Steam Machine as Set Top Box

Hello and welcome to the firstircast, the flagship podcast of VRAM. I'm your friend David Peerce, and today on the show we are taking your questions about the steam machine We published our Steam Machine review a couple of weeks ago. Sean Hollister got a lot of feedback from all of you. He came on the show. We talked about it. We also got a lot of feedback Qions about whether the stam machine is any good, whether it's worth the price, whether the fact that it's valve is valuable. So we're going to dig into a bunch of your questions and try to make sense of the seeam machine once and for all But first, here's everything else happening on the verge today. I'm Jay Kasrnakus and this is ninety Ses onn the verge for Wednesday, july fifteenth, twenty twenty six. Big changes are coming to the Google Play Store in the US. Google will start distributing rival app stores inside its own Android marketplace. And those app stores will get access to every app that's inside Google's own stores too It's a wild shakeup that can meaningfully alter the apps store landscape Google was ordered to make this change after los a lawsuit to Epic in twenty twenty three. Google tried to avoid making the changes through a settlement, but as of last night, that settlement is dead. That means rival appstors can show up as soon as next Wednesday, july twenty second Whill companies actually take advantage of this and launch their own app stores, it's hard to say. But this is the most open the A store ecosystem has been on Android in a long time. If you can bet Epic, we'll take it a shot. Next up, Open AI seems to be trying to change the narrative after Apple sued it last week for allegedly stealing hardware secrets. First, a scoop in Bloomberg sourced to some leaky people in Open AI's world, revealed details of the AI company's first hardware product, a smart speaker with the built in battery so you can move it around your house The speaker could be announced later this year, but it isn't expected to ship until twenty twenty seven. Meanwhile, OpenAe provided emails to NBC News, trying to prove that it didn't ignore Apple's legal demands like Apple claimed The AI company seems to be blaming Apple's lawyers for a confusing email thread that mixed up different people with the last names Wang and Chang. Does any of this really change the story? I'm waiting for the actual legal response. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Home Depot's giant twelve foot skeleton can talk now. There's a new version where you can use an app to talk through its robotic mouth cost three hundred and seventy nine dollars. Totally sounds like a deal. You can read more at the Verge. com. That's ninety seconds from the Verge for Wednesday july fifteenth, twenty twenty six So good, so good. New summer arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Get ready to save big with up to sixty percent off brands like Rag and Bone, Levi's, Adidas, and Free People. Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack The FIFA World Cup is here and you can now feel the thrill of the pitch in FIFA World Cup launch edition on Netflix, a fast and fluid football game where your phone is the controller and the TV is the stadium. Play for your country in sixteen different stadiums with up to four friends. all included in your membership. scroll to the games tab on your TV and play FIFA World Cup Launch Eedition, now, only on Netflix Let's talk Steam machine. The irge of Sean Hlliser' here, Hi Sea. H Okay We got a lot of feedback. on the episode we did about the C machine a couple of weeks ago and Sort the questions we're about to go through into two categories Um, O is functionally about price and sort of what are you actually getting? What is the true value of this machine? And then the other is the valve of it all. L is the fact that it's valve proro or a con or neither is a question we're going to reckon with a little bit here. Um, Let's start with a very long email we got from Jude Jude starts by saying, If this was released by ASus or whoever else besides Valve, you would have torn it to shreds for the bad product that it is instead of spending half the episode defending Valve and looking at the products with thastin into glasses then goes on to say Uh, hereere are all the possible markets. If someone doesn't have a gaming machine or games Iyray, they're better off with the Playsttation as that offers double the value per dollar If they have no machine do have an existing Sam library, they're better off building one themselves or getting a prebuildt And thus, the only remaining market here are people who already have a Steam library, a powerful enough gaming PC that can provide them with a great visual experience, a lot of disposable income, and just want an extra TV box to play chill games from or use for streaming. Basically, Jude's point is this thing is a terrible deal and you guys were far too nice to it. because there's actually no one who should buy it And I think this gets to the shouldn't you just buy or build your own PC doesnn't that neatly solve this problem potentially for for less money Walk me through how you think through the trade offff between those two things As far as I'm concerned, the steam machine is only a good deal if you do not already have a gaming desktop and you want something that seems more like a console than the gaming desktops that are out there right now, or the gaming desktop that you could build. Because if you try to build one yourself, You will find it is quite expensive. You can certainly build a machine that is the price of the steam machine that will play games And you can certainly build He. console like experience out of it. if you spend a lot of time configuring the settings and making it boot into steam bigig picture mode and all of that But what you will not have at the end of the day is a relatively inexpensive machine. And you will not have one that is very cool and quiet and nice to hang around that feels like it belongs in your living room. and Astrk S, I was going to say when you pull it out of the box. The problem with the steam machine, and this is why we gave it a six dude, not a not a seven, not an eight, not a nine. If you read our six, it is good, there are issues, but also redeeming qualities. That's where it stands in our rubric. It's right above just okay and mediocre. So We're just a step beyond those things This box It is not quite ready right out of the box. This is why we're giving it a six and not a seven or an eight. It has a number of issues, but I don't think price is the main issue with it unless you're hoping that it would be PlayStation price for PlayStation performance and I skew it in the review for not quite delivering that thing. I skewer it for one not delivering better performance than a machine from five point five years ago twenty twenty PlaySation five to We're not being ready out of the box. It has issues. This is also what we did with the Steam deck The Steam Deck review, I called it a mess, but I said it was a lot of fun. That was the original Steam Deck review. The machine is in a very similar place difference here as I lay out in the review, is that where that thing started at four hundred dollars, this is tenll forty nine cents. And So a lot of people who know how to build PC's, who've known how to build PC's for years are like, off course I can build a better thing for that amount of money. But if you go out and you look at the prices You can build something. for that amount of money Can you build something better? I argue you can't. I built many PieCs in my life. I don't think I can build anything This cool, this quiet, this compact, this Even this performment for this level of money, the performment, yes, that part I could do So on that front, actually, the thing I've been trying to think about is And I think this goes to both parts of the feedback that we've gotten, which is also about, again, the valve of it all. Is there something greater than the sum of its parts about the steam machine that is hard to see on the spec sheet, right? And I think Part of it is you talk about like the fact that it runs very cool and the fact that it looks nice in your living room in the way that your average like RGB computer tower doesn't U But is there is there something is genuinely hard to replace or imitate this thing that done the way that it is because Valve is Valve and is doing it the way that it does Agin with an asterisk sign. DMOS. If you run windows on a compact computer like this or on any computer really. you are dealing with an operating system that is designed to do so many, many, many, many more things which some of which you may want. if you're used to that Windows environment, if you want to be editing videos on it, a lot of people say that Linux does not have a good video editing tool like your Adobe Premieres or like the Final Cuts of the Wor and the Apple side If you need lots of legacy things, if you need lots of windows things, obviously you're going to want a Windows box instead of this, but all you want to do is sit down and play games and have it boot up into a gaming environment that feels like it was designed for the task. SteamOS is finally that thing. and Windows, despite Microsoft's recent efforts with you know, the Xbox Ally X and other handhelds game mode is not that thing Right now, Steam OS is on the steam deck and it should be on the steam machine, but it is not quite yet because of Sometimes I'd have suspend and resume issues, sometometimes I' had other growing pains, other bugs oping that like the steam deck few months from now, year from now, this thing is great. By the time you can buy it, hopefully it's great. Right. B' a funny thing for you. like one of the You know, truisms of life as a verge reviewer is you can only review the thing in the box Also Valve has done this exact thing before and did deliver. Like the steam deeck did eventually become the thing that we hoped it would become And so I think there is reason to be optimistic and yet you still have to sort of look at it in its face and be like, this thing does not work yet Yeah, to watch you probably will. But I want reers and viewers to understand this is why it's a six and not like a seven or an eight. I'll tell you I'm sensing you've got some feedback on your review when you published it. Do we need to talk about this? Feedback much like commenter who I think also may have been in the comments of the review itself if it could sleep and resume as reliably as the Steam deeck It would be a seven out of six. That alone pumps it up a point. We've done that for other handhelds that have come back from the point of, oh, you couldn't really resume the games anymore. Now you can. Now you can press the button. it turns off. you press it on, there's your game waiting for you exactly where it left off. That happens some of the time on the Steam machine So it's a six. If it happened all the time, it'd be a seven. It's that simple One more hardware question U that comes from Jim who basically again, if I'm summarizing Jim's email says I think the debate on the hardware longevity needs to be at the forefront. This is a thousand dollars box that isn't modular outside of the storage and faceplate, but with hardware in real world testing that iss roughly on par with the RTX thirty six equpped with a meger eight gigabytes ofam The point is essentially This thing You buy a PC or you build a PC expecting it to last a long time Is this thing going to have the longevity and usefulness life that you could expect from a device like that. And what Jim says is, while, I do think this is ultimately just trying to advance Linux as a gaming platform. It's a right place, wrong time product that is too expensive for non gaming PC owners and too weak or superfluous as an upgrade option for those who do have one t But I am curious how you feel about the idea of what this thing might be like One, two, five, eight years from now Yeah, I agree with a lot of what Jim is saying. And honestly, I previous commentary two except for the complaint with the score. but Jim Jim Yes, absolutely. this thing should have been Either priced much lower? kitted much better. I am surprised we're in this place where it's only got the eight gigabyte of VRAM. We're kind of like fighting to make it play things at four K, where you know if it at twelve, maybe we wouldn't be having this issue Um, think that If you know in my perfect world, it would have other replaceable components, but not not everything The storage is replaceable, the memory is replaceable if you dig in there under the cooler What The rest of it is very cleverly and compactly designed around the fan and the cooler, such that it can be so cool and quiet. That's really important to me. I don't know if I would trade that in the living room for upgradeability of an internal variety, I would like this to have a very powerful like Thunderbolt five or USB four port so I could expand it with an EGPU or something down the road. I do not like that like you say, This is not designed for the longevity, not designed with the upgradeability that a normal PC would have Again, which would be much larger to make it as cool and quiet as this or this size, but louder, you know are kind of the trade off you get right now, I think. Is it fair to have higher expectations for something like this than for something like the Steam Deck, which I think you could make a lot of the same arguments about, but it doesn't feel as Uh as much of a negative in something like the Steam Jet just because of the way the form factor works. L I don't think anyone picks up a steam deck saying I expect to use this as my daily driver for a decade. It's just not how we treat devices like that. But I think for something like this, which is for all intents and purposes a PC I feel like our expectations are different. Do you think that's fair? That's absolutely fair. That's absolutely true. The expectations for these are and should be different because It is supposed to be a desktop, a living room PC. When you put it in one of these places and you think about how long it's going to be there, you have to think about how the PlayStation five has already been in those places for five and a half years with total level performance. And the games that are coming down the road in one, two, three years may not play on this as well as you would want them to, even if it plays a lot of stuff that's coming out today, great. I would like more upgradeableility modularity for sure. And I don't feel quite the same way about the steam deeck because Again, the constraints of making it so portable, so handheld Nobody's expecting to put another motherboard in there. doesn't come with the territory, right? Now what Pponents and I kind of consider myself one of them here would argue is that the steam machine, because it's for this living room use case where it's supposed to be so cool and quiet, that gives them a little bit of leeway in the upgradeability department because That's also a constraint where you have to make things less upgradable to get the results that they wanted to. Now, the other place where Valve maybe gives itself some leeway is in the operating system. if it is wholeheartedly putting steamOS out there for other people to make their own steam machines. One of onene of the Verge's friends, Chris Person dunked on folks on Blue Sky brilliantly, I thought, when he pointed out that everybody who's building a steam machine out of their own components to show Valve is doing exactly what Valve wants. Y Valve would love for everybody to build steam machines out of PC components and load steamOS all them. The caveat there is that Valve is not letting go out and build steel machines. It's only letting individual people Go ahead and build them And making this work on every component under the sun is not Val's primary goal. right now. It's a fairly small three hundred fifty person company with a bunch of Linux and Proton experts that they also fund And so if you're diving into with your own components, do not be surprised if there be dragons in that So this is an interesting bit of this tension that I hadn't really thought about until you were just describing it where There is Part of the reason the PlaySation five continues to work five and a half years later is because they're just there is only the PlayStation five They have not released a slightly upgraded PlayStation five every twelve months since then PC market though is getting relelentlessly faster, there's always new stuff, there's always more stuff to support and good thing for the overall industry. It's a bad thing for the ongoing relevance of your particular device that you put in your living room So maybe to some extent just by Buying a PC, you are signing yourself up for a faster run of obbsolescence especially in gaming, when more and more people are going to do more and more bleeding edge stuff And so in a case like this where already slightly underpowered you just run the risk of getting very underpowered much more quickly as the industry kind of leaves you behind in the way that if your're Playsttation, you're like, well, look, this is just the Plsttation Like it's still this, you have to make your game for this That is exactly the thing about the console play. If you pull it off right. If you get enough gamers enough developers to latch ono your piece of hardware as opposed to All of the possible steam machines, if you get them to latch onto these steam machines, the way they latched onto the steam deck, where Sony was making sure all of its games worked well on the steam deck. All the major game developers you can think of, Square Enix, you know, which never took the longest to support steam. They are supporting the steam deeck, making sure final fantasy know, seeven rebirth and remake run well on a steam deeck If valve could put out enough of these steam machines if they had the supply, if the price was low enough that a lot of people would buy into it than it would set nice low bar orly lowest common denominator, whatever you want to call it, it would set a standard that Game Beelers could aim at, could target and then Games would actually not progress as quickly as recklessly as they otherwise might into the stratospheric level of you know K shaped economy graphics that people are going to be able to buy if they can afford ridiculous NVidA NMD cards bringing it more down to eararth where you just You expect games to run on this because game developers need to make them run on this the way they need to make them run on a PlayStation five Support for the show comes from Ring Peace of mind starts with keeping your home safe. by keeping an eye on packages Visitors And whatever else your ring system captures ith battery doorbell, you get a clear view of your front door And you can extend that view to your yard with outdoor Camp plus It has a wide field of view and enhanced video clarity for both day and night. 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Is there any other battery with power boost ingredients inside? No, just Duracl. Remember, goats only trust goats because they're built different And Messi only trusts do yourself. It all started with Callme Naby. Over ten years ago, we created Switched on Pop to listen clloser, uncovering the songcraft behind even the glossiest of pop hits. Since then, we've released almost five hundred episodes. We've defined the sounds of our modern soundtrack and interviewed hundreds of musicians and music insiders, including the singer of Callme Naby herself I' Charl Rson I'musicologist Nate Slan and I'm songwriter Charl Harding. and on july fourteenth, Switch on Pop is embarking on a new chapter. We're stepping out from behind our microphones and in front of the camera to stream our podcast on Netflix. Now you'll still be able to listen to the show anywhere you get podcasts, but now you'll be able to watch us each week Breaking down the sounds of the moment, digging into musical minute with your favorite artists and offering questionable dad jokes as always. We're kicking off our Netflix debut with a four part series on the arrt of the song, W help from artists, producers, and songwriters like Aaron Dessinner, Audrey Hobert, Trevor Horne, Cypress Hill, and Taylor Parks. Stream switched on pop Netflix and anywhere you get podcasts every Tuesday, starting on july fourteenth. Okay, I have a question for you that is it's from Adam and it is the kind of exact other side of the coin of what we've been talking about here. Um, Adam says I'm considering paying the extra money for the support that Valve provides. This is based on their historical releases, like the first gen Steam contontroller that is still usable even though it's out of production I'm hesitant to believe Sony and Microsoft won't try to change their gaming business models, so they want to sell you services between when you sit down to play and when you actually play. This is a great middle ground for me, willing to take some tinkering, but also expecting that Valve will smooth this out sooner than anyone else Listen, do I think Adam is maybe a valve employee in disguise? I don't know. But that is that's the case for the thing, right? Like that is kind of the summation of what you just said that actually Maybe valve is not most. chaotic possibility here that actually signing up for an Xbox or a PlayStation is just as much a risk on what the future of those companies or those platforms might look like, and it actually valveves history of doing right by its products and its customers. pretty strong Valve is the only company I can point to where I would say I trust this company put out the updates that make this device better and more usable down the road. I mean, yeah, the Steam controller, the original Steam link Both of those devices were like fire sale devices for Valve. They did not sell very well. They were given away at a pittance. I think I paid five dollars for for the Steam Link. It kept getting updates, it kept working. Years and years and years. I'm pretty sure it would still work if I plugged it in today, although it is on an older WiFi standard. The steam controller used AA batteries, so it's going to keep working forever. No internal lithium impact I need to worry about there on the original steam controller. The Steam deck is still getting new functionality. The original one, the one that they don't sell anymore. the LCD steam deck They're currently using that crowd of early adopters of the original Steam Deck LCD to test out a new hibernation mode, which should make your Steam Deck last longer when you're just leaving it out unplayed. They have an incredible unprecedented track record of support for this stuff much closer to a Csole manufacturer accept here of the are making the product better instead of trying to figure out how to keep people from hacking it B. and I do worry about what Microsoft and Sony are going to do next with their consoles. I have a lot of thoughts about the end of disks. But I will say this for Microsoft and Sony. they since they embraced X eighty six chips, since they since the Playsttation and the Xbox basically the came he is that happen to run a very locked down operating system. we don't really have to worry very much about backwards compatibility anymore. Yes, they're shutting down the PlayStation three digital store and the PlayStation Vita digital store. PS four games just work on PS five because they are both PCs And I'm pretty sure the PS four and PS five games will just work on PS six. They have started, finally started down the path that PCs have been on for ages where your library will just come with you And so unless they rip it away from you like they rip away digital movies when they lose licensing rights, I'm not as worried about them as I would if they were using like proprietary or special chips for each generation It makes sense. I think Val Valve's reputation is sort of crucial to its ability to pull this thing off that it's trying to pull off. It's going to be really interesting to see Okay, one tiny question and then one more big question that we're gonna get out of here We got a couple of people asking us basically how is this thing going to work as a set top box? Like can I replace my Roku or whatever with it? And I think functionally that question is just Does this have streaming apps on it that you can use It really does not. It does not have that kind of thing. Valve is never a dum over that kind of thing It's I asked them this question in an interview, We asked them about this for sure. And the response was that they could maybe see this happening through the browser. And yeah, you could probably set up the browser. but the reality is there is a lot of DRM that are baked into most of these streaming platforms. You don't just record them off of your PC. In fact, PC's are very limited compared to your average Roku. even though the PC is way more powerful. In terms of the kinds of streams they can readily play, digital providers will not always give you, you your HDR and your atmos and you your four K easily. It's a mess even on Windows And And that's despite having worked with Microsoft and Intel and others for years on things like Play reeddit, DRM Linux It does not have that kind of thing ready for you. I'm sure you can figure out workarounds There are always workarounds in Linux