> without ever touching a controller, why would I start now?
I feel similar, but for us there's also no point to get a Steam Machine. Playing games while sitting on a living room couch in front of a TV with mouse and keyboard is not comfortable at all.
Using mouse and keyboard it is better to play games at a proper desk with an office chair and I already have such a PC.
I agree that I wouldn't get it in addition to a desktop PC (for one thing, I haven't owned a TV in 20+ years so couch gaming isn't a thing for me) but when the time comes to replace my current box I might well consider whatever Steam is offering at the time. Just because it's likely to be nicely designed, thoughtfully specced and decently supported.
Memory (both main and VRAM) might be a bit on the weak side for some non-gaming workloads though. I hope we'll see those bump up once the current supply squeeze is over.
Yeah that's true. But I suppose you could just as well buy any other windows/linux PC. (I did so after finally ditching the playing-games-in-bootcamp-on-an-imac life.) I realize the same could be said about the "a box under the living room tv" use case, but I feel like to a lesser degree?
My main issue is that I don't want or have space for a massive PC tower. And building a small form factor PC is both very expensive and very difficult.
All the components come at a premium price and you also get to spend hours finding obscure forums with exact measurements of cases and components to see if the GPU fits lengthwise or whether a specific CPU + cooler is too tall for the case =)
And even if you make it, you're easily way over 1k€ before get to even picking the M.2 drive and RAM.
Thus: Steam Machine. I click "buy" on Steam, it appears on my doorstep, I plug it in and it'll start working.
I feel similar, but for us there's also no point to get a Steam Machine. Playing games while sitting on a living room couch in front of a TV with mouse and keyboard is not comfortable at all.
Using mouse and keyboard it is better to play games at a proper desk with an office chair and I already have such a PC.