Your intuition is correct that the steam machine will go up in price but I think It’ll still have an edge over building your own PC for a couple of reasons:
Valve has economies of scale and can make contracts directly with Dram manufacturers/distributers
The Steam Machine is just already cheaper to make than a pre-built because it has a custom APU (rather than a standalone graphics card). Not to mention running Linux means not having to pay for a windows licence
The Steam Machine only has 16 GB of RAM. Most everyone I know building gaming PCs with DDR5 are using 32 GB
The steam machine is not a cutting edge device, but its lower end capabilities may become normalised if building a new PC becomes cost prohibitive. It may force the whole gaming industry to take a step back for a few years. And I mean, the steam Machine can play Cyberpunk 2077 at 4k 60 fps with FSR upscaling so its got enough performance for lots of consumers
Your intuition is correct that the steam machine will go up in price but I think It’ll still have an edge over building your own PC for a couple of reasons:
Valve has economies of scale and can make contracts directly with Dram manufacturers/distributers
The Steam Machine is just already cheaper to make than a pre-built because it has a custom APU (rather than a standalone graphics card). Not to mention running Linux means not having to pay for a windows licence
The Steam Machine only has 16 GB of RAM. Most everyone I know building gaming PCs with DDR5 are using 32 GB
The steam machine is not a cutting edge device, but its lower end capabilities may become normalised if building a new PC becomes cost prohibitive. It may force the whole gaming industry to take a step back for a few years. And I mean, the steam Machine can play Cyberpunk 2077 at 4k 60 fps with FSR upscaling so its got enough performance for lots of consumers