We have all the details about Valve’s new PConsole except the only thing that really matters: price.

There are a lot of reasons why Valve might be slow-rolling that particular detail. For one thing, the amount of free press being generated by endless videos and news articles (and blog posts, oops) is enormous. Ten thousand TF2 hats off to the Valve marketing department. Or perhaps it’s like a trial balloon to gauge consumer interest at various price-points. Or maybe the answer is dead-ass simple: because nobody knows what prices for components will look like more than two days in advance, let alone a few months from now. RAM prices have almost doubled in the last two months. It certainly wouldn’t be a good look for any company to raise the price of a console three times in a year.

The whole conversation about whether Valve is really trying to squeeze into the console market and compete with Sony and Microsoft is kinda immaterial, IMO. The given specs are not particularly competitive with a PS5, nor is it well positioned to even really play any of the AAA games that drive the majority of consumer spending in the console space. Right now, games like Fortnite, CoD, GTA Online, and similar won’t play at all due to (Linux) incompatibility with anti-cheat software.

What Valve is actually doing is pretty straight-forward: creating a PConsole that is equal to/an upgrade of what 70% of Steam users currently have. And technically 6x more powerful than the Steam Deck.

But they also have a chance to break into the coveted Azuriel market… if they stick the price landing.

See, I’ve talked about it before, but I have a very specific use-case that is not currently being addressed in the market: introducing my kiddo to Minecraft in the living room. We technically have a Switch, which technically can have Minecraft on it, but the reviews have said it sucks on a technical level. Sluggish, buggy, and local co-op is just about unplayable. Meanwhile, I have a perfect PC rig a few rooms down. Up to this point, I had been contemplating rearranging my computer room into a side-by-side setup and going from there, but there’s a lot to like about a potential all-in-one GabeCube solution. Not the least of which is how many hundreds of other games I could share with the little man.

…unless the Steam Machine costs like fucking $800 or something. That would be enormously dumb.

I have dabbled in the burgeoning handheld emulator space, and the ever-present elephant in the room was the Steam Deck. “Is this $250 handheld worth it… or should I just buy a Steam Deck for a few hundred more?” To be clear, there are a lot of reasons why you may not want a Steam Deck. For instance, it’s very large. If all you care about is N64 games, getting something that can (technically) run Cyberpunk 2077 is overkill. But what Valve (unintentionally?) did was create a universal, $400 anchor in the handheld space. And, yeah, the top-tier model retails for $650. However, imagine if the Steam Deck debuted at $650 for the lowest model. Would it have been as popular or been the reference point for this market? No.

So, we don’t know the price for the Steam Machine. We do know that it’s not going to be subsidized like consoles, and it’s going to be priced “like a PC” of similar specs. The reasoning is begrudgingly sound: it’s technically an open Linux PC. The PS3 was subsidized back in the day with the assumption Sony would make back the money in software sales, and yet the Air Force chained 1,760 of them together to build a supercomputer. Thus, outside of bulk discounts of materials, the Steam Machine is likely to cost roughly the same as off-the-shelf components. Which puts it high. Which puts it out of reach for my purposes.

The one positive that may result, regardless of price, is developer focus on their games being “Steam Machine compatible.” Which is somewhat silly to say, given that its already a PC. That said, we have seen an out-sized (compared with units sold) effort to make games playable on the Steam Deck. Part of that is pure marketing math – someone who already shelled out cash for a Steam Deck is likely focused on playing a bunch of games on it – and the other part is likely relief at having a discrete endpoint. A given PC owner could have any number of configurations, and nearly every permutation must be accounted for. Meanwhile, a Steam Machine is a Steam Machine. If it plays well on that, it probably plays well everywhere else. Although perhaps playing on a Steam Deck is good enough.

Which just might be the play, in my case, if the Steam Machine ends up double the price of the Deck.