There should be a “no RAM, no storage” option.
Valve managed to make a system that can possibly outperform a PS4 for $1050 plus tax plus whatever a controller costs.
The PS4 can also play DVDs, Blu-ray’s and comes with a controller.
Who the fuck has physical media in 2026? I have vinyl records, but no CDs, DVDs or BluRay… Fundimentally its a little linux system, so a USB bluray drive off amazon should just work.
But yes, a ram and diskless version would be nice.
You don’t have to know the people that have physical media to know that it is valuable.
It just gives the old console even more value. It’s a 1080p system with a massive library of great games at dirt cheap prices.
I don’t know how Valve could have dropped the ball any worse.
If it had an optical drive I wouldn’t be buying it.
Straight up a waste of space and plastic and componentry.
Its not 2010 any more, DVDs are gone bro.
I don’t think you’re gonna buy the Steam Machine even without an optical drive.
PS4 Pro is $210 on Amazon. With an optical drive that lets you borrow games. Rent games from a public library. Buy used games. In addition to movies and Blu-ray’s that are much higher quality than any streaming service unless you have worthless eyes and are some kind of child that thinks that time passing makes things inferior.
It might be $210 bucks but I already have like 8k worth of games on Steam. Also, I wouldn’t buy a PS4 I’d just look in a landfill for a free one.
There are no games on playstation, by comparison.
I don’t buy optical media because I just steal 4k footage and watch it on a 4k panel that a PS4 can’t drive.
I don’t know why you’re bothering to argue with me, unless you’re some sort of timetraveller from 2016. In which case, theres a terrible pandemic coming in about 4 years time. You should invest in face masks.
You’re the one butthurt that people still use physical media and that an old console is a much better deal than Valve’s e-waste.
You seem like the type of person that has many friends so I’m gonna let you go back to them. Go ahead and add another downvote to this message. You’re a true redditor.
No, I’m just annoyed that you’re spouting bollocks at me and haven’t stopped.
Ah yes, the law of greed and demand.
What’s to stop them from just going a generation back and using DDR4 instead of DDR5.
There is no one who can convince me that it makes any noticeable difference anyway. When I was putting together a new/used desktop I specifically looked for DDR4 for precisely that reason and I would take any bet that a performance hit would be measured in numbers too small for any user to even notice.
Constantly needing newer hardware with only fractional improvements is the biggest scam in tech. They took their lesson from Apple and Samsung.
DDR4 prices have come up too. In fact, DDR3 and even DDR2 prices have spiked.
I know it’d be expensive, but I wonder if it’d be worth it to valve to start producing ram. They’ve certainly got the money to get it started, they are getting heavy into hardware that they can use it in, and they could sell it as well.
I don’t know if there’s a shortage of raw material or if no one wanted to invest in more manufacturing when AI could crash within a short time.
In a nutshell this is impossible because of how the global supply chain works. Specifically how most of the hardware engineers/factories are in Taiwan, and how the technology to make chips is proprietarily owned by a company in Norway.
Like the whole reason China wants Tiawan in the first place is the same reason they can’t just bomb them into submission… Their population of highly skilled hardware engineers that fundamentally make the global chips supply chain possible is impossible to replace.
Manufacturing their own sticks would onlympush the problem to the price of RAM chips.
The resources it takes to start manufacturing modern RAM chips is such that THE ENTIRE FUCKING NATION OF CHINA is finally getting around to it.
I know Valve is a big company, but that’s a pretty bite to chew and swallow.
My undiagnosed adhd brain: how difficult can in be
The actual process of creating semiconductors is basically:
- Etch a stencil that has the pattern you want.
- Place the stencil over a piece of silicon.
- Bombard the silicon and stencil with radiation so that the chemical properties of the silicon change exactly under that stencil.
- Repeat the process with multiple other stencils, so that the resulting silicon has basically shapes of wires and logic gates that can perform different functions with the electricity running through those shapes.
In recent years, step 3 has gotten so complicated, based on needing to create radiation of exactly a particular wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light focused exactly on the silicon (and the mask/stencil above it), because that wavelength allows for the smallest possible features on the silicon. So they take purified tin, melt the tin into molten liquid, and ejecting the molten tin in a liquid jet downward into a vacuum at exactly the right speed to where it forms into droplets of the exact size for the machine (about 50 μm), then blasts each droplet, mid-fall, with a 1.6kW laser that heats it up so hot that it vaporizes and ionizes into plasma at the exact position where a system of highly polished and precisely positioned mirrors focuses the UV radiation evenly onto the silicon surface.
Oh, and the machine makes one tin droplet every 1/50,000 of a second, so in any given second it ionizes 50,000 droplets in the stream.
The machine costs something like $300 million, and requires full time experts to make sure that it’s working correctly.
Everything else in the fabrication facility is similarly complicated, which is why a fab represents something like $30 billion in total costs over its lifetime.
That’s freaking crazy
If you disagree on valve share in publishing a game on steam it would pretty much be the same story. Valve is a for profit corporation whos ceo own an entire fleet of mega yachts, they are just as shit as any other corporation.
I can always just not publish on Steam. There are other options.
What’s happening here with RAM is a cartel
I seriously don’t get this constant “Valve is a monopoly, end them” bull crap. Yes they’re a business. Yes they make money. Sure they’ve got flaws we should tackle. But they aren’t out there trying to shut itch.io down or using legislation to stop you from hosting the game yourself. GOG and Epic aren’t as popular because they don’t provide a strong enough product to pull people away.
I seriously don’t get this constant “Valve is a monopoly, end them” bull crap.
You are on lemmy, perhaps understanding how this place work can help you figure out how much shit corporations like valve are. https://join-lemmy.org/docs/index.html
I literally said they have flaws. Calling them a monopoly is as pointless as your rebuttal and shows a complete lack of critical thinking. Call them out for the actual issues, not made up nonsense. Call them out for their inconsistent content moderation, call them out for their lootboxes, call them out for their caving to payment processors. Just don’t call them out for the thing they aren’t.
It’s hard to believe that it’s just a RAM issue.
Valve is going full Apple with the SSD upgrade. They’re making a healthy profit from each system they sell.
It’s both RAM and storage price. A 2TB NVMe cost upward of 300$ CAD.
Did you for get that when they upgrade the storage to 2TB they do not also include the 512GB storage included in the low end model?
Could be said for literally every single product ever made, come back to reality, holy fucking shit dude.
Valve is making a bad deal worse. By being needlessly greedy.
I am in the reality where all the other gaming consoles massively outperform it while costing hundreds less and also providing a controller.
Do you have any experience in product development? They went through a design process and unfortunately for them, when came time to choose a storage and RAM solution, they had to do it through the current price crisis.
So they either had to table the design and lose their development money or go through with it with the current storage and RAM cost.
Does it matter if I have experience in product development? Do you?
A product has to justify its cost. This one does not.
You can DIY or buy a pre-built that massively outperforms Valve’s console.
Yes I do have experience, in fact it’s core to my job.
The cost to design is significant and wasting a few years of development is not a light decision. So Valve either had to scrap the design and waste the development cost, or price it according to the current PC parts prices
You are right that people can DIY, but it always was an option and people still buy ready-made computers, so that’s a moot point.
The price for comparable parts and same form factor isn’t far off from DIY.
Why shouldn’t they? Margins are going to be tight btw, so they’re really not. What they’re really selling is a vehicle for Steam.
BTW, try putting together a same or better spec build yourself and get back to us with the cost.
You can easily make a better pc for cheaper. Plenty of reviews showed this.
For like $50-$100 cheaper. And they all ignored the small form factor which could easily cost that.
You can build and buy a pre-built PC that easily outperforms the Steam console.
that does not make sense. you are not building a pre-built, because then its not a pre-built. is the sky cloudy over there?
I meant that pre-built or DIY are both better deals. I realize now that I should have been more clear.
This Steam console is bad when discussing performance and value. It has a nice design.
oh, yes that makes sense
I really feel like Valve spend a bunch of R&D to make something that doesn’t fix any issues with PC gaming.
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It’s noticeably less powerful than comparably priced PCs
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It’s noticeably less powerful than consoles costing hundreds of dollars less
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It doesn’t come with a controller.
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It is not customizable in any meaningful way. 
 This feels like a valves version of the Wii U. Neat hardware, but ultimately underpowered and overpriced with little to no way to lower the cost.
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Why shouldn’t they?
Because they are a for profit company with a billionaire ceo. Making profits it’s their job.
BTW, try putting together a same or better spec build yourself and get back to us with the cost.
The price you pay for something in a store is not the same price valve pays for a stock of parts. They buy the same stuff for a lot cheaper and resell it at an higher price to make profits.
I hope China floods the market with cheap RAM and absolutely destroys these scumbag memory companies.
Like they did with EVs in the US?
Republicans would probably make sure that can’t happen.
No Gabe, you fucked up with these price hikes. Don’t blame the supplier.
The ram in the system went from 200 dollars to 600 dollars. Not increasing the price of the console by 400 dollars would have meant scrapping it instead.
There is literally no choice, the ram would have been sold either way, just to someone else instead.
I’m sorry, do you have any awareness of the world past your nose?
No Gabe, you fucked up with these price hikes
…in the universe you live in, is there cheap ram?
can I send you money for some please?
…in the universe you live in, is there cheap ram?
Private yachts aren’t cheap either. To buy an entire fleet of these you need to boost your profits as high as you can.
so gabe fucked it up by buying a yacht years ago, when ram was cheap, somehow boosting up ‘profit’ on this margin machine?
my god you’re fucking silly
so gabe fucked it up by buying a yacht years ago
He owns multiple mega yachts, he added a 500 millions one to his fleet last year.
man I wish you’d gone out with the rest of the dinosaurs, this conversation is extinct.
and you really think this matters in regards to the ram crisis.
wow, man, whatever you’re smoking you should share
You sound quite salty, are you in love with the billionare?
nah just reality. billionaires suck, but you seem to suck even more somehow. impressive.
Yeah that’s annoying and all, but it doesn’t fundamentally change how capitalism works.
So they should fund your gaming habit?
Who’s funding your chattering on lemmy?
He really shouldn’t have dumped trillions of private and public money into AI. Thanks Gabe /s
Are you…stupid?
Yes.
Valve and its ceo decides the price of their products. Considering valve is a corporation making billions and the ceo owns an entire fleet of mega yachts, arguing that they are directly to blame for the high prices doesn’t sound stupid at all to me. If they are literally swimming in billions their profit cut is high.
Really? The cost of components getting jacked by a supplier is their fault?
If you really are going to make that claim, you simultaneously lose all credibility by admitting that you are literally arguing in bad faith.
Shut the fuck up.
Really? The cost of components getting jacked by a supplier is their fault?
They jack their own prices to begin with, valve is a for profit company making billions, their faith is making profits.
Wow. They’re guilty of… (checks notes)… being in business.
Shut up
Don’t rant about prices being high then
The component price changed, what was Gabe supposed to do, start manufacturing its own RAM?
The component price changed, what was Gabe supposed to do, start manufacturing its own RAM?
They are swimming in billions, they could easily lower the profits they make and give it away for cheaper but that’s not their goal.
What do you think the margins are on this thing? You know how much the components cost, it’s not hard to figure out about how much it costs them.
Profit margins on consoles are razor thin already, and that’s before the skyrocketing price of components.
I’m sorry if that means your mom can’t afford to get it for your birthday now, but it is what it is unfortunately.
Yep. You are owed everything, after all. You deserve it.
It’s related to the AI bubble. The AI companies are trying to make it as difficult as possible to get a good PC, because they know they’re cooked if the general public has access to systems that can run AI models locally, so they’re buying everything up as fast as they can in the name of data centers that will never be built.
As soon as the first one fails, it’s all over. Prices will tumble and memory makers will come crawling back to Valve (and other hardware makers) begging them to buy.
Let’s not forget that almost all memory is made by a cartel of 3 companies known for price fixing. They’re all being as slow as possible about increasing production capacity.
Is that not for good reason though? Only for them really, but if they did ramp up production and then the bubble pops… I wish they would ramp up production, it’s just easy to understand why they won’t.
If there is a demand for ram, which there is in the consumer market, then it shouldn’t be a risk. If DCs get cancelled, then they should have contracts in place for at least a minimum buy, which should offset cost risk. If they don’t have that, then that’s just shitty business. Even still, they can just as easily slow down production if needed. If the bubble pops, either they’ll have inventory that the world will buy and they can throttle back prod, or they don’t have inventory and they will have to throttle prod anyway since demand for DCs as a whole has to be more than just the consumer market.
Idk, it’s probably just the cynic in me, but I think it’s likely this is just manipulation of the prices, especially given the history of these companies doing just that.
