Valve says Steam Machines are better than gaming consoles

[LurkerJ]

ganoncrotch said:

LurkerJ said:

HoloDust said:
Bollocks.

Alienware's $450 Steam machine is the cheapest one, and that 860M inside it is not faster than PS4's GPU (close in some games, but note there really).

It is faster that XOne though, so they're only Half-Lying.

Faster on paper. We don't how well games are gonna run on it. I'd rather have a slower machine with well optimized games. 

To be fair to Gabe, online play is free on steam machines, gaming for 5 years on the PS4 will add $250 to the total amount paid (and $300 to X1?)

But of course that is only if you go for online gaming, I personally rarely to never play online but do keep a psn+ sub for the instant game collection.

"In 2014, PlayStation Plus provided more than $1,300 worth of games in the Instant Game Collection,^[31] while competing service Xbox Live provided $584 worth of games.^[32]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Instant_Game_Collection_games_%28PAL_region%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Games_with_Gold_games

So yeah, playing online might cost money, but they do also give you 4/6 (XBLG/PSN+) games to play on your system each month for that price, and like I said too you can happily own a X1 or PS4 and not pay for online at all, both systems have even taken most non multiplayer stuff out from the Paywalls now, even cloud saves on XB1 are free to use without the sub.

On the other hand, with $50-60 you can buy a lot of games if you are willig to wait for sales and offers like humble bundles on PC. 

Anyhow, looks like the cheap steam machines are gonna struggle to run games, even the mid rangers don't sound like a good deal. As I said, benchmarks and faster/slower comparisons are useless when you know games aren't as optimized for the hardware, if you want something cheap and reliable, a console is still the safest bet.