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Are you ready for a $1,000 Steam Machine? Some analysts think you should be. (arstechnica.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blackeco.com/post/2330473

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[+] -22 points 11 months ago* (32 children)

Hah, this is where they get you and I’ve been dogpiled for raising this as an issue continuously. This is an illusion of an open system. Where are you going to buy games for Steam Machine? Steam obviously, there’s no competition. Then as your library grows you get more and more vendor locked. Then Valve does an Android application notarising switcheroo and you have Linux machine that’s no different from a Mac or an Android phone. Of course they can subsidise it because they can recoup it thanks to 30% cut and it’ll only accelerate the process.

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  • [–] 19 points 11 months ago (26 children)

    Where are you going to buy games for Steam Machine? Steam obviously, there’s no competition.

    Simply not true.

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  • [+] -11 points 11 months ago (25 children)

    What is the competition on Linux? What’s their market share?

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  • [–] 18 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    GoG, epic, any other store really. Proton is made by valve but it works in whatever, and there are tools now to use proton (not wine, proton) outside of steam to get all the goodies you got on top. Heroic launcher does that for the games you get from the Amazon store, gog, epic, and any other exe you got.

    I even installed battle net, and once you open it everything you install from there works in that bubble and work, I played plenty HOTS games.

    I play modded D2 without much issues.

    You know why the steam market share in Linux is so high? Because they are the ones that put the work to make windows games work on Linux. Yes, wine existed before but they both adapted it for games and contributed to the overall wine project a ton. Also, iirc, steamdecks make up for 30% of the Linux machines from valve's yearly reports. The market is tremendously tiny yet.

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  • [+] 8 points 11 months ago* (3 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [+] -6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Does Heroic launcher guarantee that the game you bought will not break Wine compatibility when patched by the developer? What kind of consumer experience are you trying to sell here?

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (18 children)

    The competition on...

    Okay, so, it's an OS right?

    So for free linux-native stuff, there's the default package manager that comes installed. Switch your steam deck to desktop mode. There's a lot there, including emulators that will run on steam deck from ancient Atari shit to Nintendo switch.

    But you can also run non-steam executables with proton. Heroic, lutris, etc are great tools from that. You can buy your games anywhere without rootkit DRM. Most things from itch.io or gog.com will run. Or, you know; other places. You can just pirate shit.

    You can in fact uninstall the stock OS and run anything you can compile for midrange x86 hardware.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (17 children)

    You missed the part where Android wanted to lock people out of installing their own apps. They postponed it for now due to pressure but it will happen eventually. Also the part where bootloaders lock you out of changing OS. This thing is possible when you vendor lock people in a vertically integrated system and people here are completely oblivious to the trap they’re walking into because they think Valve will be forever cool.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (16 children)

    Yeah those cases were bad, steam deck just has Linux on it though. Arch based I think with two DE's: KDE plasma and a modified' 'steam big picture' mode.

    I don't think anything is locked, and they aren't fucking with that in any way dell lenovo or system76 couldn't.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (15 children)

    Not yet but they hold you by the balls because you buy license most of your games through Steam. Once they’re entrenched enough they can do whatever. Android was a very open platform in the beginning, now it’s almost iOS. You can fork Android / SteamOS but without Play Store / Steam consumers aren’t that interested.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (14 children)

    But it's much easier to pirate a program than an OS, and they can't fuck with the bios too terribly easy once the thing's in your hands.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (13 children)

    It’s pretty hard to pirate on iOS (and it will be hard on Android too eventually). Their plan is to do this gradually, definitely not in a single generation of hardware. They’ll have pretty strong arguments for locking down the bootloader (kernel level anti-cheat for games like CoD or Valorant) or just plain locking Steam to supported platforms to lock you out of other OSs first.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (12 children)

    And when they do, that hardware will be worthless shit, but steam still has to run of my 15 year old Debian/Fedora x86 box, and other companies are making handhelds like this now.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (11 children)

    Why does it have to? Valve isn’t known for maintaining legacy software. You assume your software will run forever as-is but you can see how that looks like in accelerated timeline in the case of Valve games on Macs.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (10 children)

    Because most people play on the 300$ dell their mom got them for school ten years ago.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (9 children)

    The equivalent of that $300 Dell in 10 years is even more likely to be locked down. Open hardware will become more and more niche, and therefore even more expensive comparatively. This is where the entire industry seems to be going.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago* (8 children)

    Okay. I agree this is likely abd a problem. But like, is valve's hardware locked down? How are they different from dell?

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (7 children)

    Valve, unlike Dell, has the power to vertically integrate an ecosystem. They own an app store with de facto monopoly over PC gaming. If Valve says that starting 2030 you can only run Steam on Windows and their own locked down OS (and enforce that via bootloader or some other measure) what can you do about it? You only licensed games from them, never bought them.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (6 children)

    Why can't they take back shit you 'bought' rather than just licensed?

    Ownership is just a licensing agreement under capitalism.

    I agree the problems are real, but they are not specific to valve.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (5 children)

    I’m dying on this hill because people act like Valve is different. If I had to guess it’s PC players that want to feel superior to others, even though they were first to lose access to physical copies of games and second hand market it provided.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (4 children)

    The thing is: they're not different.

    And their hardware isn't, like; special; it's a single board computer running the standard x86/64 architecture that ships with a lightly customized OS most users won't change.

    I'm more worried about what nvidia Intel and and are getting up to. They'll fuck you first.

    I guess valve kind of is special? They are a games company, so they don't have big government contracts, they don't work with palantir, and they dont work at a low enough level that they can easily install something my electrical engineer or hacker friends can't possibly fix with a soldering iron.

    Theyll fuck me, sure, yes, but the chip makers already have their pants down.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (3 children)

    What are Nvidia and Intel doing?

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (2 children)

    Intel management engine, then whatever its successor is called. Same concept. I think there was some other more specific collaboration with the regime.

    Nvidia straight up contracted with palantir.

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Theoretically people could use it for a cheap non-gaming PC, except the cheapest non-gaming PC would be non-gaming specs.

    Anyone using it for cheap crypto-mining is an idiot, the cheap option there is a rack full of bang-for-buck GPUs.

    Are there any other use-cases that involve gaming-PC specs? Making videos, perhaps?

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago*

    In this context, "generic mini-PC" doesn't need to even be "non-gaming-PC", just not a platform for buying Valve's games; a razor-and-blades model requires that you be the one selling the blades. If someone just goes and runs games purchased from GOG, that's already an issue for them.

    It's why inkjet printer manufacturers, who do use this model, try to make it so stupendously difficult to use ink from competitors (outside of the bottled-ink printers, which don't use that model, where the manufacturers are fine with you doing that).

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago*

    If it's priced well and idle power usage good, it can be a great home lab. Run all sorts of services on it. Host your own Google Drive/Docs/Photos alternatives with all the automated categorization like face detection sorting. Should be strong enough to run a lot of unrelated services off one machine. If I ever had gigabit internet, I'd probably try stuff like hosting a Matrix server. Self hosted RSS feed.

    Would be great for videos. RDNA3.5 has good AV1 and HEVC encoder and decode I believe. I think h.264 got solid with RDNA3.5. Good for video usually means good for photos too. Probably audio. Blender support for AMD graphics cards continue to improve and game engines have generally always been good. Great for a computer lab to teach something like Godot

    The compact media creation thing would be the big thing for me if I needed a computer and this was substantially cheaper than a Strix Halo minipc. Darktable, Kdenlive, Krita, Ardour, Godot, Blender. I'd have people in mind where a $500-600 just under an ~RX 7600 would be a huge upgrade for their personal art workstation and the compact form is a big plus

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