Steam Machine - Deja Vu 2015

And I think through all of the announcements, all of the reviews, I think it's safe to say that Valve lost the plot here a little bit, narrowing its focus down onto the mini ITX and ultra form factor PC market targeted towards people with far more spending money than even myself, who might've been interested in buying one, might've thought to spend.

But I mean, let's face it, they're launching it at the worst possible time ever.

And you can't really blame them.

This is likely a long-time planned mountain climb, you know, to reach the current base camp where they're at, of the current summit of, I don't know, Mount...

The electronic prices go up.

And though I probably should have started this entire podcast with just why, and, you know, multi-exclamation mark, I still don't really understand why they decided that this was the window to build computers, and then even then coming back with this as a result.

I feel like we're kind of getting deja vu on the failures of the Steam Machines for anyone who's maybe old enough to remember, what was it, like the 2010s? Early 2010s? But obviously for a whole boatload of new reasons.

But yeah, I don't think they're convincing anyone except... enthusiasts to take a launch day wallet beating on over glorified laptop internals but in the shape of a cube I don't know it's hard to be so savage because literally Valve's journey to get here is more commendable than I've currently led on And there's always time for Valve to come back full circle and win that trust, right? Maybe, whatever, end of 2027, things start coming back down, prices become a little more reasonable.

Or, who knows, two years from now, give us the Steam Machine Pro.

And don't give us, whatever, less than RTX 4060 laptop internal kind of performance.

Give us something that might warrant spending $1,000 or more.

1400 US dollars.

But that's also kind of the thing.

I wonder how long they can play the long game on this if people aren't actually buying it in large droves and hopefully Valve doesn't see it as an opportunity to just end its life dramatically when clearly they got everything right except for, I don't know, the price and maybe a little bit of the performance.

But that's always part of my thinking because I always think they have a very like firm overprice their product and then deliver below average performance.

I don't know, it just screams Valve to me every time I see one of their products.

Maybe, you know, maybe it's because they're the furthest thing from your Nintendos, your Sonys, even PC manufacturers, with the level of pull that they have.

Wow, that went so off.

Okay, hold on.