I got a place on the 512GB with Controller list, and got an email a few days after they started. I ordered it on Friday the 3rd and got it today on Thursday the 9th. The tracking codes were all over the place and gave different estimates depending which branch of each company I used. Steam claimed it was shipped when the courier said they hadn’t got it so I was worried for a few days. But this morning Royal Mail (UK customer) sent me an email saying it would arrive today, while GLS said it would arrive tomorrow.
Safe to say I’m happy to have it now and be playing games!
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Congratulations! Even though they are overpriced, they are the right size and wife approved aesthetically. They are also more functional than a console. I still want one. But I got waitlisted hardcore. I hope you enjoy yours. Do write up your first impressions and a detailed review after you’ve had some runtime with it. It’ll help us less fortunate souls decide to wait out the waitlist, or go build something on our own cheaper but less slick looking :)
I will not call it overpriced because the current PC market is crazy because of AI. Even Valve isn’t happy with the price.
Overpriced would mean that Valve would be making a significant profit. They will not.
Something can be overpriced and the company can still be losing money on it. How much profit the company making it makes is entirely irrelevant to the usability for the end consumer.
If they made a bunch of poor choices that made the cost of the product go up that doesn’t change the fact that I could’ve gotten more for my money from a better designed product. Like they could make the entire chassis a solid copper cube and that could cost say $1000 alone. And it could cool like shit. If they did then this $2k copper steam machine would be extremely overpriced.
They are overpriced and the current PC market is also overpriced.
I want to see what Sony and Microsoft price theirs at and how much of a loss it will be for them.
Sony can afford to discount on the promise of online sales and planned cost reduction. I’m not sure Microsoft are going to manage another Xbox.
Well… no.
Thats… Sony and MSFT raised prices on all of their hardware too, same with Nintendo.
We’re at the point where being a huge player… can only get you priority in the queue for chips and parts.
It can no longer secure bulk pricing discounts.
That’s how bad this is.
I got mine yesterday. Copying my thoughts from a comment in another thread:
Don’t mind my essay here. TLDR: I love this thing.
I got mine yesterday. It’s the 512GB with no controller since I already got the controller separately and the 2TB version felt like an especially bad deal.
I was initially on the fence about the price and reserved just to get into the queue to make the actual buy decision later. I was expecting more people to have thoughts on it out before my spot in the queue came up, but I ended up getting my purchase email very quickly on 6/30. I let the email sit for a day but ended up deciding to pull the trigger for a few reasons:
One, I’ve owned every first-party Valve device so far, and all of them have been more than the sum of their parts. Two, I wanted a HTPC, travel, and LAN party PC that’s a bit less restraining than a laptop. Three, being a bit of a performance snob has been distracting me away from actually gaming and I wanted to get back into the no nonsense side of PC gaming again. And four, I don’t mind spending a little extra money advancing Linux, repairable hardware, etc.
I feel like I have to acknowledge reviews from the PC space have been largely negative, but they seem to be undervaluing a lot: the form factor (a 6" cube is still tiny compared to almost all other SFF builds), performance per volume (almost the entire cube is a heat sink), and the benefits of more standard performance targets we’ve already seen with the Deck.
As for first impressions, the device is packaged well, and unboxing was very satisfying. I did have some trouble getting my controller paired since it was already paired to my existing desktop PC and plugging it in directly wasn’t enough to get around that like I expected, but looking up how to pair it to multiple PCs got me past that.
I spent a few hours testing a mix of light to demanding games, and I’m more than happy with what it can do. I haven’t tried gaming beyond 1080p yet, but I’m going to be very selective about when and how I do that. 512GB is proving to be plenty of space for what I’m playing at any one time, and I think that would still be true if I didn’t have other devices acting as additional storage.
I feel like all my expectations above have been validated, and now I’m really looking forward to getting the Frame. I want to make a travel backpack or suitcase with foam cutouts for the whole set.
Does the Steam controller wake the Machine?
Just tested it. Yes, it does. It woke it from sleep and also woke it from shutdown.
CEC, on the other hand, is behaving weird for me. That’s probably a software issue Valve will soon patch or an issue with my TV. I have a 2017 4K Samsung that I will never connect to the Internet and have never bothered to update. I’ll just keep its remote handy in the meantime.
Not only does it wake it from sleep, but it also turns it on if it was shutdown.
That being said, I had the same issue as the previous comment when initially pairing my Controller to the Machine (I got the 2TB Machine but had a Controller from when they initially launched). I had to do my setup with an Xbox controller instead and after running the initial updates, it paired without issues and I’ve been able to easily use it on the Machine and my desktop PC.
Have fun fixing it when anything other than the ssd or ram breaks.
Repairability isn’t an absolute scale, and smaller form factors need to make more compromises in modularity. It’d be silly to judge this on the same metric as a fully modular desktop PC since it’s not trying to be a substitute for that use case.
However, you can build a pc with what the steam machine costs, and the steam machine is not that much smaller than an itx pc. So yeah, I think they can be compared.
The PC won’t be the same size. Or have CEC.
Side note: Seriously how the fuck do normal ass PCs not support CEC?
Not having cec control is such a minor inconvenience that I honestly don’t even care. Regarding size, between tiny, unfixable and unupgradeable and small but fixable and upgradeable, the choice is pretty simple. Heck, the steam machine is not even better value than a similarly priced pc. It performs worse. Hopefully v2 will be better, if there is one.
“Not that much smaller” is doing some heavy lifting. Every SFF build or mini PC compromises something, price, size, thermal performance, whatever. Physics necessitates it. It’s perfectly fine for you to not value size so much that a 3.8L case isn’t compelling to you over let’s say a 6L ITX case (or the 8L you really need for a discrete GPU), but it’s also okay to feel the opposite.
Except that it’s not just that. You build something larger but still pretty small and you can upgrade whatever you want, whenever you want. You can also have the same software experience by just installing bazzite. What valve has done for linux gaming is wonderful, but the steam machine simply does not make sense.
I think you’re just not seeing outside the bubble of the use cases that make sense to you. I already have great daily driver PCs currently running a mix of Bazzite and CachyOS (and Windows, ew), and I have built a couple SFF PCs before, so I’m no stranger to all of that. I can’t speak for anyone else here, but part of why I find the Steam Machine compelling is it covering the opposite end of that spectrum to a degree other SFF options haven’t reached.
but the steam machine simply does not make sense for me.
Some people just don’t have enough of a life to be happy for others. How sad your life must be.
Lol. If I wanted a steam machine, I would’ve bought it.
At this point I’d be surprised if they are doing better than breaking even.
Yeah yeah yeah, whatever. Tell me what’s the first game you’re going to play! :)
I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3, as it crashes my desktop so I’ve not been able to play it for the last year or two.
I’ve been a patient gamer on that front, waiting for it to dip below 40% discount.
…any day now.
As long as you have plenty of time, the price per hours you can spend in that game is very low.
Such a great looking piece of tech. Looks like it belongs on a better timeline than this shit one.
Mine is supposedly arriving tomorrow, if ups can be trusted
Knowing how good the Deck was, I’m happy for you!
How’s it so far?
Please let us know how it performs! I know it’s not gonna blow our socks off but a regular human being using it to gauge its ease of setup and use would be nice.
Sometimes the “I built my pc from scratch starting with smelting the copper ore for the circuit board traces and folding together the case out of a single sheet of steel with my BARE HANDS” perspective has blind spots with regard to everyday usage.
I’ve had mine since Monday and so far I’ve been very happy with it. Because of my work schedule, I’ve probably only played about 2-4 hours but the convenience of how quickly it boots up or even just being able to pause/resume a game like on the Steam Deck has been amazing.
I got the 2TB Machine so I got the 2 extra faceplates, both are really nice and I’ve opted to go with the wooden one. All 3 (2 extras and the normal black one) feel very well built (each is slightly different due to the variation in materials) and are extremely easy to swap due to the magnets.
Setup was a bit tricky though. I’d gotten my Steam Controller when they initially came out so it was paired to my desktop PC. I tried to follow the setup video that Valve posted but even with the puck connected to my Machine, it just wouldn’t work. If I wired the controller directly to the Machine, it would work for a couple of inputs then it would stop. That being said, I plugged in an Xbox controller, which immediately worked. Then after running the various firmware updates, the Machine actually recognized that the Steam Controller wasn’t paired properly and it walked me through how to pair it with it. Since doing that, I’ve not had any issues with it and the controller has been able to turn on the Machine from sleep or even from a power off state every time I’ve tried. CEC has also been hit or miss, it’s really convenient when it works but sometimes it won’t switch the input or turn off my TV after shutting down. That being said, I’m pretty sure it’s more an issue with my TV than the Machine since I’ve had similar CEC issues before.
Happy to test anything (non destructive of course) or expand on anything I’ve said if anyone is curious.
Fascinating!! Honestly I think I’m even more inclined to buy one myself now ^-^
it’s going to take a little time while i save up, but hopefully the price won’t increase it out of my reach in the mean time…
The thumbnail made me think this was some fake TV made of cardboard
Beauty! I got my purchase e-mail for 512+Controller today, hopefully it’ll be here by the end of next week! I put a 1 TB SSD into my Steam Deck that I’m going to back up, format for the Steam Machine, and then swap the SM & SD drives so my SM is a 1 TB and my Deck is a 512. A bit of work but I’m looking forward to the end result!
Very cool! Update us in a few weeks or months?
I’ve yet to recieve the purchase email.
Yeah they sent me an email to basically say no. The randomised list has apparently put me too far down so now I’m not going to get one.
No time frame or anything just no.
Nvm just checked me email, came in overnight. No the decision to open that money is real.
Congrats! Mine also came yesterday. I grabbed the 2 TB with Steam controller. I think you and I were in the same batch of emails!
so jealous. i got mine, but wasn’t able to nab a controller… so i’ve been just complaining about all the minor issues i’m rediscovering with all my old controllers, lol. (not steam issues, just “these face buttons are too squishy”, “i forgot this one had stick drift”, etc, i’ve been pure steam-deck for a while…). Good news is i can connect just about anything to it, so that’s nice. but a steam controller will be even better! Eventually!
