Article discusses the effect of rising hardware prices on the deck.
Some highlights:
How much worse has the pricing situation gotten for Valve since November? Superdata Research founder and SuperJoost newsletter author Joost van Dreunen suggested that the 512GB Steam Machine model would probably run $50 to $75 more than he expected when the Steam Machine was announced, and to expect a price “potentially $100+ above target” for the high-end 2TB model. That would mean a $599 to $629 price at the low-end and $849 to $899 for the high-end model, in his estimation.
Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter agreed that, even with the additional component costs, Valve would likely “try to get it out at $599 or so for the 512GB version,” A starting price higher than that would mean “abysmal” sales, he added. “I think $700 is a death sentence and $1,000 is unsellable.”
I’d recommend reading the article though, it has a lot more of value than just those quotes. It goes on to talk about how the price increases will likely hurt valve more than traditional console makers, and how these increases will affect sales.
It’s basically a gaming laptop.
Taking out the screen, the windows license, and some of the margin since Valve will make it back with game sales, $1,000 was the minimum expectable price before RAM got pulled into the “AI” bubble.
If they can make the steam deck for $350, why would the steam machine cost 3x more? Similarly if Sony and Xbox are selling their consoles for $500-600 it would indicate that something a bit more would be feasible. Sony and Xbox get some economies of scale, but most evidence points to them selling at cost or making some profit (from what I recall).
The steam deck is nice, but you have to throttle a lot of games performance. And that’s on an already very small screen. I have played the crap out of my steam deck, but there are some games that just don’t work super well. The difference is just the power of the components, primarily CPU and GPU, but also RAM and SSD speeds. It would expect the mini gaming PC to be more expensive than the handheld, if the expectation is that you can play any large AAA game at (basically) full specs with good frame rate. You can’t do that for cheap. I also don’t expect the price point to be a problem
Yeah, making something portable tends to cost more. If it wasn’t for tariffs and sudden ram price hike Steam Machine would have been priced cheap with the specs not being anything crazy over powered for a desktop PC.
If Valve had been able to move up their release by just a couple months they could have pushed out some reasonably priced Steam Machines out before ram prices went out of hand.
That couple months made a huge difference.