Shuhei Yoshida Slams Steam Machine: Price Makes It “Hard to Recommend

Shuhei Yoshida, the former head of Sony’s SIE Worldwide Studios, has weighed in on Valve’s Steam Machine and didn’t hold back on its biggest weakness: the cost. In his comments, Yoshida said Valve’s device is “hard to recommend,” mainly because of its steep entry price and uneven performance. Still, he also pointed to several features of the latest Steam Machine that make it appealing in specific situations.

The Steam Machine is Valve’s ongoing effort to blend PC gaming with a living-room, console-style setup. It’s built around a custom AMD Zen 4 chip paired with Radeon RDNA 3 graphics, and its pitch is straightforward: a compact form factor that can run a wide range of Steam games. But the platform’s launch price—$1,049—put it in a rough spot. Yoshida noted that this makes it $150 more expensive than the PS5 Pro. At the time of writing, the Steam Machine has already sold out on Valve’s storefront, and that scarcity has reportedly been exploited by scalpers, with units reappearing on eBay for extreme markups.

Valve has also moved to protect its product branding. The company has officially told a third-party accessory manufacturer to stop selling a custom Steam Machine case tied to one of Valve’s well-known franchises.

Shuhei Yoshida’s Steam Machine Review: What Worked, What Didn’t

After purchasing a Steam Machine himself, Yoshida shared his impressions on Twitter. His write-up focused on both strengths and drawbacks, starting with the overall recommendation. Yoshida’s main takeaway was that the Steam Machine is “hard to recommend to people” unless someone is approaching it for research purposes, largely because of its high starting price.

On performance, Yoshida was blunt, describing the Steam Machine’s graphical results as “meh.” He also highlighted a mismatch between expectations and reality. Yoshida said the Steam Machine recommends a default resolution of 1080p, while Valve had advertised 4K performance. After the Steam Machine launched, Valve quietly adjusted the Steam page so that 4K could be possible in some games through AMD’s FSR upscaling technology.

Yoshida also compared the Steam Machine’s 1080p recommendation to Sony’s PS4, which debuted back in 2013. Beyond resolution concerns, he said some games on the Steam Machine suffer from longer loading times than on other platforms, even when accounting for shader compilation. Even with a solid-state drive in place to support faster loads, he said the system is still limited to 16GB of DDR5 RAM running in a single channel. Yoshida closed this portion by saying he hopes developers will better optimize future releases for the Steam Machine.

Despite the negatives, Yoshida didn’t ignore the positives. He said the Steam Controller’s analog sticks feel “a bit looser” than he’d like, but he still called out a practical advantage: you can power on the Steam Machine by tapping a button on the Steam Controller. He also found the SteamOS interface easy to navigate, and he liked the ability to swap faceplates to give the device a more personal look. Yoshida further praised Valve for keeping the Steam Machine quiet while maintaining a compact build. Ultimately, even with his reservations, he said the ability to play Steam games on a TV is enough to justify keeping the device around.

Find the odd one out before the timer hits zero.

Which one doesn’t belong?

Valve has said the Steam Machine’s price reflects the company’s reluctance to sell it at a loss. Even so, that explanation hasn’t stopped criticism aimed at the platform’s price-to-performance ratio compared with other gaming PCs available on the market. Whether the Steam Machine can win long-term support remains an open question.