Steam Machine: Valve sees aggressive pricing despite high costs
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Valve's Steam Machine is meant to bring the PC more firmly back into the living room. On price, however, Valve leaves little room for maneuver and defends the system with what it describes as aggressive pricing.
The Steam Machine is intended to become Valve's bridge between the PC and the living room. In terms of pricing, however, the system clearly leaves the traditional console segment behind. According to the latest pricing information, the entry-level model with a 512 GB SSD starts at 1,039 euros. With the Steam Controller, the price rises to 1,108 euros. The larger version with a 2 TB SSD costs 1,359 euros without the controller and 1,428 euros as a bundle.
That means the Steam Machine will not only be measured against game consoles, but inevitably against gaming PCs as well. This is where the difficult comparison begins. In an interview with PCGH, Valve emphasizes that its own pricing ambitions have not changed. The Steam Machine, the company says, is still aggressively priced. What has changed above all are the costs. Components have become more expensive, which is why the price is higher than Valve itself would have liked.
"If you're somebody looking to buy a gaming PC, we think it compares very favorably on price, feature set, quality and performance. If you're looking in the market for a gaming PC, I think it compares really favorably. Obviously, if you just don't have the budget for it, you don't have the budget for any real gaming PC at that point."
- Valve
From a manufacturer's perspective, that explanation is understandable. But it answers only part of the question. A sample calculation using Bazzite as a SteamOS-like operating system shows the problem. An AM4 system with a Ryzen 5 5600, a Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GiB, 32 GiB of DDR4, a 1 TB SSD, a Mini-ITX motherboard, power supply, cooler and case comes in at around 1,010 euros. An AM5 configuration with a Ryzen 5 7500F, 16 GiB of DDR5 and a similar graphics card costs around 1,145 euros.
Pay particular attention to the graphics cards, because the example systems use a Radeon RX 9060 XT with 16 GiB of graphics memory. The Steam Machine, by contrast, uses a proprietary RDNA 3 GPU with 28 compute units, 2.45 GHz, a 110 watt TDP and 8 GiB of VRAM. Valve argues that 8 GiB is sufficient for 1,920 × 1,080 pixels at medium to high settings in most games. At the same time, the company acknowledges that high presets can fill up the graphics memory. Improvements to VRAM management are at least already in development.
Valve itself stresses that it does not primarily see hardware as a margin product. The goal, according to the company, is to create more ways to play Steam games. At the same time, Valve acknowledges that the price will exclude some potential buyers. If the cost situation improves in the future, the company says it will look at what may be possible. Valve is not, however, holding out the prospect of a specific price cut.
