It's based on the Steam Hardware Survey, so unless those office PCs have Steam on them, they shouldn't count.

When I take a look in their own Steam hardware survey, the new Steam Machine only offers equal or better performance to ~50% of PCs.

The Steam Machine seems to have a GPU equivalent to a RX 7600, probably a bit below.

The RTX 3060 should be in that performance area in rasterizing games, but has a huge advantage in upscaling (DLSS 4 image quality compared to FSR 2 + FSR 3 games).

But as soon as you want to play some raytracing games, even at 1080p / FullHD, it falls off a cliff:

For a fixed system that can't be upgraded, which should stay relevant from 2026 to probably 2030+ , they should have at least used a RDNA4 GPU with FSR4 support and much better raytracing capabilities. 

They should have an ability to upgrade.

To be expected honestly, I mean you don't reach 150m+ steam users through tech enthusiasts who spend $1000 every 6 years on new hardware

Most gamers on any platform are casual users who play a few experiences a year, they're probably not on forums and are likely more interested in generational leaps versus incremental quality settings that most hardware upgrades achieve.

Yeah, but I think typically the majority of active PC gamers will upgrade to hardware better than an old console by its 4th year. The transition has been slower this generation on both PC and consoles (where tens of millions of PS4 players refuse to upgrade).

I'm a PC gamer myself (dropped PS4 after Sekiro) with a build much weaker than a PS5, but still decent-ish for most games that I care about.

Yeah, I think thats because the generational leap is just less present, but also that same flattening of the curve is what has helped steam grow so much in the last decade imo. Concurrent players has grown over 4x since 2015 and I think ease of old hardware/non gaming PCs ability to play most popular games is huge part of it. Hardware is less a barrier to entry and that has also made consoles a little bit less in important too

If they had made GPU modules for it like a framework laptop that could have been great, though likely expensive.

They could have at least included an oculink port though for external GPU support.

Oh well wait till Steam Machine Pro

Not office PC's, but it does include anyone who has Steam installed on a laptop, like me. My 1060 gaming laptop could still run Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 at high quality at 48 and 72 fps. 

My youngest also his Steam installed on his weaker laptop, just for some indie games. He mainly games on his PC with 3060. (And mostly plays Roblox so that's still overkill) 

70%+ of the 'master race' isn't bothered by 1080p, 60fps. You really don't need much to play at 1080p 30-60 fps unless it's a heavy RT title. So in that sense the GabeCube is well positioned like the Series S, will do fine as a 1080p60 machine. It's just not that interesting for the 30% or anyone who is already used to game on a 3060 or better.

From the hardware survey 1080p or less accounts for 63.7% of Steam gamers
2.5K or less accounts for 90.13%

Popular resolutions

1366 x 768  2.57%  +0.11%
1920 x 1080 53.47% +0.24%
1920 x 1200 2.04% -0.09%
2560 x 1440 19.93% -0.59%
2560 x 1600 5.22% -0.24%
3440 x 1440 2.99% +0.06%
3840 x 2160 4.65% -0.18%

For sitting close to a monitor, the 'master race' sure doesn't care much about 4K.

For consoles 4K is overkill unless you sit on top of the TV.
Popular 'bedroom' TVs are 43" and 50"
Any further than 6 and 7ft from those makes 1440p the max you can see. (with 20/15 vision)

A lot of those are laptops with either just an iGPU/APU, some more entry-level GPU like a 3050/3060 (mobile) or MX series GPUs, or simply old computers that are still rocking GPUs like the 2060, 1080 or older GPUs, many of them also being ripe to get upgraded soon. I'm also fairly sure that they added pure office PCs to come up to that value, because as like Conina explained before, even if just taking the Steam Survey into account it should have been a lot closer to 50% already.

In other words, in 2 years, this should have dropped below 50% already simply due to entry-level mobile GPUs outperforming the overclocked 7600M in the Steam Machine, and even less in the Steam survey alone. And once DDR6 comes into the picture, it's quite possible that iGPUs/APUs will be able to outperform this GPU