Of course my prediction depends on the success of the Steam Machine, but I expect it to be highly successful, just like the Steam Deck, another piece of Valve hardware game studios have been pretty much forced to optimize for due to its success.
I disagree that the target market won't accept the price. I see the target market as less technical people, who don't care about hardware specs, but just want to play Steam games without issues.
The price is in the same region as an iPhone, and if you care enough about PC gaming to buy a gaming PC at all, you are certainly willing to spend at least as much money on it as you spent on your phone.
I bought my own version of a "Steam Machine" i.e. a mini-PC powered by an AMD APU for just €676 right before the RAM prices exploded.
It is an AOOSTAR GT37 which actually outclasses the €1,039 Steam Machine in most areas except graphics. One cannot blame Valve here though, the hyperinflation of RAM prices is too blame here.
AOOSTAR GT37 (€676 a few months ago [now vastly more expensive if you can still get one at all]) vs Steam Machine (€1039 right now)
CPU: 12x Zen 5 vs. 6 Zen4
Graphics: 16x RDNA 3.5 vs. 28 RDNA 3
RAM: 32 GB LPDDR5X vs. 16 GB DDR5 + 8 GB GDDR6
HDD: 1 TB vs. 512 GB (both NVMe-SSD)
I expect the Steam Machine to run graphically demanding FPS games quite a bit better due to the extra RDNA cores and faster VRAM. However it might actually be the inferior gaming machine for CPU/main RAM intense strategy or simulation games (e.g. Stellaris).
This is the #1 argument for buying a Steam Machine IMO.
You can achieve a lot by specifically optimizing your game for a particular machine and Valve has such extreme market power that every game studio releasing on PC will make sure that their game looks and runs great on the Steam Machine.
This machine is more limited than I expected e.g. only 8 GB VRAM, however because of Valve's market power all game studios will see 8 GB VRAM as the new limit. Every game will now aim to look and run great with only 8GB VRAM.
As a poor gamer, I truly appreciate Valve setting such a low standard for gaming PC hardware. Game studios were certainly already looking at 16 GB VRAM + 32 GB RAM as the new standard for AAA games. That is now history.
All of Europe's top AI talent immediately gets recruited away by the American megacorps. European companies simply cannot compete with the salaries and opportunities these corporations can offer. In addition the EU is infamous for being an overregulated bureaucracy monster.
The only two reasons for top AI talent not to move to the US are A.) Anti-Americanism or B.) Patriotism. Now, Anti-Americanism is an ideology of dumb socialist-leaning folk who are not high performers in anything and patriotism has been killed by Europe's left-wing ruling class. This is proven by the fact that indeed all top AI talent produced by Europe thus far has moved to the US.
The most recent, prominent example being Austrian programmer Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw.
"In February 2026, he announced he would be joining OpenAI and rejecting an offer to join Meta. [...] In 2026, he said he was moving to the United States, saying that there was too much regulation and "scolding" stifling AI development in Europe." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Steinberger_(programmer)]
True, and that's exactly the reason why people want to buy this stock now.
If future returns were already (almost) certain, they would have been priced in and you couldn't make any money with this stock.
This is a classic high risk / high reward stock. IF the space economy takes off you might 10X your investment. If it doesn't, you might lose most of it.
Rich people (who own most of the stock market) can afford to make such high risk bets, because they can afford to lose the money and thus many will make that bet.
Actually given that the first colonists on Mars will live pretty miserable lives before dying early of radiation poisoning Musk and Co are trying to recruit other people to move there.
Musk, Thiel, Bezos etc. none of these guys have ever said they want to move there.
Tl;dw: Most people are already irrelevant to the economy. They are not even needed as consumers anymore because the corporations mostly sell to other corporations and the rich.
>If adaptation means accepting that the scoreboard is now an AI orchestration benchmark, then we should say that honestly instead of pretending the old competition still exists.
This is like someone complaining that making machine parts has been ruined: Skillful craftsmen used to make them by hand using manual tools!
Nowadays the CAD/CAM/CNC cheaters have almost completely automated the whole thing. How is the next generation of craftsmen going to learn how to craft a gear by hand when the process of gear making has been reduced to pressing start on a CNC machine?!
See what I mean? Sorry, I think this article is just Luddite. I can empathize with the pain of your beloved craft basically being rendered obsolete by new technology, but the process can neither be stopped nor is it bad in general.
The manual skills you trained with CTF puzzles are now simply no longer relevant . (Field-specific) "AI orchestration" is the new cyber securtiy skill if LLMs really have become so good at this, and what the author used to do manually then has the same value as being able to craft a gear by hand.
I would say, if you put Claude in an android body with voice recognition and TTS, people in 1991 would think they are interacting with a sentinent machine from outer space.
"Legal, ethical, and accountability concerns outweigh any potential benefits.” - Bonnie Docherty, Harvard Lecturer
Meanwhile the Chinese couldn't care less about any of these issues.
The only real question is: Will militarized AI give the nation using it a substantial advantage?
If the answer is yes, the Chinese and the Russians will certainly use it, which will inevitably lead to the US using it too to keep up. All ethical and safety concerns evaporate in an arms race.
My money is on the Chinese accidentally building Skynet in the process. They are absolutely reckless as far as AI is concerned. E.g. while the West was immediately concerned about the safety of OpenClaw, the Chinese government offered grants to anyone building products with it.
I remember when so-called "expert systems" written in Prolog or LISP were supposed to replace doctors. Then came the (first) AI winter after people realized how unrealistic that was.
Nowadays LLMs are supposed to replace doctors.. and that makes even less sense given that LLMs are error-prone by design. They will hallucinate, you cannot fix that because of their probabilistic nature, yet all the money in the world is thrown at people who preach LLMs will eventually be able to do every human job.
I disagree that the target market won't accept the price. I see the target market as less technical people, who don't care about hardware specs, but just want to play Steam games without issues.
The price is in the same region as an iPhone, and if you care enough about PC gaming to buy a gaming PC at all, you are certainly willing to spend at least as much money on it as you spent on your phone.