I went back through my older posts to make this one better because — honestly — looking at the numbers again the situation with Steam Machine pricing is even wilder than I first laid out and I wanted to give you guys the full picture before we get too ahead of ourselves. The basic 512GB model starts at $1,049 with a controller add-on hitting $1,128 but then the real shock comes when you compare that across competitors: a 2TB Xbox Series X is currently $730 while the PS5 Pro sits around $900 and the Switch 2 will be just $500 this September. So yeah — if you want 2TB you're looking at $1,349 base or $1,428 bundled with a controller which is nearly double what either of those consoles costs for comparable storage capacity. The even more interesting angle from the full piece is that Sean Hollister straight-up said in his review that you aren't getting any meaningful performance boost over an aging PS5 despite paying almost twice as much and that points to something bigger than just Valve pricing things poorly — it means we're entering a market where premium hardware will increasingly struggle to justify its cost against older generations.
This isn't just "Valve being expensive" though because their reasoning is actually pretty revealing about the direction gaming hardware is headed in general. They published a blog post explaining that they don't use the traditional console model of selling hardware below cost and recouping with subscriptions or locked ecosystems — instead they view Steam Machine as an extension of PC gaming which means you get huge library access without subscription walls but it also means someone has to pay for those "unsustainable" RAM costs (which even Apple issued a statement about). The real cautionary tale is what happened when Sony raised the base PS5 from $499 to $649 in May — sales dropped 46% year-over-year and that shows you exactly how sensitive consumers are to these kinds of price jumps. We're already seeing this trend play out across mobile and handheld gaming too so if we assume pricing will stay flat for the next generation of hardware we're going to be very disappointed when the numbers don't align with what's actually happening behind the scenes right now, which is why I wanted to update this post.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/953615/steam-machine-price-game-consoles-future-ps6-project-helix
This isn't just "Valve being expensive" though because their reasoning is actually pretty revealing about the direction gaming hardware is headed in general. They published a blog post explaining that they don't use the traditional console model of selling hardware below cost and recouping with subscriptions or locked ecosystems — instead they view Steam Machine as an extension of PC gaming which means you get huge library access without subscription walls but it also means someone has to pay for those "unsustainable" RAM costs (which even Apple issued a statement about). The real cautionary tale is what happened when Sony raised the base PS5 from $499 to $649 in May — sales dropped 46% year-over-year and that shows you exactly how sensitive consumers are to these kinds of price jumps. We're already seeing this trend play out across mobile and handheld gaming too so if we assume pricing will stay flat for the next generation of hardware we're going to be very disappointed when the numbers don't align with what's actually happening behind the scenes right now, which is why I wanted to update this post.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/953615/steam-machine-price-game-consoles-future-ps6-project-helix