| Captain_Yuri said: Opinion Piece time! PC gaming these days has become a luxury more so than anything else. No longer can you argue about the concept of Value vs consoles. It's a platform where if you want to play, you need to pay a very high entry fee and imo, that's not going away anytime soon. Crypto is coming back up in price and once again, it is becoming viable to mine. Software like Nicehash makes it so easy to mine these days that anyone with a half decent GPU can do it. And electricity is so cheap that most people in a lot of countries won't care. AMD and Nvidia (to a slightly lesser degree) has all but abandoned the budget market. Intel is still releasing budget CPUs that perform very well but if you can't pair it with a good GPU, it won't be very useful when trying to play AAA games This is why if Valve or someone were to make a gaming PC that's subsidized to be budget friendly, I think it would sell like hotcakes. The problem with the old steam machines is that not only were they third party only, building a PC with a similar price point would more often than not be cheaper as companies marked up the branded PCs or kept the same pre-built PC premium back in those days. These days however, it's more often than not cheaper to get a Pre-built PC than a DIY PC. And the reasons are companies like AMD/Nvidia gives OEMs discounts that they don't give the DIY market and releases cheaper components exclusively for OEMs. As an example, Dell has a 5800 non X which performs very closely to 5800X but it's obviously cheaper but it's OEM only. So if Valve were to make a budget friendly PC with Steam OS with great value as they would get the same OEM discount. I think it would work in a market where the pricing is this terrible and AMD/Nvidia is not leaving a lot of options. My hope would be: CPU: i5 11400 CPU: i3 10105F $500-$600 |
They absolutely can make their own gaming PC's, they just have to do it themselves and not rely heavily on third parties like they did with Steam Machines (where they were the ones being hands off and the third parties were the hands on).
If they can push both Steam deck and their own PC's, both using Steam OS, I think they would have a good shot in the arm for pushing Linux that bit more and becoming a more stable player in the field (unlike Google/Amazon, both of which have seemingly flopped with their endeavours).
Step right up come on in, feel the buzz in your veins, I'm like an chemical electrical right into your brain and I'm the one who killed the Radio, soon you'll all see
So pay up motherfuckers you belong to "V"
