- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blackeco.com/post/2330473
Hah, this is where they get you and I’ve been dogpiled for raising this as an issue continuously. This is an illusion of an open system. Where are you going to buy games for Steam Machine? Steam obviously, there’s no competition. Then as your library grows you get more and more vendor locked. Then Valve does an Android application notarising switcheroo and you have Linux machine that’s no different from a Mac or an Android phone. Of course they can subsidise it because they can recoup it thanks to 30% cut and it’ll only accelerate the process.
Well that’s certainly an…unusual position.
There’s definitely competition. Is the competition great? Not really. But you can still buy and install games from Epic, Itch and GOG and run them on Steam hardware. It’s just not as convenient. There’s not really anything they can do about that. I hope one day soon someone makes a better frontend that supports other platforms better, and if they do, you’ll be able to install it on Steam hardware, because that’s what an open system means.
Closed hardware looks Like PS5, XBOX and Switch. No browser. No desktop. No access to any files. No mods. No emulation. No third party stores AT ALL. And in fact if you try to do any of those things, they will remotely brick your device.
Not sure how you get there…
What you’re saying doesn’t contradict that on Steam Machine you’re going to buy games from Valve only so it doesn’t matter that you can, in theory, buy from somewhere else. The bigger your library grows, the less likely you are to start buying games in another ecosystem. Valve doesn’t care if you „jailbreak” with a web browser for now. They’re in for a long game and there was no better time than now because in the US they can get around tariffs by selling this console as a PC.
What you’re saying is just false. I’ve owned a “Steam machine” for several years and regularly acquire and play games from other stores. Whether you buy games from Valve is entirely up to you.
No. That makes zero sense.
There is no jailbreaking. There’s nothing to break. The system already allows you to do whatever you want. Just go into the menu and select “exit to desktop”.
Why would you think PCs aren’t impacted by tariffs?
Theoretically people could use it for a cheap non-gaming PC, except the cheapest non-gaming PC would be non-gaming specs.
Anyone using it for cheap crypto-mining is an idiot, the cheap option there is a rack full of bang-for-buck GPUs.
Are there any other use-cases that involve gaming-PC specs? Making videos, perhaps?
In this context, “generic mini-PC” doesn’t need to even be “non-gaming-PC”, just not a platform for buying Valve’s games; a razor-and-blades model requires that you be the one selling the blades. If someone just goes and runs games purchased from GOG, that’s already an issue for them.
It’s why inkjet printer manufacturers, who do use this model, try to make it so stupendously difficult to use ink from competitors (outside of the bottled-ink printers, which don’t use that model, where the manufacturers are fine with you doing that).
If it’s priced well and idle power usage good, it can be a great home lab. Run all sorts of services on it. Host your own Google Drive/Docs/Photos alternatives with all the automated categorization like face detection sorting. Should be strong enough to run a lot of unrelated services off one machine. If I ever had gigabit internet, I’d probably try stuff like hosting a Matrix server. Self hosted RSS feed.
Would be great for videos. RDNA3.5 has good AV1 and HEVC encoder and decode I believe. I think h.264 got solid with RDNA3.5. Good for video usually means good for photos too. Probably audio. Blender support for AMD graphics cards continue to improve and game engines have generally always been good. Great for a computer lab to teach something like Godot
The compact media creation thing would be the big thing for me if I needed a computer and this was substantially cheaper than a Strix Halo minipc. Darktable, Kdenlive, Krita, Ardour, Godot, Blender. I’d have people in mind where a $500-600 just under an ~RX 7600 would be a huge upgrade for their personal art workstation and the compact form is a big plus
Could be good for some home automation workflows- plex server, transcribing security cam video, doing object detection on said video.