Depends. I’d love to say go with GOG whenever possible but they have some utter shit in their store. Like, old versions of games with bugs that were patched years ago or just plain don’t work. Dragon’s Dogma where online is completely broken comes to mind. So, I guess find out which version is the best on a game-per-game basis? I realize how much of a fucking non-answer this is and I’m sorry to have wasted your time.

Just jump right into 7. 8 is kinda like 7 but more action oriented. Still pretty fun. Then go RE2 Remake and RE4 Remake. They’re the best in the entire series. Then play original 4 again and realize I lied to you and that one is still the best.

Ethan, NO.

Yes, you are definitely bringing nothing constructive with your goalpost moving.

No, it’s a thread about the market differences between the PS3 and the Steam Machine. You’re just being so irrational in your obsession with being right that you don’t know what you’re talking about or with whom.

Ah, brilliant argument. Shall I take this as your agreement that $750 is not console pricing?

It’s not a console in the same way the Steam Deck isn’t a Switch competitor. I get what you’re saying but putting “console price” at over $750 would just mesh it with PC pricing and then the distinction would be meaningless.

You’re quoting someone else.

Yes, it is riskier. That’s not my point, though. It is that telling people “just don’t do that” isn’t helpful.

Umm, actually. All proprietary software is unethical and introduces huge risks to your PC. People should stop playing any game that has such closed closed source.

That PC at microcenter is much faster than the Steam Machine.

Here’s some benchmarks for the 7600M, which has the exact same specs as the GPU in the Steam Machine:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-RX-7600M-GPU-Benchmarks-and-Specs.679303.0.html

Here’s some benchmarks for a 9060XT which is the GPU on your link:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-RX-9060-XT-16GB-Benchmarks-and-Specs.1029097.0.html

And here’s some benchmarks for a desktop 7600 which is another card people are comparing the Steam Machine to:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-RX-7600-Benchmarks-and-Specs.806213.0.html

In case anyone doesn’t wanna wade through the terrible way notebookcheck presents information, I’ll post the numbers for CyberPunk High Preset at 1080P to give you an idea of the performance difference. Nothing particular about why I chose that game, it’s just the first I found that was on all 3 links:

• RX7600M: 62.3 FPS
• RX7600: 90.1 FPS
• RX9060XT: 127.2 FPS

If we set the 7600M as 100%, then the 7600 and 9060XT are 144.6% and 204.1% respectively.

I think people believe the Steam Machine will be way faster and that’s why they’re coming up with these outrageous prices.

Only one of those 3 consoles is comparable to the Steam Machine. You can’t grab a product from a different segment in the market and lump it in with the rest just because they’re the same kind of product. If that were the case, I could just look at a ThinkCentre and say “see? $200 is PC pricing” but thatd be insane — nobody looking to buy a ThinkCentre would ever consider a Steam Machine, and nobody looking to buy the disc or Pro versions of the PS5 will consider a Steam Machine either. So yes, your failure to consider market segments means that you are wrong.

No, but there’s some unhinged people arguing it’s gonna be $800 or even $1k.

You’re the one that brought up Valve selling at a loss because you think anything under $800 would be selling at a loss. I’m telling you it is not.

Seems like they changed it two months ago. That still puts a $650 price tag 30% above the PS5 MSRP so no, $650 isn’t console pricing.

And if my grandma had wheels she’d be a bicycle.

You seem to think the Steam Machine will be much faster than the specs imply.

An educated guess. The specs of the “semi-custom” components perfectly match with existing products. However, if I were to put my tinfoil hat on, I’d point out that the 7600M has been out for 2 years and you still cannot find a laptop with one. Almost as if someone snatched up all of the supply.

Edit: Forgot to mention what those existing products are. Ryzen 5 7400F and RX7600M. (The M is very important. Don’t forget the M).

Care to share a link to a PCPartPicker with that?

Nope. Already closed the tab and can’t be bothered to do it again. I did check the link you provided and I see where you went wrong. We’ll get to that in a bit.

It’s literally not, they custom developed it for the product, similar to the Steam Deck one, it is based on the architecture used on laptops, but so are Playstation and Xbox AFAIK.

It literally has the exact same specs as a Ryzen 5 7400F and an RX7600M. But hey, you were right, the CPU is actually not a laptop CPU.

Can you provide a link to such a prebuilt? Here’s the first prebuilt I could find with similar specs, and it’s 1k https://periphio.com/gaming-pcs/firestorm-7600-prebuilt-amd-gaming-pc/

Sure I could. I won’t because you already did and your prebuilt even is a $50 cheaper than the one I had found. Remember that I said we’d get to why the part list you posted was wrong? Here we are. An RX7600 has 32 compute units and a boost clock of about 2.6GHz. The RX7600M “custom GPU” in the Steam Machine has 28 CUs and a boost clock of about 2.4Ghz. This results in the full size 7600 being anywhere from 30% to 70% faster than its mobile version depending on the game and about 50% in synthetic benchmarks. So those PCs with “similar specs” you brought up are not similar at all.

And the other one is 700, your point is?

What other one? The one nobody bought? I guess Valve could go the same route if their goal is for nobody to buy their product.

It didn’t happened with the Deck because it’s not sold at a loss, so it’s cheaper to assemble a similarly built PC for you. But I definitely saw several posts through the years recommending people just buy a Steam Deck as their machine in certain conditions. If the Steam Deck costed 300 I guarantee you people would be using it as their daily drivers or building clusters of them.

It didn’t happen with the Deck because it’s one of the worse ideas ever conceived. It won’t happen with the Cube because it will remain one of the worst ideas ever conceived.

The PS3 was using a rare CPU that you could only get from it or from some enterprise dealer at a much higher price. The Steam Machine is a standard x86 computer that can’t match the ubiquitous ThinkCentres in price/performance.

Assembling your own Steam Machine with similar parts will cost around 800

No, it won’t. $800 will get you a machine that’s around 50% faster. Controller included.

Even if you assembled it yourself you would be missing features, such as cec, wake by controller, sleep mid game, etc. LTT will try to build one, it will be interesting to see what they come up with, but I’m 90% it won’t have feature parity.

Fair enough.

There’s lots of engineering gone into this machine, they’re way more compact, less power hungry and more quiet than anything you can build yourself.

It’s literally a laptop CPU with a laptop GPU.

Buying the same build as a prebuilt brings a premium and costs around 1000

Also not true. A 1k prebuilt is around 70% faster. Controller not included, though.

Valve purchases stuff in scale so they can diminish their margin and could potentially sell it cheaper than prebuilts, and possibly cheaper than building it yourself.

Sure, but that’s an argument in favour of it costing less.

Consoles are sold at a loss, and they recover it with games because the platform is closed.

Yeah, and the best selling console of the generation is $450 for the digital-only version.

The Steam Machine is not closed, they can’t be sure they’re getting game purchases, because people might be buying this to be their work computer. So they have to price it as a PC, with margin on hardware, not promise of future returns.

Stop this delusion. If this was an actual possibility, it would already be happening with the Steam Deck. Yes, I know you know someone who did it. I know someone who bought a Surface to put Linux on it. There’s dozens of us!

Price might fluctuate between now and announcement, RAM prices are going crazy nowadays.

That I see happening. RAM/storage might triple in price tomorrow which would push the price of the whole industry up.

The digital PS5 is $450 and the Xbox Series X has about 15% of the marketshare, proving people won’t stand for ridiculous prices.

$650 is far too close to current console pricing

I don’t think it is, though. $650 is 44% over the $450 MSRP of the PS5. If we look at “PC prices” (whatever they meant by that) the desktop I specced outperforms it by 30% to 50%. That puts the size tax for the Steam Machine at up to 45%, which would be hard to justify when laptops with 4050s are regularly on sale. Pricing it above $650 means you can go to BestBuy right now and get an HP Victus for $550 and have a spare $100 for a controller. Then you’ll have a PC that is faster, smaller and cheaper than a Steam Machine. This has to be under $700 to succeed. Although… Valve has been fostering a sort of Nintendo effect where they could price it at $5k and send you a dildo along with the PC so you can go fuck yourself and people would still buy it.

Fun fact: I was looking for laptops with a 7600M to get a more direct price to performance comparison but I wasn’t able to find a single one. Guess now we know what they mean by “semi-custom GPU”.

I just threw together a PC with an 8500g and a 7600 (not the mobile version) and it came to about $780 while being about 30% faster. I think $750 is the most the market would bear but, honestly, it should just be $650.

Edit: Oh shit, I forgot the US doesn’t include tax on their prices. Those $780 are converted from local currency and after taxes. Sales tax in Mexico is 16% so the real price would be around $673. I changed my mind, Valve would be delusional if they price this a cent above $650.

If you go to CyberPower (nothing special about them, it’s just the first system integrator that popped into my head). You can find a prebuilt with a RX6700 (which is anywhere from 50 to 70 percent faster than the “custom” GPU on the Steam Machine*) for $1049. It would be monumentally stupid to price the cube anywhere near $1000.

*I’m using an RX7600M to estimate the performance for the Steam Machine since it has exactly the same specs.

Most people don’t treat sports like that, though. Even those who do, know to shut up about their stats when talking about their sport with someone who isn’t that into it. You don’t say “oh, I went golfing with some friends last week” and immediately hear “I can score an 85” because that’d be obnoxious. I know there’s always been people like that but it honestly feels like “competitive” play has become the norm and it didn’t use to be like that.

The current landscape of gaming is so foreign to me. Gaming for me has always been an experience to get lost in a fantasy world — something akin to reading. Nowadays everyone seems obsessed with the online and competitive sides of it. It feels like you can’t have a conversation about videogames without someone bringing up Fortnite and the new skins they unlocked by treating it as a job.

Another round of bootlicking Lemmy’s favourite megacorp. Good job, guys.

And this is not an argument.

They’re not benevolent in the slightest.

A pretty specific subset of gamblers.

For whom?

Never forget how Nintendo made its money.

lol he’s from Blizzard?! I didn’t even know about that. Literally everything I know about the guy is that he tried to cancel MatPat and said some dumb shit about SKG.

Gotta give it to that annoying guy with the fake voice and the greasy hair, I wouldn’t have known about this if not for him.

Buying games and playing games are different hobbies. On a similar note, I tried to buy System Shock (on GOG) just to be greeted by an “Already in your library” message.

Figured it out! It’s not hard. It’s actually quite easy. It just gives zero fucks about letting you know the level of the enemies or the areas where they are. I got a quest to gather some flowers at level 5 and was told they could be found in the outskirts of the city so I went south out of chance. Turns out that’s 20ish level area. Perhaps the same happened to you.

Dragon’s Dogma. WTF? Why did nobody tell me it was good? Why do people describe it as “hack and slash”? It’s a proper ARPG. Also, do I just suck or is it actually this hard?

Congrats. Want a cookie?

I came here to make a joke along the lines of “lol don’t play Valorant” but I see there’s people seriously suggesting it. Holy shit, you guys.