Submitted 3 weeks ago by can@sh.itjust.works to steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
Before you start making plans to evict your current rig, I want to explain how the Steam Hardware Survey actually works. Rather than representing every player that uses the storefront, the monthly census instead uses a small percentage of participants who’ve opted in as a sample. It’s anything but representative of all 154 million active users, meaning the statistic above isn’t an absolute.
Does the author know how surgery sample sizes work?
Do I?
Is it because it’s opt in or opt out?
One could argue that the Steam Hardware Survey being opt-in means that it’s likely to overestimate the power of Steam users’ computers, since people with fancy rigs are far more likely to want to brag about it.
Perhaps, but a couple years ago when I still had a GTX 1050 I was happy to participate in the survey to show that a lot of gamers didn’t have fancy RTX cards. I suspect there is a lot more low-end hardware on the survey than high-end.
My 960 using ass participated just a few months ago.
I’m just assuming but my assumption is that from the people that are active steam users, the ones that opt in on the survey are in general more involved in gaming than those who don’t, and if they are more involved, the chances that they invest more in gaming than those less involved are high, and part of that investment is the rig.
So, 3 assumptions there, but they make perfect sense to me. If those are actually true, then the survey has a overrepresentation of extra involved gamers, and those have an overrepresentation of better rigs. Thus the survey has a survivorship bias into better rigs, not worse.
If their conclusion is that, even with that bias, 70% don’t have that good rigs, I’d say that their conclusion is sound.
Mind you, I’m not saying that people who do the survey have good rigs, I’m saying that the amount of people that have good rigs compared to those that don’t is probably higher in percentage in the survey due to above.
I use it to show off me playing on Gentoo.
On the other hand, I suspect that some people with high-end PC specs might be more on the “privacy inclined” side of the spectrum, and might prefer not to share data on principle.
Though, if I were to guess, yours is probably the larger influence.
This kind of article, that just stretches out a simple point over a few hundred words, is absolutely infuriating to read.
TL;DR : Steam Machine has a laptop-grade low consumption GPU and will probably be more console-class than desktop-class. (Also, author has likely never taken a statistics class)
Yeah why would valve try to place the steam machine at the gaming pc sector?
This sector is heavily contested by many sellers. And you can’t be cheaper than building your own rig. And on top of that, almost every pc enthusiast has already steam installed, there is no point to build a pc for gaming for valve.
However when you go into the console space things are very different. The steam machine has no problem competing with an Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo switch.
Now performance isn’t everything, now you have steam on a console like pc. People can play their already owned games and by new ones for playing on the TV.
Okay, but the heat sink is 10x any laptop cooler I’ve seen.
That’s just not how statistics work. You never get 100% of the subjects to participate. But you get (in Steam’s case) an enormous sample size, that very likely represents the vast majority of gamers.
It’s probably skewed by how many of us have consoles more powerful than our “gaming” PC’s. I don’t know many PS5 or Xbox Series X owners that are bothering with a more powerful PC. Give us something that has a chance in hell of bringing-in some converts.
I did the math during the GPU price insanity
It was cheaper to buy a steam deck, ps5 AND Xbox series x than a gaming PC
I’m fine with that and now I’m seriously looking at the Steam Machine vs Framework Desktop as my next “PC” for the two dozen or so games that are much better on non-console hardware and the Deck can’t run properly
The weird part is I think a lot of the disappointment comes from a lot of people with even high-end gaming systems wanted this to be the thing that replaces it just because they hate windows so much and because it wasn’t as powerful they couldn’t just buy this box and it would just do it
If they have a high end rig, they should be able to install the Steam Machine OS to it though, thus making it a high end Steam Machine?
The steam machine is also guaranteed to have official driver support for everything on the board which is definitely not the case if you install steamos on any given gaming pc
Yep but the common person doesnt want to install anything they juat want to buy sonething and plug it in. Thats why desktop linux wont happen untill they can go into a store and buy it on hardware and stream machine is the closest we have in this day and age for that to happen.
Steam OS doesn’t support Nvidia or Intel hardware. You’d be better off installing Bazzite
If it’s cheaper than the top 30% I’ll think about it. I haven’t had a gaming capable PC in a long while and I HAVE wanted one, but I’m not paying $1000 for it
Approximate same power mini-pc - Minisforum HX99G, when being sold (discontinued as of today) used to be at a price around $800. Sometimes it was found to be sold at discount price of $700.
I want to believe that Steam Machines will be lower than that due to brand name recognition and mass production.
If it’s not cheaper than a PS5 I don’t think it’s gonna catch on unfortunately. Xbox is obviously defunct by now but the ps has much much more wide ranging awareness than Steam. And to compete with that they’ll need more than “it’s twice as expensive but a little prettier” to the layman.
My home gaming PC is a ryzen 1500x and an Nvidia 1060 GPU. Old as hell but still runs most games.
Most people on steam probably have a rig with 4+ year old hardware, and after seeing what my little steam deck oled can do, id say the steam machine will be able to out perform any 4+ year old windows system when it comes to gaming.
Technically all surveys are opt-in. Gallup can’t force you to answer questions when they call you on the phone. You could just hang up. It’s rather silly to argue that opting in makes it an invalid survey.
The design looks so solid but it’s likely not more powerful than an RX 6750XT or RTX3080 so it’s not something I’ll need sadly.
It’s roughly two-thirds of a 6750xt or half of a 3080 so yeah definitely not
so is my ps3
Idk why everyone is giving their input when all of you will line up and buy this no matter what.
Who? This isn’t the Switch 2, I dunno where this is coming from…
Switch 2 is ass and everyone says " I’m not buying it " only to fold and line up and pay as soon as its out.
I won’t be. I’ve set up my old rig, a Ryzen 3600/Radeon 7600 mini-ITX machine on my television running Bazzite. AFAIK it’s quite a similar experience to SteamOS (Launches in Steam big picture mode, can switch to a KDE desktop, immutable distro with flatpak apps), from what they’ve released, it seems my machine has relatively similar performance, it’s about 3 times as big, but…I don’t need a Steam Machine.
I might spring for a Steam Frame headset though.
Who are your referring to? I’m not gong to buy it. He’ll, we don’t even know the price.
We don’t know the price, but I’m interested, weather I buy or not, will depend on the price.
As Linus (inferior) of LTT said, most products are not bad products, just bad price.
That’s what everyone says and then as soon as it’s out everyone rushes to buy.
If a customer is satisfied with their purchase then it is equal or better to anything else out there.
Oh no, will steam machine flop again? Sometimes I wonder I am being delusional, thinking steam deck and machine has any edge in today’s world where AI apparently reigns supreme.
Why are they spying on my gear? Fuck off.
Hardware survey is opt in, so you should chill out.
Do you have a habit of reading things on Steam?
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 3 weeks ago
This is very close I think to critics and movies. Critics will always be hyper critical of movies because, well, it’s your job. You go in and watch movies all day - you’re going to pick up on small details that most average watchers won’t notice and you will be hyper critical of that.
Similar here, if your job is to play games and review hardware I’m guessing the writer of this thinks more people than not have huge gaming setups, when in reality Valve is right, most have a modest setup. They know they’re not competing with ultra highend, those people are already in the bag. They’re going after the casual people who maybe haven’t updated their PC in 6 years and just want to play some newer games, getting them into the ecosystem. In short, it’s hard to be a critic of a system that wasn’t designed for you in mind. Hell it’s not designed for me either.
nobody158@r.nf 3 weeks ago
Its probably not designed for me in mind but I love my steam deck and depending on price I will probably buy a steam machine.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 3 weeks ago
I use Bazzite on my TV, fork of SteamOS, and it’s been a gamechanger. It’s so easy to just have all of my games on the TV, so I think the machine will be a great investment.
TachyonTele@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
That’s is why i got a steam deck. My gaming laptop died and i was stuck with idk what this thing is. So having a set, reliable, and recent pc setup was perfect.