YouTuber Linus Tech Tips, who was the one to reveal Valve wouldn’t price its upcoming Steam Machine like a console, has made an official prediction for the price of the mini-PC.
After building their own PC with the same power from off-the-shelf components, and factoring in issues of scale, the current market and more, they predict that the official price for the Steam Machine will come in at $699.99 for the 500Gb model.
It’s considerably lower than their earlier estimate in the video of $910, which is what they say it would cost when built from cheap source components in today’s current market conditions at retail price.
As previously revealed, it’s expected that Valve will not subsidise the pricing of the unit with Linus offering a compelling reason why in a new video:
“It’s exactly that PCness that makes the console pricing model just not work for Valve. It would take a matter of minutes for me to grab my brand new Steam machine, install Windows and Epic Game Store on it and then never give a penny of ongoing revenue to Valve.
So, coming back to that word sustainable, if they want their hardware business to make business sense, they can’t risk pricing this thing so attractively that say a corporate office might buy 80,000 steam machines and kit out their entire workforce, all of whom will buy a total [zero] games.
Now, the Steam Deck was never in any real danger of that happening, which is why it could be priced as aggressively as it was, but the same can’t be said for the Steam Machine.”
The video sees Linus and his assistant playing “Cyberpunk 2077” on their custom PC built to Steam Machine specs alongside playing the same game on a base PS5 in performance mode. The PS5 was said to offer considerably better lighting, while the PC version was a tad sharper. The Steam Machine had to be set to the ‘Low’ preset in terms of graphical quality, with FSR set to performance, in order to achieve 60fps.
If priced at $700 USD for a machine less powerful than a base PS5, a console that’s currently selling for as low as just over $300 USD in at least one major retailer for Black Friday-Cyber Monday sales, it raises the question as to what audience this machine is for.
Valve are not disclosing the price until closer to the launch of the Steam Machine.
Source: LTT
