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!
Neat, hope you like it! I was interested in one as an upgrade to my Steam Deck since I mostly use it docked, but even before the RAMpocalypse pricing, when Valve said it would be priced like a PC I knew it would too rich for my blood. I’m guessing it was supposed to be around $750, still too high for me to justify.
Have fun!
Such a great looking piece of tech. Looks like it belongs on a better timeline than this shit one.
Co-co-co-cool!
Ugh happy for you. I really had in my head that being in the reservation queue meant that I would have mine by now!
I know, I’ve been seeing so many people get theirs I’ve been checking my email daily afraid I somehow lost the email telling me I can purchase now lol
I’ve yet to recieve the purchase email.
Nvm just checked me email, came in overnight. No the decision to open that money is real.
Omg just checked I was kicked out from the wait list somehow :(

spoiler


Put it in your ass!
Show us what you’re really about…
One (wo)man one machine.
I get this reference, having seen the source material a thousand time, voluntarily and with raging erection
A gentle(wo)man of culture I see!
I are a cyborg, thank you. My pronouns are 0/1/null and I am grateful to be both a porn star and a new member of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints. You should come to one of our churches this weekend, especially if you are trans or a furry. Especially if you are a furry. I’m doing science for God.
Holy shit I’m so glad I get to experience this humour now, considering Reddit is practically 90% bots and information warfare. Side note FUCK U/SPEZ FOR SELLING OUT TO CORPORATE INTERESTS AND KILLING THE YEARLY PIXEL ART AND ORIGINAL AWARDS.
Wat
Bro, I are famous. Everyone knows who I am but you
I appreciate the inclusivity.
I’m on the waiting list, and boy is it annoying to see them being listed on ebay
I believe you can email steam about it.
To what end?
If Valve wanted to be petty they know what Steam account the preorder for each serial number of Steam machine came from(they know family accounts as well, etc). They could stop you from logging into Steam on any account that isn’t that one for some duration of time. It’s not fool proof and likely depends on the OS reporting hardware information correctly but they could make it a big enough annoyance to deter people. Once the supply catches up and scalpers are less interested the whole system could just be dropped. It likely isn’t worth the effort to set it up and manage complaints though.
I believe they could in theory do something like that, with limited success. Nothing is keeping anyone from creating hundreds of new steam accounts just to purchase the hardware. If the scalpers never fire up the steam machines, and sell them, it would be horrible for Valve to start punishing people that Vought those devices if they log in and they can tell the serial number or something.
It would be very complicated for Valve to do something about this, with very little reward for them or the actual final owners.
At the end of the day, they are selling like crazy, way above what I thought they would due to pricing, and scalpers taking them off of their hands is still revenue for them.
I still believe the only thing that can stop scalpers is letting them purchase 1 or 2 whole batches of whatever, and never buy from them, not even if they match the price on Steam. Let them keep all that inventory to rot.
But that’s not happening, so.
They have a legal department, money and an interest in people not reselling their stuff when there is still an waiting que.
There is nothing illegal about it
And, they’d look like dicks if they got legal involved with people who legit ordered them
Like any of us here, I also hate scalpers to no end. But let’s be realistic here, there’s nothing Valve can do about scalpers (at least not legally). That was the reason for my question. Email Valve to let them know about scalpers, online or otherwise, then what?
Now, if everyone chose to never buy from scalpers, if everyone would prefer to miss out before paying horrible people ridiculous prices because of hype, scalpers would eventually disappear.
But just like avoiding mainstream social networks, the convenience of Google, Apple and Microsoft, enjoying same day delivery from Amazon or forking over an extra 40% to get food over Uber Eats instead of getting off of our asses to go get something to eat is unimaginable to most people out there, too many would rather spend a month’s worth of rent on things they want, but don’t really need due to FOMO.
You are absolutely correct in your statement.
If we want to block scalpers and predatory businesses (not talking about Valve here) we need to start somewhere. Some of us already do self-hosting, moved to Lemmy and Mastodon, and dropped Microslop for some type of Linux distros, but we’re a ridiculous minority.
In my case, some of the people in my life even started calling me to ask me for suggestions to start getting away from those companies, same people that told me I was paranoid and “voluntarily suffering for no reason” when i eliminated Facebook and WhatsApp. And, of course, even now that they see that I was right all along, when I say “close all the Meta bullshit” and such, the response is, invariably, but that’s how I communicate with everyone.
So, yeah, scalpers will keep scalping, predatory businesses will keep at it too, because they can, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it, other than sit back, relax, and watch all the users cry their eyes out when shit hits the fan. I’m pretty sure we’re not far from that moment.
Fuck scalpers. Opportunistic pieces of shit, all of them. I hope Valve sues them into homelessness.
🤷
Steam’s emailbox I presume.
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 :)
At this point I’d be surprised if they are doing better than breaking even.
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.
Yeah, the fact that they are using bespoke parts, but still barely come in above the independent build cost tells me that they aren’t raking billions off of this. I’m fine with the price. Expensive, yes, but so is everything else.
It is ‘overpriced’ compared to a desktop in the same way laptops are ‘overpriced’ compared to desktops. Making things smaller increases cost, especially when there is a lot of heat dissipation needed.
Is this overprice compared to laptop I seriation still valid with the current AI driven price peak?
Yes because the desktop equivalent cost machine would be faster, no cpu locked at 30w or cut down gpu. Just like with a laptop.
It is expensive for a pretty low end machine but also so is everything now. And it does look nice and comes with a more console like experience out the box.
No one should be buying this thing based on performance alone, but it still ticks many other boxes
Yeah the real money is on the backend when people can now impulse buy games from their couch
My main issue with it is that’s it’s not upgradable and does not support eGPUs.
It’s console like pc like the Playstation for the average gamer that just want to connect and play.
Yes, but it’s marketed as also just a PC. Yet, it cannot be upgraded and you cannot use an eGPU. This makes it a terrible choice for PC gamers.
The thing about consoles is that they can be guaranteed to play all the games that are available for them at 30 fps minimum, but more often 60 fps or greater. The thing about the Steam Machine is that it certainly cannot play all the games available to it even just from the Steam store itself. On top of that, it is not at all upgradable so you’re stuck never being able to play those games on this “console.” The whole point of the Steam Machine was to be a dedicated gaming PC that also feels like a console. They have thoroughly missed the mark on that.
You will soon see people who “just want to connect and play” complaining that they cannot play the game they want to on the Steam store, and cannot even upgrade their PC to be able to play it.
Other platforms achieve that by messing with the quality generally and locking things down
And, I play all my games on rog ally on my 4k screen. This is substantially more powerful. And it’s a turnkey solution
This is a pretty ridiculous take if we’re being honest. Saying the Machine misses the mark for all gamers assumes that all gamers want to only play the latest releases at 4K60, meanwhile, many are more than happy to play at 1080p or 1440p, and most buyers of the Machine will have preexisting libraries that they want to play (especially as reservations were gated to existing steam accounts). Most of those games will likely not be the most demanding titles available. For instance, I’ve yet to actually find a title that hasn’t ran well at 1080p (and in many cases 4K) out of my 1,000+ game library, especially since not every game is ideal for couch gaming which is what the Machine is intended to provide.
Additionally, anything that ran on the Steam Deck will run even better on the Machine. Plus it gives a fixed hardware point for devs to target, which is likely to happen similar to what we’ve seen since the Deck launched.
Sure the Machine is expensive, and it may not be the perfect device for some customers like yourself, but for many it meets enough criterias to more than justify the price.
That’s not at all what I said.
I made the claim that it’s not a good choice for specifically PC gamers. I then gave a few reasons why.
It can’t play all of the games in its own store. The CPU and GPU are not upgradable. It lacks USB 4, so cannot be upgraded externally with an eGPU.
If the argument is that it’s good for people that want a console-like experience, I’d still disagree, because with a console you are guaranteed to be able to play all games that support the console. SteamOS is great for people who want a console-like experience. The Steam Machine really is not.
Well technically it is upgradable: you can add more ram to the Steam Machine. But that’s me being pedantic, the rest of the device is absolutely not upgradable.
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.
wtf who says this to people? Who raised you?
Lol. Thank you.
Smart people that taught me how to be objective in my decisions and plan ahead.
Dude can be proud of being a fanboy and a consumerist that buys everything and anything Valve makes, but no one can point out that that’s kinda dumb? Ok.
Read the room buddy, this is a celebratory thread. We’re excited the machines are shipping. This is a happy place. (With some gentle joking out of jealousy.).
You threw a big 'ole damper! OP is happy they got a thing and you respond with “have fun when it breaks!” You’re going to get some funny looks when you do that.
While I am not one to shit on peoples excitement and personally I kinda want a steam machine (and especially want the controller), I do also think its fair to say the fediverse absolutely loves to be anti-consumer until its consumerism that appeals to us as a group 😅
Still not gonna be antagonistic about people’s joy though 🤷🏻♂️ I kinda want one, I’d be jazzed if mine just showed up too
I feel sorry for anyone that doesn’t have at least one area they are enthusiastic enough about to splurge a little in. Still, can we really call it consumerism when Valve releases hardware so infrequently? Seriously. 11 years between controllers? 7 years between VR headsets? 6+ years expected between handhelds?
You can hate on facts, they’ll still be facts. Have fun ignoring reality, I guess.
I mean you could have made your comment about that and not “lol I hope your $1k cube breaks.”
Same goes for literally every comment in social media. Solid argument there bud xD
Also, electronic devices always break. It’s not a matter of “if”, but rather “when” and “what”. I didn’t say that I wish it breaks, just that it’ll be a pia to fix when it does.
Someone here never got a single quality toy from their parents. That explains some things.
“Objective”? Any objective person would have come through the thread, and then move on. There’s nothing objective about you except for the fact that you’re and objectively sad individual who is probably going through some bad life situations. By the way, I’m being as objective as you, in case you’re wondering.
What a fucking moron 🤣
That’s literally a subjective opinion. You might need a thesaurus dude.
Lol. Don’t assume I’m going into these purchases on blind fanboyism, and don’t confuse “niche” with “bad.” I just have very good experiences with their hardware going all the way back to the OG Controller, Link, and the Vive (which I consider theirs more than HTC’s), and that informs decisions that follow.
Yeah. I tried gaming PC for a while. Have fun with random issues.
Same as a nas. Everyone tries building their own, and ends up going turnkey eventually
The steam machine IS a pc. I’ve also been “pc gaming” and haven’t gone crazy or had unsolvable issues. When you can’t fix something it’s usually user error or ineptitude.
Sorry, that’s what I mean. I mean custom pc
There’s no reason why a steam machine would be inmune to software/driver/hardware issues. I mean, it’s basically a laptop in a different form factor and laptops hace issues too.
When you can’t fix something, it’s usually “the OEM is doing something insane in their ACPI code”, or “you have a cracked MLCC somewhere, which pushes power delivery barely out of spec and some net doesn’t make timing under complex microarchitectural conditions”.
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.
I love that you talk about being “objective” and then make a bunch of extremely subjective statements.
“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.
but the steam machine simply does not make sense for me.
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.

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.
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!
Is there not a way to use the deck as a controller?
I was expecting a picture of a humidifier.
Just put a bowl of water on top, run cyberpunk and you’ve got one.
cackles maniacally in 4090
I looked at the picture for a good 10 seconds trying to figure out what kind of steam generating device it was before realizing it wasn’t a shitpost.
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.
I’m waiting for the gog $4.99 deal in 15 years.
My threshold is $10. Not $10 discount. $10 or less total price w/o tax. I’m gonna wait a long time.
As long as you have plenty of time, the price per hours you can spend in that game is very low.
It’s got to be a cozy game that doesn’t stress the hardware. Probably Stardew Valley or similar :p
That’s right. Gotta break it in like a new engine.
Jumpman or Oregon Trail for the first 500 hours should do it.
Sable!

















