Steam Machine launches today

I really wanted a PS5 when it was first released, and I refused to pay the scalper tax to get one, so I spent a few minutes a few times a day over a couple of weeks trying to snag one from one of the many retailers selling them. Extraordinarily frustrating, I was not so interested in this process that I was going to script it or any such nonsense, I just wanted to eventually get lucky and snag one.

I eventually did, and when it finally arrived at my doorman building I mentioned what was in the package to the doorman, and how happy I was to finally get my hands on it after the effort expended and he said "oh really? there's a guy on the 5th floor who's bought dozens of them - he sold me one at cost".

At the scale of the PS5 release (I don't know how many they first shipped in 2020, but they're at >80M sold now so undoubtedly X million in the first year) - would an address match intervention have been able to differentiate my order from the dozens of orders the scalper on the 5th floor had placed, presuming some cooperation from the doorman to allow for variance in the details of the shipping address the scalper used? I'm reasonably confident the answer is no and I would have been caught in the net that attempted to prevent the scalper from scalping.

It’s less about 1 scalper buying 100. Order limits, credit card limits, etc already restrict that.

It’s more about 1000 scalpers buying two or three to immediately resell. There are entire discords and communities around this with thousands of members.

They do:

> Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries.

many ways to write the same address. abbreviations, fake unit/apt numbers, apt numbers, etc. try to verify that at the scale of nike or adidas.

ultimately they are selling out inventory so it probably takes a lot of convincing to spend money on a cat and mouse game

IIUC: scalping manuals and scalper ring Discord accesses are sold as get rich quick schemes underground. Gullible individuals join the big supply choking sessions. Many of them don't make much but masterminds don't care.

So it really has to be done like Cybertruck early deliveries to 100% prevent scalping and flipping(the fact that Musk nails it...)

The answer is that once you move past a modest shipping op the people with actual visibility on that would be the warehouse that's fulfilling, also typically people who don't have the power to cancel orders themselves.

Ecomm orders want to drop to the distribution center as soon as possible, which means you can't wait until you have a whole bunch of them just so you can analyze which addresses are on multiple orders. You would either need to 1) detect this in the warehouse systems (I spent my career working on these, so I can say with high certainty that is almost definitely Not going to happen, especially if they go through a 3PL) OR 2) you have to cancel orders after they have already dropped to the warehouse (which means wasted labor in the best-case scenario).

None of that is worth the effort to a company who is fundamentally still getting paid the same for the product regardless of if the purchaser is a scalper or not.

Knowing how it works is simple. You can game it with different names, you can modify the text of the address. My address I was able to make 20+ versions without trying. You can add unit # to a house address. It becomes wack-a-mole at some point.

I feel like to put that much effort into anti-scalping efforts you actually have to have a product that's really valuable. For a lot of products this really isn't the case (like this Steam machine iteration).

The lower g is, the lower the profit margin for s is, so so the fewer resources they will put into it. Unless there's unlikely to be more releases later or g are not cost sensitive and want it at a premium, this neatly scales to lower numbers.

Isn't it s/(s+g), where as you correctly say, g is legit account who want to buy? 1000 people want to buy a machine, 10 of them are scalpers, that's one percent on average? s = 10 and g = 990.

I feel like I'm having a slow day XD

Scalpers can be damned because Valce might just deprioritize accounts in lottery unless they already spent money on Steam and play games.

When the Xbox 360 came out decades ago, the store I got mine from did this. They had like 10 consoles and there were like 200 people there. They did a raffle for the consoles and I got to buy one. It felt like I won the Xbox even though I still had to pay for it.

It’s effectively closed off to new accounts too, which significantly reduces the effectiveness of bot campaigns

> aka European Burning Man

Fusion festival is a Psytrance festival. It's nothing like Burning Man (a DIY community driven festival).

For the American's it would be closer to Electric Forest or Lost Lands (but with good music).

And the soccer WC went the opposite direction, by encouraging scalping, giving it an official avenue, and taking a cut of the profits. Now only rich people get to enjoy a sport meant for the masses, yay.

"Customers must meet the following criteria to be able to sign up:

    You must have a Steam account in good standing.

    You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.

    Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries."

I assume scalpers are often much better at getting through a heavily contested purchase flow (eg the recent steam controller release) due to tools like bots, general experience, and being able to dedicate 20 minutes or more to sitting at a computer constantly refreshing a browser window.

This way it's just a random draw and (I think?) the number of accounts scalpers can enter with is limited because they need to be established. So it might not solve scalping, but it could be a significant improvement.

It doesn't solve scalping, it solves putting everyone in a Red Queen race[0] against the scalpers.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race

I think account age and activity should be weighted into that equation.

Even with a hundred or a thousand bots per person you'd need a hell of a lot of scalpers to dwarf Steam's ~130 million active human users.

> But there is also the fun side of it becoming a status symbol I guess. Drive up future demand.

For the Steam Controller that's very clearly at least partly what's going on. Valve's "we didn't expect the demand!" schtick is getting pretty hard to buy when they clearly expected around the same expectations for V2 as for V1. PC gaming usage has grown massively since the first controller came out.

As it is, scalpers/bots have been cashing in for a while, coining it from cashed-up people, so flipping that would make sense by a company and taking advantage of that to help reduce/fund a lower price down the line quicker.

Another way would be to auction of X amount of units, then those with cash can pay through the nose directly and again, the company gains and by that, so do normal consumers on a breadline, as it would help reduce the cost quicker down the line for the rest of the purchasers.

How so? You don't like the price, you don't make a bid. You can only royally screw yourself.

Right, I think the problem with a lot of the economics-based analyses in this thread is that they rely on the assumption that Valve ought to, or wants to, sell the device at its market value.

Ticketmaster does this, and they are still around.

What's sad and ironic is that GabeN actually lived here for a few years (during COVID) and has even gotten a PR... you'd think he'd show some love for us hobbitses.

At least someone on the Google Pixel team finally discovered a map with New Zealand on it, and Pixel phones can now place calls over LTE here!

I'm across the ditch in Oz, and every time I am in NZ it is always peculiar just how forgotten they are in some spaces.

I live in Melbourne, and our population is larger than that of all NZ so I get why they kind of get forgotten, but it still sucks.

It's way, way better than it was 15 years ago. Amazon and Amazon AU, Costco, etc. TradeMe for the cheaper stuff you don't want to wait for shipping from China.

But yeah the selection and availability is nowhere near the USA or even say.. Indonesia.

Crazy, I thought they would have just treated kiwistan as another australian state.

All the best jokes are only part jokes.

Valve open silicon when?

I believe in you Gabe.

The variety of reasons being Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc.

We all know why hardware has become unaffordable even if Valve hasn't spelled it out.

If there's anything good to be found about the Ramageddon, it's that people will hopefully keep using their perfectly good phones and other hardware a bit longer between upgrades.

I'm pretty sure they would have loved to put a better GPU chip in but that would have cost too much extra in these mad days.

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>The original price should have been in $700-800 range, pre-RAM and storage pricing escalation

Also on a 2025 launch, but that 2023 mid-level hardware feels already pretty weak in 2026, especially for a console you're supposed to run 6-7 years into the future. Sure, it's as powerful as a base PS5 but that console is already 6 years old by now. So the valve box is a pain to justify jumping in unless you're a big valve fan and don't want to DIY a PC.

I feel bad for them running into this shortage right before launch. Steam Machine was announced before all this.

To a large extent, all these datacenters are being built because people want tokens. Do you use something like Opus or GPT5.5 for coding? Well, you're part of the demand.

If you don't, then yes, as a PC enthusiast I'm sad as well. But like, it's a little bit ironic to be complaining about RAM prices if you've got 5 sub-agents hacking away.

I love my steam deck and I just don’t see this working, but time will tell. If they sell 2-3mill units I’d consider that a wild success and that i was dead wrong. really hope I am. Steam machine will really change the game if it success

Sure, and I'd really like a true black display. I accept that any mass market device coming from a niche will have compromises in the interest of reaching a broader market. The high end is already served by pimax and bigscreen.

genuinely what do you use AR for? I see alot of people saying this same thing. I don't have any VR/AR experience as the frame will be my first VR headset

If I may ask, what devices would you consider to be "with the times"? If there's some dope AR headset that I don't know about, I'd love to learn more.

wasn't it strongly implied that things like that would be enabled via the expansion port and aftermarket products? I would not be surprised to see color AR within a year of launch

There is a linux driver that allows playing without steam. Are you on Windows?

If you are stuck to Windows there are some 3rd party efforts like https://github.com/ddeverill/SteamlessController

The last generation of steam controller still had a mode you could start it in where it would register as xinput device. Seems that's gone on the new generation.

Would you rather have it degrade to the functionality of an Xbox 360 controller without Steam? That's the best they could do without all games including support for the controller (latest SDL3 has it).

unfortunately, not that straightforward in valve's case.

they created a nasty gambling system with their loot boxes that exists outside controlled casino environments and which impacts young adults a lot.

For at least a short while. I'm not sure it's a stable configuration.

Sony have admitted to selling the PS5 at a loss during the first 8 months of sales. Even when they announced the $499 disc drive SKU was no longer selling at a loss, they admitted the $399 SKU still cost more to make than it sold for. Things are no doubt different today, but Sony absolutely subsidized the PS5 at launch.

> https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...

Discounted doesn't necessarily mean at a loss. It could just mean a smaller profit margin than normal.

But if they subsidize the hardware, non game users will purchase the hardware and use it for non game use-cases, where valve cannot recoupe the costs.

A interesting scenario would be to sell the hardware at cost, but include a 30% off ticket to the steam store (up to a few hundred dollars, in savings).

Steam take 30% of the purchases made via the Steam Store. If you sell a game on Steam, you can redeem as many Steam Keys for your game as you wish. Those keys are sold at 100% profit to you, Steam dont take any.

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Fun fact about the kindle ad thing: I don’t know if they still do this but when I got mine, you could just write to the support and let them know you found the ads inappropriate (extra points for mentioning a child in the household) and they would just remove the ads for free.

they’re gonna struggle to meet demand at $1000 already, i don’t think they need a shitty ad version to support also.

(then again i always buy the most expensive SKU they offer so im very outside the target buyer profile for such)

Snapdragon gaming handhelds are much cheaper than a Steam Deck, so I’m hopeful that as an Arm device it won’t be completely crazy.

i can deal with folding my laundry in black and white

Like what? Provide examples please.

As long as you're running Zuck's spyware OS. The frame is a a linux box with fancy packaging and peripherals. You will be able to put arch on the frame and turn your new singular hobby into building drivers.

But can I uninstall Meta Horizon OS and install Gentoo?

You have to do things. You can't sit on project ideas forever while they become obsolete. A lot of things on my project ideas file became obsolete while I didn't do them, and that is sad. I even had enough time to do them but still wasted it on places like HN.

how far down the chain does the protection go? if you swap the flash chips can you just boot or do the other chips expect a signature upstream?

a trainer takes more work and substantially worse security. i can code review 40 lines of shell+python at a glance cannot say the same for most general purpose trainers

It is surprisingly powerful for a handheld. Somehow Cyberpunk 2077 ran really well on it.

crysis runs great

> bring gaming back to the couch in a way that the Steam Link didn't succeed at.

Also in the way that the Ouya didn’t succeed at - their kickstarter tagline was “Cracking open the last closed platform: the TV”. I actually had completely forgotten about the Ouya, but the wording of your comment made me go look it up.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of...

Having used a Steam Link, I couldn't tell you why it failed. It works great. Maybe the controller was the problem.

They want to expand the public's perception of who a gamer is, to make people feel more comfortable identifying as a gamer. If you included a sweaty CSGO player farming loot boxes with bloodshot eyes at 3am, that doesn't give you a new market. They're already going to buy.

Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart.

(And yes, I know why you're asking and what answer you're looking for.)

Maybe you're out of touch, they pretty much look like the typical young nerd from Seattle.

Who says they're average? Why should they be average?

What leads you to that conclusion? What do you think the average Steam user looks like? What about them doesn't fit your idea of this?

“Movie stars tend to be more attractive and better at acting than the median human. Really makes ya think doesn’t it?”

Do you and GP understand that it's not 1998 anymore and that many, many different types of people from all walks of life play games?

I'm very curious what you and others think the average Steam user really looks like.

About 0.3% of people are firefighters in the US. The odds that you end up with 100 of them is:

0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%

That's 248 zeroes after the decimal point.

Ah, I think you’re right. That aside, there’s still no evidence of continuity between the two shots and I’m a cynic.

If you're good at acting you can go up on stage with somebody you met two weeks ago and people will believe that you're family.

It's funny how it works. I took an iPhone selfie of myself as the character that I go out to do street photography as and my wife and my son say "you staged that!" but then I hand out my business cards with it and everybody else tells me it is a great photo.

I can appreciate that the direction for this commercial was "just play the game and we'll find a good 2 second cut". I'm just worried that I'm seeing people compliment an advertisement. It's the kind of overt emotional marketing I would hope we'd all scroll past looking for the technical specifications.

Idiomatically, it’s “WHAT something looks LIKE” or “HOW something looks.”

It’s never, in EFL, “HOW…LIKE”

Next up is “make” vs “take” a decision.

Sure, and this also solves those things while having better hardware. I have a shield pro, it hasn't seen a hardware update in a long time. I can game one it, but I need to use the steam link app, not run the games natively. These devices serve similar, but different markets.

Not really - it's not a PC.

Even if AAA supports Linux, it’s got to be without kernel anticheat. That’s a non starter for myself and many others

How much do you rely on Steam hardware survey? I am doing my part reporting my Linux usage.

> And I don't want to have anything to do with people like that.

And nobody is forcing you too.

> I don't really understand why anyone wants to spend their time playing games with assholes from the internet.

Maybe your experience and preference is not shared equally by all? HN users in particular to seem to struggle with this concept for some reason.

I'm curious which ones you had trouble with? I switched last week, and have been testing all the games in my library. I'm quite impressed with how all of them just work with zero or little tinkering. The only games I haven't been able to play are the ones with anti cheat that explicitly deny Linux.

No, Ardour is disgustingly ugly, so is Gimp and other FOSS apps stuck in the 90s. Some people dig that though I guess.

Also isn’t the case with Ardour that they essentially want you to pay for the binary because compiling it is a PiTA and there are no instructions on how to do so?

You're not alone, I'm also constantly pixel peeping and disappointed with the UIs of many open source (and closed source!) tools.

In their video today, they said they asked Valve the original pricing, and they said (paraphrasing) "we can't tell you exactly - but the increase we recently had on the steam deck is about how much the pricing for machine increased" - which is how they came up with the $800 number

Not it was definitely before.

Well none of them actually went out and pretended to buy the entire world's supply of silicon. So no, Altman gets most of the blame personally in this case and the silicon fabs for taking the fake order like absolute tictacs. Demand would be high otherwise too, but that's what got everyone panic buying and resulted in this mess.

Even taking into account all their fuckups majority of their content is accurate and well sourced. I dont know why people do this thing where they point to a few instances and then extrapolate that out.

It’s not just LTT

https://bsky.app/profile/papapishu.bsky.social/post/3movfklq...

Oh was it? I remember some rumors but not that one.

Yeah I probably wasn’t going to then.

This is a good general theory, but generic and sort of reasons backwards from "actually it's not popular"

No way people will buy more games when their libraries are full of unplayed games...

No way players will ever accept microtransactions...

Ok, Asia is doomed but no way western players will ever accept microtransactions...

No way...

I think you need to check out what prebuilt PC prices are now. This is pretty much the same price as a DIY.

Just to pick on someone, iBuyPower's cheapest "RDY" prebuilt gaming PC has 6 performance cores, 16GB RAM, 8GB VRAM RTX 5050, 1TB NVME, and costs $1200. Basically same specs as the Steam Machine, for a very similar price, but in a typical midtower instead of a sleek, compact cube

The people buying this will be a small niche who have a lot of disposable income, already have a high spec gaming PC and a Steam library, and likely already have a laptop or handheld before considering this as a third device for the living room.

At these prices, it's not going to convince console gamers/more casual gamers to move to Steam.

Steam Deck was also vastly more appealing at launch when the base model was £349 (64GB/LCD). It now starts at close to twice the price, £649 (512GB/OLED) despite the hardware being kind of old at this point.

Could you please help me by listing one or two prebuilt towers with sufficient gaming performance for $1100?

I see examples like this: https://www.bestbuy.com/product/cyberpowerpc-gaming-desktop-... ($1200)

The Steam Machine is $150 cheaper, less storage, and due to lower TDP going to perform more poorly. But... I want something I can hide behind my TV that is very quiet. Can you help me find towers like that?

This is 6x6x6" and can sit on my desk, quietly.

Yes, you could also buy a gaming console instead of a PC. These are not the same things. This will sell out.

It isn't difficult to fact check this; the markup is ~$80 from what I can buy independently, not factoring in general extra cost for mini-pc parts.

You could have done that 12 months ago.

Dear god, when Valve sells a computer that's twice the price of a comparable Mac, the world's turned upside down.

Depending on the games and how much you're willing to pay for them, the price point shift very fast.

No steam sales on consoles after all

It almost certainly is. Once people get used to the higher prices, and the companies see that the units sell anyway, there is no meaningful incentive to lower costs again.

This has played out time and time again during every other supply-side shock. Once prices go up, they don't come back down.

You have evidence that they are going to go down? Not unless government policy steps in to pressure chip makers, or establish new markets. Corporations will use inflation, ai, et al to validate their record profits at the cost of the consumer. Monopolies or better put the mergers of companies over the last 40 years hasn’t lead to cheaper prices, it never was going to either.

Prices will continue to go up.

You really think the manufacturers or retailers will lower the prices now that people are used to the new normal? How often do you see that happen?

> This one is exclusively for unreleased products.

What? This is so obviously incorrect that I'm not even sure how to respond to it.

The mac mini is a wonder but it's not a great gaming machine[1]. You can see that these stats are about 1/2 of what the Steam Machine does, so I think the comparison is pretty apt.

[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/mac-mini-m4-gaming-hands-on/

The lowest spec M4 Mac Mini on apple.com is $799 today. The next generation Mini will likely be more expensive due to memory pricing, and as the Steam Machine already includes current higher memory pricing, that would be a fairer comparison, no?

Now play games on it and show me the benchmarks.

I mean that for real: I’ve been impressed by the performance of the M4 Mini I own, but a gaming machine it is not

That CPU comes with a cooler so you don't need that.

At 2TB SSD, you should compare to the $1350 steam machine instead.

The GPU isn't exactly equivalent. Gamers Nexus puts it closer to RX6600 performance. But that ignores the RDNA3 improvements so I don't really have a good comparison for that.

They did announce SteamOS for general computers, so I don't expect game support to be too different.

I don’t have a horse in the race and I’m speaking from ignorance, but I noticed that Valve’s offering only requires 300W of power. That sounds very appealing for the sort of games I play.

Would it be difficult to make a PC with a similar power/performance profile?

Yeah. That's great,but I think it gets a bit expensive if you try to go small form factor and silent. You need more premium parts for that.

So if you want something small, it's a bit more expensive

The RTX 5060 will be significantly faster than the Steam Machine on games with hardware ray tracing effects, which tend to be the more demanding games.

> You don't have to have assets loaded in RAM and also VRAM for the CPU/GPU to use them.

You typically don't want to do this anyway in games. You're probably doing something wrong if you're reading textures/meshes on both the CPU and GPU.

> Don't forget about how much more RAM a general purpose OS like Steam OS can consume versus a gaming specific OS too.

SteamOS is meant to be a gaming specific OS first. It has a desktop environment but none of that loads unless you switch to desktop mode. That's just taking up some disk space while you play games.

Console stores also have sales. Often with pretty huge discounts. I just bought a bunch of games on Xbox in the 1-5 dollar range. I see similar sales on PS5 all the time.

The sales are a nice thing but for me the biggest benefit of Steam is knowing that I can use my games library on other/future devices.

My games have been working on my desktop from 10 years ago, the SteamDeck, my laptop and likely any future computer I buy that runs Linux.

Honestly, these days, Steam, PS and Xbox game sales prices are pretty much in the same level now. Ten years ago it was very different. Recently I was thinking whether to buy Resident Evil 4 on Steam or on PS (had the same price 9,99€). Got it on Steam in the end. Though, Steam still wins on regional pricing as they support more local currencies.

Only the Nintendo store have games priced usually a bit higher.

> The vast majority of people one-and-done games and movies. There are a handful they go back to, and that's it.

Citation needed.

* Not all PS4 games can run on PS5. Granted, it's only a few edge cases. But you still need to pay the PS4>PS5 upgrade if you want to avoid bottlenecks.

* PS3 games and the like require a 150+$ yearly subscription, and it's streaming for many of them. No thanks.

* No PS2/PSP/Vita compatibility, heck no emulation at all.

I think they mean rebuying all your steam games on PSN

I'm still gaming on a 980. I have never been chasing pixel perfection or the latest and greatest.

I would say I am the exception, but hardware survey says otherwise. There are a lot of people for whom the Steam Machine would be at worst a sidegrade.

> Valve very much is in the position to subsidize the costs;

They're not, because they don't lock down the hardware to only Steam.

If they subsidized the cost, people could just buy them as general purpose computers and not buy steam games on them.

Valve would only be in a position to subsidize the hardware if they locked the hardware down to just the Steam store.

Yeah but then people would buy them for non-gaming use. Remember the PS2 supercomputers?

> Only for the first few month

Yes, but we are in the unique situation that we saw actually increasing prices for RAM and storage over time due to AI craze. You (or me) have no idea what Sony's markup on consoles is right now.

The steam machine is just a regular Linux PC, you can install anything you want on it.

I have the Deck and I mostly use it to emulate Switch & PS2 games.

> I would guess that users of the Steam machine would mostly be as locked-in to Steam purchases as PS5 users are to PS Store purchases.

[pirate flag emoji].

Games from sources other than Steam are a bit more fiddly to get going, but it's far from impossible. Like Valve says, it's your computer.

Steam machine is not locked into the steam client. You can install whatever you want.

Valve cannot do that because they can't guarantee that people buying the Steam Machine will even use it for gaming.

All caps doesn't make it true.

And it is the first time in history where storage and RAM cost double or triple what it cost 6 months ago. So unknown if Sony makes a profit from todays sales.

It is already outdated I think? 8GB of VRAM, and CPU and mobile GPU from 3+ years ago. Nobody would build a gaming PC right now with a GPU that anemic and 8GB of VRAM.

I wish PCs were still advancing that fast...

That's pretty good. Even if the SM cost 20% more the cuteness factor of its small quiet aesthetic has its own appeal. Hope PC prices come down...

the benefit here is that the game developers know this device as a standard target, and steam will tell you how well a game works at purchase time.

valheim started with extremely poor steam deck performance, but at some point, the team did steam deck optimizations that got it humming nicely enough

The Steam Deck is the closest thing the PC world has to a console (barring the Steam Machine, of course), and features near-console levels of hardware/software integration.

Way too many prebuilts use fully custom components making it (intentionally) hard to upgrade them piecemeal.

They’re just as ugly and huge as you spec them out to be. There are tons of ITX / SFF builds that look just as good or better.

Physical games are on the way out for consoles and the proces quotes for PlayStations are the models without the drive.