Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida has shared his thoughts on the Steam Machine on X.
Yoshida spent 31 years at Sony where he helped to launch the original PlayStation and served as president of SIE Worldwide Studios between 2008 and 2019.
Having recently acquired one of Valve’s boxes, he says the tech is “hard to recommend to people” at this time.
On the negative side, he called its 3D performance “meh” and says “the system recommends to default to 1080p – am I going back to PS4 days?”. Other complaints included the machine’s long loading times and the Steam Controller’s loose sticks and hard-to-use touchpads.
On the upside, he says the system UI is “easy to use”, the Steam Controller booting the system from a single touch (just like a console) is a “killer feature”, the changeable face plates are ‘nice’, and “the small form factor and quietness is super good”.
The biggest issue though is the price being “very unfriendly” and he adds it’s “hard to recommend to people unless for research”. The review falls in line with many tech reviews about the machine, which have praised the box’s construction but have also not recommended it due to the price and lack of power compared to consoles.
Yoshida will probably be best remembered for the infamous “this is how you share your games on PS4” video, a pitch-perfect piece of trolling against Xbox at the time but also one that’s seen as ironic now considering Sony’s just announced move to an all-digital future.
More recently in the days since Steam Machine’s started shipping out, a breakdown of the hardware by Gamers Nexus has revealed that Valve has gone with a single-channel 16GB DDR5 RAM stick, as opposed to a dual-channel setup with two 8Gb RAM sticks.
Tests suggest that had they gone with dual sticks, it would’ve seen performance gains of up to 20%. Earlier comments from Valve indicated that the performance difference between single- and dual-channel configurations would be negligible.
Valve launched the waitlist for its Steam Machine last month with prices ranging from $1,049-1,349.
