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Valve's Steam Machine is launching, finally, with reservations starting today. While the hardware is the same as it was when it was announced late last year, almost nothing else in PC gaming seems the same. There's a massive component shortage. Prices are high on tech in general, and speculation about how the Steam Machine would be priced took over the conversation about the entire launch.Ahead of the system's launch and reservation queue opening, I talked to Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat to discuss the system: how it was engineered, why Valve made the decisions it did, and how the company came to pricing that starts at $1,049."It's definitely the case that you know our original design was based on memory and storage prices from, you know, two years ago or so," said Griffais. "And so we were in a different segment than we were hoping to be, but I think it's more of a reflection of where the market as a whole is than Steam Machine itself, right?"The engineers didn't dare forecast the reception to the price, nor how that would affect sales. But Griffais suggested that Valve expects anyone who wants the power in a Steam Machine would still have to pay a similar amount in another device, but highlighted what's unique to the Machine — the form factor, how quiet it is, the CEC integration, and the dedicated Bluetooth controller antenna.I posited the possibility of people going for a console, instead. Even the PlayStation 5 Pro is currently cheaper, at $899. But the two engineers suggested that's not the right comparison.Griffais said there's more to compare than just specs and price. He suggested that PC gamers would also have to rebuy games they want to play, and that some of them would have to get used to the idea of paying to play games online."I think the value of the Steam machine is inherently tied to the value of your Steam library in a lot of ways, right?" Aldehayyat said. "Like, the more games you have on Steam, the more valuable the Steam machine is to you, and the Steam machine makes your existing library even more valuable. So, those two kinds of decisions are very much intertwined. And I think at least early on, we suspect that it's for people who already have a big Steam library… it's just going to make a lot of sense to them."Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.The lack of subsidiesA lot has been made of the fact that Valve is not subsidizing the hardware, which the company has said would turn the PC into a more closed ecosystem. There has always been an assumption that Valve has subsidized the Steam Deck off of the profits it takes from the sales on the Steam Store.That's not quite the case, the Valve engineers said."If you look at like certain SKUs at certain points of time, it might be below or above cost bya small margin," Griffais said. "I think there's some comments that we made around it, you know, being painful and all that early on, that was more about being as close as possible to cost than anything, yeah, same thing [with the Steam Machine], right?"In fact, Griffais claimed that despite recent cost increases to the Steam Deck OLED due to the component shortage (and, now, the Steam Machine), they're being more aggressive on pricing now than they used to be."We understand that the higher price is less accessible to people… and so we're even more aggressive now, trying to be as close as possible to the actual cost of the parts that we're shipping," he added."But it's important that the Valve hardware is a self-sustained program, it's not subsidized by software sales," Aldehayyat said. "So that's kind of the important piece that we can get across."8GB of VRAM? 4K support? Really?As soon as the Steam Machine was announced, enthusiasts honed in on one very specific point on the spec sheet: the semi-custom AMD RDNA3 graphics with 28 CUs and, to many, a sparse 8GB of VRAM.Griffais said that Valve is "very aware" that it is being "kind of aggressive" with 8GB of VRAM. But the way he talked about it, it seemed that the team was also taking a sort of artistic license with what players want out of a small box like this. He said that the team did calculations that that for "the kind of stuff that you would want to play" 8GB could support the level of detail and performance one would expect out of a small, TV-based system."The cases where you're running out of VRAM are actually cases that you would not want to be playing on a system like that," he said. "Yeah, it'd be too slow… The cases where you're exercising the VRAM limits are actually cases that you wouldn't want to play as a real user, in my opinion" He admitted however, that it's possible that in the future that some games may need more VRAM to reach the same performance.Still, on SteamOS, the team has been working to make VRAM more efficient. For starters, the current iteration of SteamOS was really only meant for APUs, but now has logic for discrete GPUs and VRAM. That came with a different set of features to add, like handling VRAM under stress to get the best possible outcome. The team at Valve is still working on it.In Aldehayyat's opinion, the upgrade cycle for PCs has been "slowing down dramatically," and that they're seeing games come out with a better ability to scale across CPU and GPU generations, and that the PC ecosystem isn't designed with a single fixed performance target in mind.
