An announcement from last year is finally becoming an actual thing Australians will be able to buy, but the way they can do it at least initially isn’t exactly going to be an easy deal.
Valve’s blending of its Steam gaming platform seen on the excellent Steam Deck portable is making its way into a console of sorts in a PC designed to be small. It’s a specific foray for the company behind Steam, Portal, and hopefully an eventual conclusion to the *Half-Life* series of games, where its Steam Machine PC-like console will deliver an easier living room experience than plugging in a giant desktop would normally offer in the home.
Announced last year alongside a controller and Steam Frame VR headset, the expectation would be that the trio would launch this test. But these announcements came *before* a world where the boom in AI data centres has also meant the pricing of hardware has risen due to supply shortages.
Now those very gadgets can really only be priced higher, as practically every device maker dependent on RAM and solid-state technology is forced to increase pricing to match. And since that’s a problem for computer makers and phone makers and game console makers, it becomes a problem for *everyone*, particularly the general public who ends up absorbing it with higher-priced tech.
Which brings you to the Steam Machine.
Essentially a gaming PC as a console, the Steam Machine encases a system spec roughly six times more powerful than the handheld Steam Deck in a device sized like a 15 centimetre cube. It’s not very big, but it comes with a sizeable performance.
The problem is it also comes with an equally sizeable price tag, fetching a starting price of $1609 in Australia for a 512GB Steam Machine *without* the controller, which itself is a bit of an optional extra. Add the Steam Controller, and it becomes $1728. Bluetooth is a part of the design, however, so it should work with other controllers.
If 512 GB isn’t enough to future proof yourself against the increasing size of big games, there’s also a 2TB model on the way, which will be priced at $2109 in Australia without the Steam Controller or $2228 with.
The price is definitely up there, and likely because of those aforementioned memory struggles. But how you get one also is a little complicated.
Reservations will be randomised in what Valve says is “an attempt to improve the purchase experience and limit resellers”, which basically means an attempt to limit scalpers from pricing the Steam Machine even higher. But it does mean one cannot simply buy the compact computer, and it becomes more of a randomised process of hoping and waiting, so to speak.
When you are added, you’ll get an email about it, so you’ll at least have an idea of what’s going on, and the first batch will go out from June 29, gradually working through the reservation list as time goes on.
It’s definitely an approach, and one that comes with a high price, particularly for a device designed to stay home and turn the PC into a console of sorts.
With such a high price, it doesn’t immediately seem like the Steam Machine will change console-style gaming in quite the positive way the Steam Deck did for portability, which delivered handheld gaming without quite as high a price tag as other portable PCs. That said, it did come *before* AI pushed prices of everything up, so it’s difficult to judge this machine in quite the same way.
For now, this reviewer will likely stick to leaving his gaming machine on the network and using an Apple TV Steam app to play remotely. Sure, it’s not the same, but it just might be easier in this economy, at least until AI is done wreaking havoc on any sense of price and economic stability.
