Valve confirms Steam Machine will be priced ‘like a PC with the same level of performance’
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
Facts people forget:
- Assembling your own Steam Machine with similar parts will cost around 800
- Even if you assembled it yourself you would be missing features, such as cec, wake by controller, sleep mid game, etc. LTT will try to build one, it will be interesting to see what they come up with, but I'm 90% it won't have feature parity.
- There's lots of engineering gone into this machine, they're way more compact, less power hungry and more quiet than anything you can build yourself.
- Buying the same build as a prebuilt brings a premium and costs around 1000
- Valve purchases stuff in scale so they can diminish their margin and could potentially sell it cheaper than prebuilts, and possibly cheaper than building it yourself.
- Consoles are sold at a loss, and they recover it with games because the platform is closed.
- The Steam Machine is not closed, they can't be sure they're getting game purchases, because people might be buying this to be their work computer. So they have to price it as a PC, with margin on hardware, not promise of future returns.
- Price might fluctuate between now and announcement, RAM prices are going crazy nowadays.
With all of that being said, it seems to me it's very likely it will be around 800 but less than 1000. For people saying you can build one for that price yourself, sure, go ahead, you'll have a huge, power hungry loud box, without the same features and you would have saved only a small fraction of the value by having to assemble everything yourself.