Seven months later, Valve’s Steam Machines look dead in the water

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It's been about seven months now since Valve officially got into the hardware business with its Steam Machines, a line of Linux-powered gaming console/PC hybrids paired with a unique dual touchpad Steam Controller. Today, we're getting our first concrete glimpse of the impact that hardware has had on the wider market for gaming machines—and the numbers don't look too good for Valve.

 

As part of an update on new Steam Controller functions, Valve announced that it has sold over 500,000 Steam Controllers since the early November launch. A Valve representative confirmed to Ars that this number includes the controllers that are packaged with every branded Steam Machine sold through Valve's hardware partners.

 

Put it together, and you find that there have been less than half a million Steam Machines sold over a span of more than half a year. The real number could potentially be much lower when you consider curious Windows gamers who bought a Steam Controller and SteamOS players who bought additional controllers. While the 500,000 number doesn't necessarily include people who decided to download and install SteamOS on their own PCs (or all sales of Valve's $50 Steam Link streaming box), it probably serves as a good ceiling for the wider SteamOS market at this point.

 

Half a million might not sound like a bad sales number for a brand new hardware platform, but it starts to look pretty tepid in the context of the wider gaming market. Both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One sold over a million consoles in their first day on the market in 2013. After just over seven months on store shelves, Microsoft was up to about 5.5 million Xbox One sales and the PS4 had racked up 10.2 million worldwide sales. That's what a successful gaming hardware launch looks like these days.

 

More @ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/its-time-to-declare-valves-steam-machines-doa/

[trag3dy]

Not very surprising. I'd forgotten it even existed.

[Doli]

I guess we can expect to find more of them on woot.com.

[chrisj1968]

The only one probably that can survive would be Nvidia.

[George P Global Moderator]

No surprise there, gamers who would care for something like this are much more interested in building their own gaming systems to their own liking then buying something pre-built.   I'm in the process of building a new PC with more gaming in mind but I also intend to use it for other tasks as well, if I just want a system for gaming alone I'd get a console.

 

I bet the number of actual steam machines sold is around the 100k mark, if it was higher then Valve wouldn't be talking about having sold 500k steam controllers, they'd be talking about the actual systems instead.

[DrunknMunky Veteran]

I doubt they are worried. Steam Controller and OS are the two ponies they are betting on, and to a lesser extent Link. The machines are not manufactured by Valve, so their losses are paltry compared to if they created them in-house.

[chrisj1968]

1 hour ago, George P said:

No surprise there, gamers who would care for something like this are much more interested in building their own gaming systems to their own liking then buying something pre-built.   I'm in the process of building a new PC with more gaming in mind but I also intend to use it for other tasks as well, if I just want a system for gaming alone I'd get a console.

 

I bet the number of actual steam machines sold is around the 100k mark, if it was higher then Valve wouldn't be talking about having sold 500k steam controllers, they'd be talking about the actual systems instead.

would be cool to see what your rig looks like when finished. I suppose you'll throw a couple 1080's in for good measure?

[George P Global Moderator]

1 hour ago, chrisj1968 said:

would be cool to see what your rig looks like when finished. I suppose you'll throw a couple 1080's in for good measure?

I'm not looking to SLi anytime soon, so just one card for now.  I'm going to wait and see what EVGA does as far as liquid cooling.

[PGHammer]

The OS (SteamOS) is as close to ideal for a non-Windows gaming-centric PC as exists today; the issue with the SteamMachines themselves is the same one that still plagues a lot of mainstream desktop PCs (even ones built around Windows) - too much overhead (in terms of price); it is cheaper to build than buy.

[adrynalyne]

24 minutes ago, PGHammer said:

The OS (SteamOS) is as close to ideal for a non-Windows gaming-centric PC as exists today; the issue with the SteamMachines themselves is the same one that still plagues a lot of mainstream desktop PCs (even ones built around Windows) - too much overhead (in terms of price); it is cheaper to build than buy.

Cheaper to build has never hampered the mainstream PC market. Those who do build their own are a very small minority group in the greater scheme of it all.

[PGHammer]

That's not my implication, adrynalyne; my implication is that the majority of interest in terms of non-Windows-based PCs is AMONG the BYOPC community.  (In fact, hasn't most of the advertising been primarily on sites that cater to BYOPC?)  Those that, by and large, buy mainstream PCs are conservative - if not downright chicken - when it comes to their PCs; choosing a Linux distribution (which - at the end of the day - is what SteamOS is) is neither.

[ZombieFly]

hmmm, let me see. i can stream ALL games including steam bigscreen interface from my main PC using my raspberry PI,  60fps 1080p 5.1 surround [using moonlight/nvidia gamestream]. It works flawlessly.

 

however using the steam in built streaming system, i can't get 5.1 surround to work over hdmi and according to the steam forums, this is also an issue on steam machines too. They don't seem interested in fixing it.

 

so, i can do better than a steam machine using a £40 PI3 and an xbox 360 controller with the added benefit of streaming my desktop.

 

unless they price these things acordingly and have a featureset that actually works then I can't see how it's going to survive.

[PGHammer]

On 6/20/2016 at 8:55 AM, ZombieFly said:

hmmm, let me see. i can stream ALL games including steam bigscreen interface from my main PC using my raspberry PI,  60fps 1080p 5.1 surround [using moonlight/nvidia gamestream]. It works flawlessly.

 

however using the steam in built streaming system, i can't get 5.1 surround to work over hdmi and according to the steam forums, this is also an issue on steam machines too. They don't seem interested in fixing it.

 

so, i can do better than a steam machine using a £40 PI3 and an xbox 360 controller with the added benefit of streaming my desktop.

 

unless they price these things acordingly and have a featureset that actually works then I can't see how it's going to survive.

That is due to the issue of 5.1 over HDMI in Linux distributions themselves all too often relies on those proprietary binary blobs - it is not unique to the FOSS nouveau driver.

[ZombieFly]

On 7/8/2016 at 0:55 PM, PGHammer said:

That is due to the issue of 5.1 over HDMI in Linux distributions themselves all too often relies on those proprietary binary blobs - it is not unique to the FOSS nouveau driver.

i am using retropie, which seems to be working. that must use a different driver?