Valve says the Steam Machine is better than what 70% of PC gamers have at home, a convenient reminder that not all gaming PCs are monster rigs

The Steam Machine is a peculiar device. Ever since it was announced, we in the PC Gamer hardware lair have been discussing exactly what the target market is and who will get the most use out of it. And while that question looms in part because of the gaming PC's as-yet unknown price tag, it's because of its middling specs. On that front, Valve explains that the company's upcoming machine is actually "equal or better" than 70% of Steam gamers' systems.

Talking on YouTube channel Adam Savage's Tested, a Valve engineer said, "Another thing that we actually looked at is the Steam Hardware Survey. Basically, that just gives us a good benchmark of where people's home devices are at, in terms of performance. And the Steam Machine is equal or better than 70% of what people have at home. So that's also another way to, kind of, think about where we kind of arrived at that performance level [that they targeted]" (via Notebookcheck).

The engineer explained that the company wants the Steam Machine to allow users to play all their Steam games, but "we also kind of wanted to target more of an entry-level device" that is affordable. Thus the middling specs.

The Steam Hardware Survey tells us about the kinds of systems that the broad population of Steam users have each month: GPU, CPU, operating system, and so on. That's only based on those who are offered and choose to respond to the survey, though. It isn't the best at tracking smaller changes over short periods of time, but for figuring out broad data, such as how powerful 70% of users' machines are, I reckon it's fine.

The Steam Machine has a custom AMD RDNA 3 chip with 28 compute units (CUs), which makes it roughly equivalent to a Radeon RX 7600M, or a cut-back version of the Radeon RX 7600. It also has 8 GB of VRAM, too, which puts it behind most mid-range graphics cards today, but in line with budget ones.

Put two and two together, and Valve is pointing out that most people who game on PC don't have the latest, greatest machines. Most, in fact, run on what we'd consider a "budget" rig, or an old rig that's equivalent to a modern budget one. This tracks with what I've found when looking over Steam Hardware Surveys. The most popular graphics card is still the RTX 3060, and there are plenty of 10-series GPUs and older ones populating those lists.

We might get a different picture of the PC gaming landscape because what we often see online is a vocal minority of people with more modern and more powerful gaming PCs. This might go some way towards explaining why there's been such vocal backlash against the Steam Machine's 8 GB of VRAM, which I think will be unwarranted provided it's priced right.

And therein lies the crux, yet again: pricing. A dinky, console-like, SteamOS-powered gaming PC running an RDNA 3 GPU with 28 CUs and 8 GB of VRAM might be equivalent to or better than 70% of current Steam gamers' rigs, but how much do those rigs cost?

I'm sure people will be willing to pay a little extra for that official Valve stamp, but how much extra? Let's hope Valve prices it right. Over here, we're expecting something in the $500–600 range, but we're all a little in the dark, for now.

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