What we really think of the Steam Machine

Hi, I'm Scott Stein with CNET

I'm Matthew Buzzy from PCMag. And we both had the Steam Machine for a good chunk of weeks this summer

And we're going to talk about what we think about it. So let's just get into it

Off the cuff, I like this thing. I think it's interesting. I think it's kind of fun

The elephant in the room, of course, being the price and the power, which we will definitely get into

But the concept for me, I don't know about your gaming setup or how you use this thing

For me, I was like, I get the idea. Taking my desktop, taking my Steam library

moving it over to my living room couch, enjoying a diminished performance experience

but nonetheless, being able to play those games sometimes in a more relaxed environment. My wife likes to watch me play sometimes

so it's like, oh, I'll bring this out of my office and put it in the living room. Like, I kind of saw the idea

Now, is that an expensive way to do that? Yeah. Yeah, and I feel the same way

Like, when I used this, I got to see it in November. I'd been, you know, lucky to kind of fly out and look at it

My thoughts then were like, yeah, I get it. They're trying to put steam everywhere

and kind of continue that Steam Deck journey. And this had been promised for like a decade

where they were looking at the idea of this. And then it's like, oh, we really got this

And then the question to me was, like you said, was price. Price versus performance

And I thought, okay, this kind of looks like console. Even back then, I was like, the performance didn't look like it was that great

And that was my thought. And then lo and behold, same thing. It's like, actually, it's better performance using it at home

than I think I had in those very early demos in November

where they admitted that the games hadn't really been optimized. And I like it

I mean, you know, I found I was playing the games. It was a very Steam Deck-like experience

I'm not a PC gamer. So to me, I was really thinking about how the Steam Deck opened up access to Steam OS

and that fun, and it's a pretty straightforward OS, even though you do get a lot of little incremental updates

and some things that get a little wonky. But that same relaxed feel, easy setup

I love how small this thing is. I love that it's like half the size of the Xbox Series X

I will never remember the name of that console. It's their fault, not yours

Yeah, yeah, which I have in the living room. And then this thing just tucks anywhere

I brought it on vacation. I love all of that. But the problem is the price. To me, so much of this is that price

But now the price is all totally screwed for everything. So I was going to say, like

well, if you can buy a game console for a certain price. But what price is a game console now

Like, it's all going up. and this is suffering that too and a thousand dollars feels like way too much and also i'm a

handheld gamer so i think the question is how often am i playing in front of a tv to the credit

of the steam deck which is pretty old now like i would prefer to play like that and then i found

like oh this is cool but i just i'm a handheld person so that's the but i but i think if you're

into that pc in front of a tv i you can't get to a size this small otherwise without doing this no

Oh, and I think it's good we kind of come at it from different angles because I have consoles, I have a Switch, you know, I have a Steam Deck

But my main platform is playing on my gaming desktop. So, you know, initially, especially being a PC mag, we think, oh, well, you can probably build something similar to that

You probably get more power out of something similar to the price. And you do. However, I will say, it's hard to get it this small and this sort of just out of the box

Like the plug and play experience of this thing compared to, well, yeah, an enthusiast can build a desktop

And sure, I think most people buying a Steam Machine might be in the enthusiast camp anyway

I don't know if someone's going to do this instead of a PS5 if they buy Madden every year

That's maybe not the person that's going to buy a Steam Machine anyway. But there's something to be said for the pre-built, the spokes, small size

Clever Engineering, if you've opened this thing up at all, they did a lot of work. It's not just like, yeah, we took some stock parts and put a case on it

They did real work to make this thing quiet, cool, efficient. It comes in about console performance in a little less, less good at higher resolutions

which, you know, $600-whatever-dollar console versus $1,000, you're like, that's not a great price proposition

But it is a PC. If you're a Linux head, go crazy on this thing. Yeah, I love the flexibility with that

And again, that's the problem. We are now comparing against consoles that are like six years old

and time is going by fast. And so that is a long time

and to feel like something is, like, not eclipsing that and costing more, it's just totally rough

And Valve, obviously, looks like they were as caught by surprise by the price situation as everybody else

But it is what it is. And then, you know, so I felt that

And that was the friction, as I feel like if you are a bleeding-edge PC gaming

or you want, like, really awesome graphics, then, you know, to understand that this is not designed for that

Even the games that they were showing off at the beginning for this were more casual, which actually lines up with how I play. Same thing, I'm an indie game person

good experience I didn change the graphic settings much and so I wasn doing yet heavy benchmarking I also feel like it was clearly not designed for that and I think this is the thing is that they recommend 1080p settings

So I was like, I'm going to keep it at that. And then when I bumped, and it seemed generally fine with a couple of weird games that would be like

give like a weird graphics message, or something would kind of break. And it's the thing, it's like, your mileage may vary

It's not without its quirks, it's hard to just jump in and say. If you're a console person, just get this, you'll never have to do anything PC-like

You will sometimes have to do some things that are a little PC-like. Yes, and there are a lot

I mean, that's the thing. If you've never played a, if you've never had a Steam Deck, if you've never done SteamOS things

they do a lot of downloads. So I feel like compared to a game, they're always doing little patches and little optimization things

There's always something downloading. You're like, I thought I already downloaded that. Even the controller, it was probably because it was new

Yeah, like a million firmware updates. You're always kind of plugging it back in

But compared to the pain for me of a PC thing, it felt like it's all just guiding me seamlessly through that, so I really like that

And I just kind of went with the flow on that. But if you're not the person who's going to go with the flow and you want to optimize, then to me it's like, well, yes, you're going to be a pro PC setup person

Or, like I saw thoughts online, people were saying, we're already buying this, being like, oh, I like it for what it is

And you kind of have to like this for what it is. Yeah, before you even go in, it's like, you know you're getting diminished

don't expect to set up in your living room the same performance you're going to get on your desktop

You bought the $1,000 box, you know, it has diminished performance. You already justified the use case for this in your mind

if you're considering buying it. Like for me, I'm like, oh, I can take the experience of my PC to the couch

And you're like, well, I can get a TV experience for my handheld. Like that's kind of the biggest thing is these use cases

People have said, what do I even get it for? What do I even, I think there's a million of them, honestly

I think they're all a little enthusiast-y. I think, you know, it's not the most mainstream thing

but whatever angle of gaming setup you have now that you're coming at this from

I think you can kind of justify it. And I did mainly plan 1080p as well

I was driven for the full review to do benchmarks and just see how the high resolutions went

I think if you are willing to use FSR, AMD's upscaling technology

that you should sort of embrace that for this. You kind of have to if you even want to imagine 1440p or 4K gaming

You can globally change the resolution on this so even the SteamOS UI will be those higher resolutions

then you'll launch into the game and they'll have those options for the higher res. Framerate's definitely suffered

If you turn on FSR, you can get 60 frames and experiences that otherwise were not getting 60 frames per second

Generally, though, 1080p is what I would recommend for this, unless you're playing really simple 2D games

Don't look sharper. Something that's not action-oriented or a 3D open world or whatever

That's asking a lot at 1440p or 4K. It was a little crazy that Valve did initially say 4K 60fps gaming on this

before dialing it back, I will say. They kind of rescinded that around launch

It's like up to in some scenarios is more kind of the wording now

which I think is a little bit more accurate. But I was generally impressed enough

I kept reminding myself it was $1,000, because when you plug it in and you're like, yeah, it does like a PS5, the game just works

I'm playing Red Dead, I'm playing Cyberpunk, I'm playing these games that are pretty visually demanding

Red Dead Redemption 2 scales pretty well, but Cyberpunk is a demanding game

And 1080p ultra settings or even the ray tracing low settings, especially if you want to turn on FSR

This thing can run those games. So it's not like it's like stick to your indie, stick to your simple platformers

That's all this can do. Just don't expect max settings. Don't expect 1440p

Don't expect 4K. I think the restrictions are kind of obvious if you just look at the thing

But for $1,000 or more if you want more storage, which by the way, 512, really restrictive

Even just for my benchmarking for the review, it's like, okay, I have four games on there

I guess I've got to pull two things off. Game installs are just massive these days

So FF 12 doesn't go very far. I got spoiled with the ridiculous high-end review unit one

which has like 1.8 terabytes of storage, which that's nice to have if you can afford that

But it also fills up over time faster than you'd think because the size of PC game downloads

which could be 100 gigs of pop easily. The thing for me too about this is that I just felt like

I love this as an initiative. I love this as a statement, as a moment in time

I think it's tough because, well, anyway, game consoles have all been kind of blown the hell out of the water

But also even where things are going, like the fact that this feels like it could get more powerful

and the Steam Deck is now aged somewhat and you think they're going to do a Steam Deck 2 at some point

and what would that be? And now that price has probably been cut out from under them too. They're like, ah

Right, and now that's so expensive. And that was the whole thing I love about Steam Deck was that originally it was like, oh, $400 or something

or a thing that suddenly could play a lot of your PC games and on the go and even have a dock that would basically be kind of a kludgy but kludgy kind of nice way to play your games almost like a Switch

And now this is breaking that out in a much more specialized, more expensive thing

It's kind of like Xbox in that they want Xbox to be everywhere. They want SteamOS to be everywhere

But it's different in that they're building hardware for it. I do like over time, I feel

faith that Valve commits to its hardware pretty well, at least historically

Like the deck experience has gotten better and better and better. And they seem to be very committed to games routinely being optimized for deck, but I

also don't know if that's based on how many they've sold. How well will future games all be optimized for Steam Machine

That is the biggest question, and you hope it's going to be almost all of them that really

start meaningfully doing it. And then will you start having, you know, the other question I would ask for you is like

what are the odds that PC manufacturers start to kind of mirror this model? Because they almost build reference devices

Yeah, yeah, that's what I was going to say. Yeah, Deck becomes the model for SteamOS on other things

which I hope can be the case here if the hardware is affordable. Yeah, a little bit like the Microsoft with the Surface scenario

It's like, this is what this form factor could be. Go forth and make them. That could be the case here

Not that it would be the first small form factor PC, but in this exact size, in this exact sort of plug-and-play pre-built scenario

and then the Steam Deck gave way, I mean, you can kind of credit the Switch, I guess

if you want to really take the two-handed big screen handheld gaming device first, but both of those sort of led the way to this bevy of Windows gaming handhelds

You got the Legion from Lenovo, you got the Asus Ally, MSI has the Claw, Acer has one now

There's plenty of them out there, so that kind of was a proof of concept. The Steam Deck's like, hey, do this, and they're doing that again here

The price might make that a little prohibitive now. Again, that's not Val's fault. That's just the component market

Every PC I review, every phone review I see, it's like $200 more than last year

Shrug. They wanted to launch this, you know, $800 around there, which I think is a lot more palatable

So it might be a bit harder for these future manufacturers to come in and say, here's our cheap pre-built

They might all be expensive pre-builds. And much like the Windows handhelds then

and this happened to phones too over time. It's like, here's the cheap phone. Now they're all $1,000 flagship phones

And now, like, all the Steam, the MSI Claw, which I saw at Computex, and we're in the process of reviewing right now, it's $1,800

And that is so far removed from the Steam Deck's original price that it's kind of crazy

Yeah, it's all inherently, like, not affordable. They all seem like luxury devices now

And this is, like, the example of the build-specific gadgets movement in tech

What I also hope happens here, and this is a lot outside of this little machine

but considering Valve is a Steam and software company, I would hope that this is an initiative where they're going to start thinking about how Steam

kind of what I was saying, how it runs better on all devices. And in a way, this is kind of an initiative for that, where it's like, because it's a little underpowered

that could also create an impetus to create more meaningful optimizations that are less confusing

so that if you have a laptop that's not the bleeding edge one or whatever else

maybe you can open up these more Steam Machine-like modes that could benefit hopefully all devices

I feel like things are going to go there, but it's hard to tell. I think so too because less new hardware feels like it's going to come out

because everyone's kind of backtracking. So it's like we better optimize for the middle here or even the low end

It should run on laptops that have been out for a few years because these GPU upgrade cycles are getting longer and longer

This is kind of the laptop scenario. It's kind of stuff like that, and it's not as powerful as a desktop GPU

so you should optimize for it. And the Steam Deck, I think, has done that. Cyberpunk, and I'm sure other games, for example, have a Steam Deck visual preset

It has made an impact. You flip through low, high, medium Steam Deck

That's one of the options in the game. Yeah, it becomes a lot more easy to figure out, whereas somebody

I'm on that side, I've seen it forever, but I've reviewed PCs, I'm embarrassed to admit that I'm terrible at optimizing and customize

It fills me with triggers anxiety. And I don't like tinkering. I like the ease of setups

And so, yeah, I feel like Valve is clear to that. And Valve is a company that, like, you know, the bottom line is it's all about Steam

They're the platform. The hardware is always kind of this, you know, adjunct

It's not the number one core to their business. So I feel like this feels like an effort to

as it serves the way that the games can run better in more places

We're gonna showcase for its software, which we were just talking about Pixel phones. Google kinda has the same mindset

They don't sell a giant number of volume, market share wise with those phones

It like here our software here our OS Huh Take it to your own hardware And we did see the Lenovo Legion they have a model with SteamOS It was like the first non hardware It was pre pre with SteamOS So that already an example in the wild Valve has put on its website

an FAQ about these things that they're working on adding support. I think the SteamOS experience

the environment that this launches into, obviously way more mature than what the Steam Deck had

So you already have the advantage of this whole verified system and all these games having been tested it kind of launches into this much easier to play experience that's not to say there weren't

quirks i know you ran into some um there you know uh anything that uses an external launcher a little

awkward on this it pops up like uh like red dead 2 uses the rockstar launcher pops up yep and you

gotta there's like some workaround controls which you know i know from the steam deck you hold the steam button and then you can move the cursor like a mouse cursor with the control stick to like put

your verify code in from your email it's not you know that happened to one of mine too and i'm

trying to remember the game but i mentioned it in this in the story was like yeah it kind of like froze the screen i couldn't even get to the uh for some reason the cursor wasn't coming up and i

was like maybe i should plug in a keyboard but you know the other thing too is i i do really love

that there was no instruction manual at first i was like what the heck and then it literally was

just like scan the qr code you just sign in through your app to to um to you know to steam os and

And boom, this thing became the same environment as my Steam Deck

So it was like, you know, same order of the games. They have some good pop-up instructions on screen to guide you through when you first launch it

Yeah, to get all of your firmware stuff, the order of the plug-in, things like the puck. You don't even need the wireless puck because the wireless protocol for the controllers is built in here

But it just felt like that nice single environment thing where, boom, already I'm on

It's got all the stuff that I wanted. it's a seamless extension

so if you already have a Steam Deck you're sitting on here, it just feels like you moved to a new

new screen it's lazy easy and I really admire that because I don't

feel in the Windows gaming handheld space when I've tried playing them

it has felt like a nightmare it just felt like, can I just get to the smooth

easy part, and they keep wanting that Xbox overlay, but you've got Windows to deal with

and it's not just going to launch directly in and this is just, it's just trying to comfort

And I love that about this. And I also do like the little swappable faceplate

Yeah, the wood one, we've got the base model, which doesn't come with those swappable faceplates

So stuck with that one. Sorry, I didn't play with that, but yeah. I will say, even modern consoles, like a PS5

you know, Series X, they're more friction-filled than they used to be too

It's like, oh, I gotta update again. Oh, I'm out of storage. Oh, I gotta update this game before I can launch it

There's always something. It's not plug and play like it used to be either. like it used to be either

So I think this has about the same level of issue. There's more compatibility stuff, obviously

I think of my 350 something games in my Steam library, like 180 were like fully verified as

run great on Steam Machine. And a lot of multiplayer games don't work. This is one they have to kind of work out

A lot of multiplayer games that run anti-cheat scripts in the background. Yes

Not Linux compatible. They're working on it, but they won't run full stop. Even if you want to play offline. Yeah

And that's like the deck, too, yeah. It looks like there's these weird frictions that, yeah, a lot of that stuff remains pretty true

And it's interesting because then it's like a philosophical argument versus like the do you buy this argument. But I will say, like you're saying, as game consoles start to feel more and more up in the air

especially with what's going on with PlayStation and Xbox, I, from the outside, have never felt more bullish about the idea of a PC as game console than I have now

I think they proved the concept as they wanted to. So I feel like in that sense, there's all this criticism about it

I'm like, this really excites me because I feel like it really, really is here

And now it's a matter of like, oh, can it perform better? Oh, can you do this? Can the price be lower

But like it actually has been achieved. And like you said, like the difference now feels much more like a little checklist than like this is more of a console than it is a PC

Even though it can be a PC. Right. Yeah. I think I said in my review, like I wish the price didn't dominate the discussion so much

Because I think there are so many more interesting things to talk about. And I think it largely succeeds

Again, quibble over the performance all you want. It's not going to blow anybody out of the water. I think it's acceptable

If it was $700, it would be a totally different story. Exactly, yeah. If it came out a few years ago, it would be a slam dunk

That sort of thing. So there's concessions. I like it. I think it's easier to say I like it than it is to say you should go spend $1,000 on it

I think only you know if that fits your gaming setup and your budget. So that's our opinion on it and how it fits into our lives

Yeah, so that's a story on Steam Machine right now. and it is a work in progress and so is the whole gaming landscape

So if you have more questions, let us know in the comments and we'll have more to come

on a whole bunch of gaming hardware and things like this in the future

Thanks for watching