly comes down to supply chain issues for RAM and storage; it isn't much more expensive than a comparably powerful prebuilt PC, and I think most of the difference comes down to the fancy case. They're not subsidizing it or trying to undercut other manufacturers, because I'm quite sure they want other OEMs to make their own Steam OS boxes at a variety of price points.

The one iffy part of the Steam Machine is that it has only 8GB of VRAM. It's an unsurprising compromise, given how ludicrously expensive VRAM has become in the last six months. Valve submitted a patch to the Linux kernel a few months back that improves the efficiency of VRAM usage, so that a lot of games may need less in practice, but it remains to be seen how much of a difference that will make. In general you can expect this thing to run software about as well as a PS5.

In conclusion, you all should not try to get one. Don't even think of adding any more people to the waiting list. I'll take one for the team and let you know if it's worth the price.
 
Judging from early impressions so far, it sounds like you'll have to do a bunch of settings tweaking on any given game to get comparable performance to a PS5 or Xbox for twice the price.

Having said that, I don't really have a dog in this race, so if anyone wants one I wish you the very best of luck in the lottery!
 
I paid a much more eye-watering amount for a new PC after not buying a new one for 15 years, so this was bad timing on my end. I wanted it to do much better, but I don't see it being a success at that price point. Hopefully memory prices will come back down and it will do a bit better.
 
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