its partner-made Steam Machines. To date, promotion for the various boxes has been murky at best, and this is really the first opportunity fans have to see all their “home PC console” offerings in one place. The result? It’s a highly organized nightmare, and only goes to show that Valve’s existing competitors in the space, Sony ’s PS4 and Microsoft MSFT -0.85%’s Xbox One, have nothing to fear from Steam Machines. Not even a little bit.

Why? Before I flood your screen with a deluge of reasons, first and foremost what the new store page shows is a huge range of prices, ranging from slightly above asking price for the PS4 and One ($460 for iBuyPower’s box) to typically absurd gaming PC levels (as high as $5,000 for top-of-the-line units from Falcon Northwest and Origin). Across the fifteen(!) different machines on the page, only two are around the $500 mark, while the rest probably average between $700-$900, if I’m being generous.

Let’s clear something up from the start here. One common refrain I’ve heard during the discussion of Steam Machines is that no, they’re not really competing with existing home consoles. They’re trying to expand the space on their own terms, and simply offer a way for PC gaming into the living room. They’re an alternative without being a competitor.

steam machines

I don’t care what phrasing you want to use, but there’s simply no way to get around the fact that whatever their intentions, in practice, Steam Machines are very much in competition with consoles like the PS4 and Xbox One. You cannot build a box that is meant to play video games on a TV in a living room and say that it does not compete with video game consoles. You just can’t.


And can they? Compete, that is? No, and I don’t even know where to begin.


We’ll start with your average console player. This type of person is likely going to choose between and Xbox One and PS4 in this new generation, considering 80% of their favorite franchises have fled Nintendo at this point, so the Wii U will often not even be on the table unless it’s a supplementary system. They want a unit with good performance, good exclusives, a good price, and above all else, ease of use. You buy a video game console for a set price, it plays all video games made for that console, period.

Sure, they may say they care about things like resolution. In fact, according to Nielsen data, most existing PS4 owners say they purchased the system because of the resolution differences between the consoles. And yet in practice, if consumers really cared about resolution and top-of-the-line performance above all else, they would already have invested in a gaming PC. But the barrier of entry to that scene? Complexity and price.

Steam Machines do literally nothing to change that.

Sure, some of them are premade units which takes a bit of the struggle out of building your own machine if that isn’t your thing, but I have to believe most console players are going to look at this list of fifteen different Steam Machines ranging from $500 to $5,000 and not have the faintest idea where to even begin. All the barriers to getting a gaming PC are still there, with few of the benefits of a console.

Yes, Steam Machines will play PC games in your living room, great. But Valve very much wants you to use their new controller to do so, their constantly changing monstrosity that even in its final form reportedly still feels as awkward as it looks. I’m guessing most Steam Machines will be packaged with it this fall, and so players will lose out on a mouse and keyboard to play PC games (a huge, key part of the PC experience), yet not have the familiarity of the Xbox or PlayStation controllers either.