GoKawiilAhead of our review of the Steam Machine, we sat down with Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat to talk about the compact SteamOS PC. We discussed the pricing, the design process at Valve, component shortages (how could you not?), and even Windows support. We published excerpts from this interview in a story alongside the review. Here, we're presenting the full transcript of our conversation.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Andrew E. Freedman, Tom's Hardware: I think I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the elephant in the room, which of course is pricing. The Steam Machine starts at $1,049 in the U.S. for the 512GB option. How do you think that price is going to hit, and how do you think it reflects the vision of the Steam machine when you were building it?
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Pierre-Loup Griffais, engineer, Valve: I think we'd be hard-pressed to make predictions on how exactly the market's going to respond to it. I think it's very different than what it looked like last year. And so in terms of what appetite people have to buy a gaming PC at a certain price, everyone's going to have a different opinion on whether it's a good value or whether the product makes sense for them. So I don't know if we're hazarding any predictions there.
But it's definitely the case that our original design, of course, was based on memory and storage prices from two years ago or so, 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? So, I think if you're looking at building a PC from parts, either comparable horsepower or more horsepower, you know, you're probably looking at a similar price point here. At least that would be our expectation, right? That if you're, if you're looking at a trade-off of, "I want something that's about as powerful," you're still looking at a price that's roughly what we're offering there. And then you have all the things that you can't really build, like the form factor, the quietness, the CEC integration, the dedicated Bluetooth antenna for controller support. All that stuff is not really something that you can put in your own gaming PC and are still strong reasons that people might want to get the Steam Machine.
Freedman: Some of that definitely tracks. I've been going through our database, and things that were around the price point of the Steam Machine now are not the price of the current Steam machine anymore.
Yazan Aldehayyat, engineer, Valve: Yes, yes.
Valve speaks on Steam Machine compared to traditional consoles
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
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