The one thing Valve would change about the Steam Machine? 'Make it cheaper'

Valve explains the Steam Machine (and that pricing) - YouTube

Valve has a new cube coming out, and boy is it pricey. The Steam Machine finally broke cover last Monday, revealing that its absolute cheapest model would still set you back $1,049—for which you can thank the RAM crisis. It caused some consternation, with a lot of people who might have thought themselves day-one buyers balking at the sum. Well, Valve balked too.

PCG sat down and chatted with Valve engineers Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais ahead of last Monday's reveals and, yep, they're not happy about the price either. We asked the pair, if they could snap their fingers and magically change one thing about the Steam Machine, what would it be? Their answer was quick: the price.

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"Make it cheaper," laughed Aldehayyat, in response to the question. "Yeah, I mean, that's an easy one," agreed Griffais. But it sounds like Valve went through the wringer when it came to negotiating memory and storage for the Steam Machine. "Things that, two years or a year ago—commodity things—you would just say, 'Yeah, I need that much,' and you just pay the normal price for it and it's all good. Now you have to negotiate really hard just to secure a few thousand."

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As for the hardware? Valve's pretty chuffed with it, sounds like. "It's kind of perfect for what I need because we've shaped it like that, right?" said Griffais, though Aldehayyat added "We're open for feedback. I think we're pretty biassed, obviously."

Oh, there was one thing: "We always want more ports," said Griffais. "People want more ports. The thing would be full of ports on all the sides if we listened to everyone." Mark it down, folks: Steam Machine 2 to feature a trypophobic mess of ports on all available surfaces.

Anyway, the result of Valve's hardware travails is that a min-spec Steam Machine costs $1,049. And Valve says it's not gonna subsidise the cost owing to its "religious" refusal to "build a more closed system." On the plus side, you could always turn your own PC into a Steam Machine, provided you're using an AMD GPU. As of SteamOS 3.8, Valve has given its official blessing to SteamOS installs on non-Valve hardware.

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One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.