Some people may not want to spend time on cobbling together a Linux machine. There’s some research involved in figuring out which hardware works best, and maybe fiddling around with configuring a system. There is value in know that all of the hardware in your system will get priority support from the OS maintainer and game developers. Some glitchiness in a game on a steam machine will get fixed before some glitchiness on someone’s custom rig.
And many of us don’t buy a new PC every year. What benefit is it to me if a new AAA game has higher resolution options that aren’t available on my 2+ year old PC unless I spend a thousand dollars to buy video card or whatever?
No idea if this will be a success or not, but there is a lot of upside to having a standardized platform (there’s a reason consoles are so popular) and little downsides for anyone that’s not spending more money on hardware than on the actual games. Sure the PC Master Race types won’t want this, but I think that’s a very small group of people.
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 6 days ago
No, talking about the steam machine. There are still people that think it’s going to release at like $400-$500 lol. It’s going to be over $1k for PS4 level power.
topcrest@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
Ah. I’ve not been following price rumors/talks. And $399 made me think of the old steam deck pricing. Wild that someone would be that convinced a more powerful chunk of hardware would be so much less expensive than current steam deck prices.
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 5 days ago
Handhelds and consoles are different though. Consoles/PCs don’t have screens or controllers built in, or a battery. Most of the cost of handhelds is in making them handheld.