Following the surprise announcement of Valve’s revamped Steam Machine mini-PC, a reader predicts it will win in a console war with the PlayStation 6.
I guess we were all a bit shocked by the Steam Machine annoucement this week. There were rumours of a new VR headset, but Steam Machine? That flop idea from 10 years ago, that it sounds like Xbox is going to try and copy for the next generation? It sounds crazy at first but the more I think about it, the more it seems to me like it could really work this time.
10 years is a long time and so much has changed in just the last three, so I really don’t think it’s relevant that the idea didn’t work back then.
The biggest difference is that, ignoring Nintendo, console exclusives barely exist anymore and so the only reason to get a console, rather than a PC, is the cost of PC hardware and the difficulty of using it. But that’s exactly what Steam Machine is trying to fix.
One of the main reasons Steam Machine didn’t work before is because it was too expensive – more than a console and as much as a mid-range PC. They haven’t said the price of the new one yet but the rumours and the specs both say that it can’t be much more than a PlayStation 5, so hopefully that’s that problem solved from the start.
And then there’s the rumours of Half-Life 3 and/or other Valve sequels. They’ll be playable on any PC but that makes them no less an exclusive than PlayStation games that end up on PC after six months. Half-Life 3 on Steam Machine is absolutely going to sell the hardware, much more than a Demon’s Souls remake or whatever the launch game for Xbox Series X was.
Sony has done this to themselves. They’re the one that stopped making single-player games and ended up only making one or two exclusives a year. They could have cut budgets or they could’ve made half-sequels, but instead they did nothing and when they saw their console was still selling they convinced themselves they made the right choice.
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But PlayStation 5 sales are only up because nobody with any sense is going to buy an Xbox anymore. There is no option but PlayStation if you want to play high-end console games. A lot of people are already giving up and turning to PC but if you then give them a cheap, easy-to-use alternative they are going to flock to it, in my opinion. And that is going to look a lot more attractive than the PlayStation 6, if it ends up with no big improvement in graphics but an even more expensive price tag.
The games industry wouldn’t be what it is without Sony, but they have a lot of faults and one of the most obvious is how slow they are to react to anything. That’s been the main problem with live service games. If they’d been quicker onto it maybe they would’ve had an early hit and if they’d been quicker about backing out, they wouldn’t have wasted a whole generation on nothing.
By the time they realise they’re being outmanoeuvred by Steam Machine they’ll go the same way as Microsoft, just another multiformat publisher whose main format is PC. Phil Spencer always said that the Xbox One generation was the worst one to lose, because that’s when everyone started their digital libraries and got tied to a particular format. Steam users are already like that and when they get a new influx of people with the Steam Machine, then even more people are going to be tied to that instead of PlayStation, and there’ll be no reason to leave.
And why would they? They can already play the same games, and even use the same controller, so why not do that on a format that’s cheaper and has other games and features that the PlayStation 5 will never have, like all the indie titles and user mods. Because none of that is going to be any different on the PlayStation 6.
Xbox is already dead as a console format and I think PlayStation will go the same way a lot quicker than people think. I’m not saying that will better or worse for gaming, but change is definitely coming and the PlayStation 6 is not the one that’s bringing it.
By reader Bosley
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