You're probably right...

As an optimist, I really hope this hardware crunch leads to a greater focus on polish and optimization. I feel like a lot of development studios have let specs inflate to cover being unwilling to focus on building their games efficiently. It can feel crazy when you start comparing specs on games from different studios.

As a realist, I imagine we're just going to have a lot more cloud gaming services and that may just end up being the norm. I'm still waiting for a AAA publisher to start releasing their games exclusively to cloud platforms, probably first as a pre-release or early access bonus of some sort. I have my money on Ubisoft as the first big one if they manage to keep it together as a company.

As an anarchist, I've been looking into selling all my electronics and investing in some farmland.

AI did a number to gaming, but truthfully, gaming technology was probably about to stand still anyway. Barely any studios can afford to make a game that's so technologically advanced that it pushes our current hardware to its limits.

I'm not going to post what I almost did, but I'll just say that I'm mad.

As did Covid.

Would be nice if it pushed back 20 years before steam become so popular

Yeah, I live in a small space so the steam deck is my only gaming device. Never tried VR but was considering the steam frame just for the big screen experience.

The timing here really fucked valve. They announced these products around the same moment that component prices went through the fuckin roof. Hopefully the price will drop in a year or so

Playing No Man's Sky on VR (PSVR) was my favorite VR experience.

I just want to play No Man’s Sky on linux VR.

Should work already https://www.protondb.com/app/275850 if you have a Valve Index and a good gaming Linux desktop.

Wtf? The 16g of ram costs almost as much as the gpu. I really hope my ram sticks don't fail on me anytime soon.

This really reflects the reverse spiral gaming hardware has seen in recent years. The benchmarks are absolutely laughable for what you could get for the same price just a year ago. Go back 2 years and the gap is even larger. Gamers are being priced out by AI slop generators.

The hardware prices seem competitive. But the important note is hinting at the real form factor tax: It doesn't have the same cost / performance ratio as a normally sized PC using the same hardware.

Now also consider that the Steam Machine also has a tiny form factor, extremely quiet cooling, and CEC over HDMI that make it exceptionally suited for a living room PC and it more than makes up for that $71 gap. It really is about as good a deal as it could have been in 2026, but most people are still comparing it against 2024 prices. I think the $99 Steam Controller having a bundle price of $79 shows that Valve really are trying to do what they can here.

Honestly the fact that were able to push sub-1.1k prices with the mess we have now, and at the same time they so SteamOS can be used on your own steam machine (as in made by you) makes me think they knew of the corner they walked in for a long time.

Where'd you find this?