

You maybe could have gotten a much better system for a similar price a year or two ago but I’m not sure you could at today’s prices. Especially if you price out a small form factor one. I wouldn’t be surprised if the original price of steam machine was in the 6-700 range before the current ram/storage/gpu crisis










Those first 2 you posted are roughly 10x the volume of the steam machine, which is one of the big draws for me
16.6" x 10.2" x 14.4" = 40 L
8.5" x 15.75" x 16.50” = 36L
vs
6.1 x 6.0 x 6.4 = 3.7 L
And even the DIY page the cheapest config they came up with is $920. I think Valve pretty much cannot sell their machine less than comparable PC, because if they did, people would just start buying them as general purpose small PCs, so they need to make at least a small profit on them, unlike the dedicated console makers who can take a loss on the machines since the only way to get software on them is through them