Valve Keep Getting Away With This - Part 1 - The Steam Machine
I've been chewing over the Steam Hardware announcement for a few days now, and after much head scratching and umming and ahhing, I've come to a simple conclusion.
I'm going to end up buying all of it.
I want to talk about the different devices individually because each is appealing for slightly different reasons, though it all fundamentally revolves around the fundamental pillar of Steam Compatibility. Today I'm focusing on what at first seemed like the least appealing of the lineup - The Steam Machine
Why Wouldn't It Appeal To Me?
When I first saw the reveal and spec of this PC, I saw it as a pretty simple product - a couch-gaming machine with power about half that of my main PC. I don't have a huge amount of need for an additional machine as I have a PS5 and my PC in the same room as my TV - at a push, I can connect a very long cable and do "couch gaming" that way.
What Would It Fix For Me?
The more I thought about it the more I realised that my current setup actually kind of sucks - I almost never play games at my couch anymore despite the fact that I play most of my games with controller to save my delicate/fucked-up wrists. It's a fucking chore tbh.
PS5 games are expensive and when I turn it on every other month I have to spend half an hour waiting for updates and downloads to finish.
For PC gaming I can connect a cable but I don't - the cable's been sitting limp around the edge of the room for over a year, unloved. Part of that is that the wireless signal doesn't really make it over there from my PC, and I'd need a 4m+ cable to the couch to get around that.
I have an old Steam Link but it's really showing its age now, and it still has something of a wired-controller problem.
All of this goes away with the Steam Machine + a Steam Controller (I'll discuss that in a later post).
It would sit alongside my PS5 for couch-gaming kinds of games. It's low-spec, but my recently-played list on Steam includes games like Demonschool, FALLSTRUKTUR, BALL x PIT, and SteamWorld Heist II - all of which would run beautifully on that hardware.
I'm not certain but I'm also pretty confident that it'll support streaming from my beefier PC for more demanding titles which would deal pretty solidly with the spec issues.
So that's why I'll probably buy one. But why would anyone else want one of these? Those weaknesses still exist for most people. Here are some case studies. "User Stories" if you're that kind of asshole.
The PC-Only Gamer
There's a particular subset of people who have never and will never buy a console, because the platform lock-in of a Steam Library is just too great. It's hard to justify shipping £500+ on a machine where you don't own any of the expensive games when they could just play one of the 500 games you bought in sales over the last 15 years. Or get the same games for half the price in a couple of years.
These people either don't do couch gaming, or have a janky setup with either long-ass cables or extremely underpowered machines. The Steam Machine basically allows them to take all that sunk-cost and apply it to a (hopefully) jank-free setup with most of the perceived upsides of console gaming and very few of the downsides.
I'm pretty sure they make up the core target audience.
The Console-Only/First Gamer
Over time I think a lot of Console-Only people have transitioned to being Console-First - having a small steam library for games that run on their non-gaming PCs/laptops. I'm lumping them all together here, but their sunk-cost buy-in is admittedly quite different.
The big thing for these people though is that they're comfortable with the couch-gaming paradigm. A machine that does the exact same thing but you can regularly buy a dozen games for £50? That could be revelatory coming from the locked down PS and Xbox stores. A lot of those who have Steam already probably have a library of games they nabbed at a bargain and never touched, because playing on their laptop just isn't that fun.
I think this group will be one that grows in proportion over time as Steam Machine adopters - word of mouth and the inevitable gravity of Steam Sales just makes the value proposition too good.
The Non-Gamer
It's hubris to predict that a product will somehow take the shrinking fraction of non-gamers in the world and make them see the light, so I won't be doing that.
What the Steam Machine does do is give their gaming family members a gift idea that they can preload with a bunch of guaranteed winners. If the Steam Machine is a reasonably low price (£500 or so) you can buy one of those, make an account on it, and preload it with dozens of low-cost high-value easy-to-enjoy games.
It's the sort of task you might assign a tech-savvy daughter or nephew to sort out and have a pre-configured casual gaming powerhouse for a price comparable to a Switch 2 with a handful of launch games.
I think this is one of those "don't expect it but maybe..." markets that you leave a big set of question marks on in your strategy planning. If the Steam Machine is a smash hit, they'll be why.
The Aces Up Valve's Sleeve
These are all reasons someone might buy a Steam Machine, but there are two things that really sets it apart for me vs a normal Console.
First is that the available library is vast and ancient. I know I touched on that a bunch, but it's worth overstating that Steam has a functional library going back to the PS2 era while backwards-compatibility on consoles is something you get charged for. If you bought Dark Messiah in 2006, you can play it on your Steam Machine - no qualms, no questions. That's fucking insane in the context of Consoles.
Second is something they say in the announcement - it's just a PC. If you have one and you find you're not using it - it's gathering dust, unloved - you can just install Windows on it and use it as a PC. You can use it as a media server or a homelab. You can let a kid use it as their First Desktop Computer because it's just a PC under all the design. You can't do that shit with a PS5.
Conclusion
So yeah I'm probably gonna buy one. Of the 3 announced, it's the one I'm least likely to drop cash on, but it's the most interesting strategically as an attempt to fill an ancient market that never seems to get satisfactory products.
Next time I'll be talking about the one I'm 2nd most likely to buy.