IGN are not the best when it comes to actual meaningful analysis, they were probably go going off the recent trend of PC hardware to land around $999 without any contextual consideration of the specs, form factor or purpose of the machine

Moore's Law is Dead estimated that the GPU will be approx 20% less performant in real world gaming than the PS5 given that games will be less optimized.

He did add the caveat that by the time that it comes out FSR4 may very well be available on RDNA 3, which would help shrink that gap.

From my POV I'd have liked to have seen something with a little more oomph. If the pitch was 'this will play games at parity or better than PS5/XSX but give you access to your steam library (which is far far superior to those of the consoles & these days includes most of their newer 1st party games) & also gives you the flexibility of a PC it'd have been hard to resist.

Even if that would have made it 100 - 200 bucks more than the PS or XB it'd have been worth it for the access to cheaper versions of games + the advantages I mentioned above.

If it ends up being a similar price to the two consoles but 20% less performant it feels like more of a compromise to me...

I hope they come out with a 'Pro' version at some point that can trade blows or surpass PS5Pro, again would be willing to pay over PS5Pro sticker price for the clear advantages.

Failing that, a version that allows you to swap out GPUs, even if that means mobile versions to keep the form factor small, that would solve a lot of problems.

Yes, if they could release a model with a close to 9060 XT 16gb equivalent GPU, with all other specs the same, for about $799. I'd be all over it. As it is, the gpu is just too weak for me to consider it at the moment. I like everything about it except the GPU.

I feel like for just an extra $100 spent on the GPU would have made it a much more attractive product for me, even a 7600 XT I'd be at least considering it.

The "GabeCube" name the internet has given the Steam machine is hilarous and awesome at the same time. Wonder how long it will take for someone like Dbrand to make a GabeCube aftermarket option.

If this becomes a thing for multiple generations going forward, it could be my next home if Playstation goes belly up at some point.

Now all it needs is a GameCube emulator and the iconic GameCube startup music.

Oh, and being able to use the wavebird controller.

The console space could really use more competition, with Xbox having committed Hara-kiri. 

I feel like the Steam Machine though is more a niche thing rather than something that will pose any meaningful resistance to PS, much like the Steam Deck posed no real resistance to Switch.

That said, more options are a good thing. 

Will the steam library be optimised for this vs say a PC or it is still up to each developer to do that?

I think this is looking like Valve slowly expanding their audience, which is probably exactly what they're aiming for. It's probably a low-risk effort that's going to pay off a bit in the long run.

I honestly have no idea how the whole Steam library could be optimized for this automatically - or even manually. I think the best that could happen is optimized settings for Steam Machine for each game, but that would have to be on a per-game basis. I don't think that happened with Steam Deck either. That said, Steam Deck certainly seems to have received some attention from developers, so depending on how things go, this might too. I don't know how far exactly developers have gone to support Steam Deck, but I suspect it's not a lot, so personally I wouldn't expect anything drastic. Still, this could end up being one of the devices developers ensure their games run reasonably on.

Generally the in game settings are up to the developer to implement. Many games generally have a detector of some kind that automatically configures the game to usually either high or low settings. But overall, game optimization from devs is not something that can be relied up on.

But Valve does do a few things which make them unique over a traditional windows pc experience. Because Steam deck and machine are fixed hardware, Valve does pre-compile the shaders which significantly reduces to eliminates shader compilation stutter from various game engines for developers who do not do it themselves. That along with sleep/resume and slightly faster performance on Linux does help the game experience quite a bit.