I dont think its a good value even at the originally desired price, but it definitely would have been easier for people to swallow for what they get than what they're paying now.

They hold back the hardware significantly for thermals and to stay within the paltry power supplies 300w limit, and uses FSR to pick up the slack. This is not a steam machine, its an FSR machine. Its basically a updated non-portable steamdeck.

And that was fine for a steamdeck. People accept limitations and concessions for a battery powered handheld, but if these concessions get accepted for a desktop PC, its just going to ultimately be another thing that damages PC gaming.

I said during the shortages that every idiot and their mother paying 2000 dollars for shitty scalped cards was going to show nvidia/amd how stupid consumers are and its gonna lead to skyrocketing prices.. and thats exactly what happened. nvidia and AMD both doubled their prices as soon as stock stabilized.. and as expected, idiots kept buying them in droves, driving prices higher. scalping them for even higher.

Letting the steam machine prove to developers that FSR is acceptable even for 1080p is just gonna lead to shittier games, that play worse, and even at 1080p wont be usable without resolution scaling. . . Which is bullshit. We're at the point in time now where native 1080p gaming should be crushed by almost any modern card, but as FSR/DLSS becomes more popular, that crutch is going to become increasingly used to avoid optimization and efficiency.