Steamboxes Compared in Price to PC Builds (PCPartsPicker)

Perhaps custom PC shops are much different from what they are where I live. In my country, the largest custom PC shop has a total of 3 stores, and 9 employees. Two employees per shop, and three others who probably run finance and coordinate the shops. That was what I compared it to when I thought about custom PC shops.

My father used to run a small company, and essentially built computers. Their imaging system was essentially none. All they had was a power outlet, and a network cable, and would copy over the prebuilt image of whatever OS it was from LAN. The hardware required to do this was pretty much none. Everything was fully automated. Even though they were four people only, they DID bulk order. They had negotiations with companies, and they would bulk order.

And he would get discounts, and large ones according to him (although it's all under a NDA so he never told me any values, only that they were significant).

The price shops sell the components they receive already includes a profit margin, that the manufacturers themselves suggest more often than not. When looking at a prebuilt, I always try to be careful about this.

I noticed I made a mistake by not including the steam controller, as another user pointed out, which would make a $50 difference.

However, if we are to exclude it, a $50 price increase over the price you get from pcpartpicker should make no sense, and anything more than that even less sense. Even if we were to accept they were essentially selling the parts at full price, they were still charging $50 for the price of building it and connecting it to a cheap automated system that copies hard drives (just remembered, I have one! It cost $20, but can only between two drives at once, although I don't use it for that purpose). I assume they don't cover shipping costs, so no overhead there.

So you essentially wound up with a profit on both the hardware and the service end. Since their agreements aren't made public, we can't be certain how much exactly do they profit on the hardware side of things. I don't like it when they double-dip on my wallet, though.

When I heard about the Steam machines I honestly hoped they wouldn't be overpriced hardware, and it saddens me to see most of them are. Only one or two of them had an actually balanced pricing.

I understand the overheads, I know not all of them are mega-corporations, but these specs are, in my opinion, mostly overpriced.

If they are unchanged, and the price is too unchanged, then by the time the Steam machines launch they can be absolutely certain to be profiting in hardware, as well as in the services to build the computer itself.

At this point I have no desire to buy one, perhaps I'll be getting Steam Link to replace my current stream box which is basically a 7-year-old laptop, and perhaps it was just my naivety to assume they wouldn't be the same old prebuilts, this time with a steam stamp on them. Steam machines have the potential to be a great thing, but only if we make them great.

/r/pcmasterrace Thread