Steam Machine, and presumably Controller, will release.
The Machine is just an HTPC with MAYBE a bespoke mobo and cooler (to my knowledge, nobody got a close enough look to truly confirm that). If they were planning for a Q1 release, those would have been all but done by the time they were formally announced and they are living in a warehouse.
The issue is the off the shelf (well, bulk purchased) storage and memory. Which… is the issue for a lot of computing at all levels right now.
My guess? We will have VERY limited release provisioned Steam Machines. “We got 500 units at this price” then “We got 700 units at THIS price” a week later and so forth. And there will probably be a Bring Your Own Memory/Storage version with greater availability for those who have some stockpiled or want to gamble.
As for the controllers? Controllers are actually really cheap to manufacture. Their cost is the R&D that goes into them. But they are generally very high mark-up (for the platform holders) and used to help offset the cost of the console itself. Think “gold plated HDMI”. That is why there have been so many third party controllers over the decades.
But those ALSO are sitting in a warehouse. It is just a question of how Valve wants to use them to offset Steam Machines.
The Steam Frame? Pretty sure that is fucked. Because the memory and storage is going to be soldered on (or outright integrated onto the board to begin with). And, as someone who has owned two HMDs (a Windows MR and now a facebook quest some shit or another)… it was probably always going to be a failure.
brillotti@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The supply for RAM and SSDs is really tight these days. I hope Valve can make these products happen in spite of these setbacks.
Speculater@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Oh me too! I’m just afraid this generation of tech will fall victim to the AI black hole. Like cool, we’ll have 100 new 1 trillion parameter LLMs… And nothing to interface with them all while searching for a use case.