Triple Click - How People Afford Video Games

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

Kirk, Jason, and Maddy talk about how the affordability crisis is impacting gaming, reading some listener emails to talk about how people pay for games these days. Plus: we've got Steam Machines and have some thoughts. Those two topics are very related! One More Thing: Kirk: Steam Machine Maddy: Balance: A Perimenopause Journey Jason: Steam Machine LINKS: Strong Songs Live! July 11, Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland. Livestream Tickets HERE Chris Person’s review of the Steam Machine for Aftermath Kirk’s Rhythm Heaven stream: Friday, July 3, 7PM Eastern on the Triple Click YouTube Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

The steam machine will cost you more than $1,000. But, hey, that doesn't seem so bad if you compare it to, I don't know, buying a house. Welcome to Triple Click where we bring the games to you. This week we are talking about affordability. We heard from many, many listeners about their experiences buying games, and we are going to talk about it all. I'm Jason Shire. I'm Kirk Hamilton. And I'm Maddie Myers.

Hello. Hello. Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode. Hopefully we can be the bright spot in what is going to be a little bit of a difficult stretch for the video game. It is a stressful time in the world in general. It is. It is a stressful time in the world.

But not here. Here on triple click, things are stress fee free. And that's thanks to listeners like you supporting the show and making it possible. So if you want to continue getting your stress-free, stress-free. Well, it's free so hard to say. You want to continue getting your stress-free dopamine fix from triple-click. You should sign up to support us, become a member. We are entirely listener-supported. If you go to maximumfund.org slash join. You too can be part of the club of listener supporters. But it's not just a charitable donation. You got a bunch of stuff

for it. You got our monthly bonus episodes, including a humongous backlog of episodes. And one that we are about to put out about the video game, 007 First Light. We are going to be talking about that, doing a deep dive into the full game with spoilers and all. We're all, I'm just about to finish it. You two have finished it.

And we're going to talk about it. We're going to get into the whole story of that game, which is really cool. So sign up today, become a member. One other thing up top is that we will be off next week. I guess Kirk are we going to throw a bonus an old bonus episode into the feed for people

so they have a little something to chew on Yeah, we'll have to decide which one of the bonus episodes that you get if you become a member we'll put out in the feed Which we like to do when we take a week off. We'll be off for summer break, summer vacation, summer vacation So Kirk can prepare for his ridiculous show that he's about to do it. Yeah, it's actually the opposite of a vacation for Kirk. Right. Kirk is off for summer work.

Summer. Or working summer for me so far. Working summer. Is there a couple other things before we get started, Kirk? Yes, a couple of quick things. First of all, Spotify, you heard of it? Not the greatest podcast platform in the world. Lately...

Wow. Shots fired. Is that that controversial to take? It's really bad. I know a lot of our listeners like to listen on Spotify, and I get it. It is convenient if you already listen to music there. They also have a lot of exclusive podcasts, et cetera. So lately we've been getting these weird notifications

from Spotify claiming a copyright violation because of the music in the promos that we play for maximum fun shows, which is like not our music and like is creative common stuff and is totally like, you know, the shows using that have permission. But for whatever reason, like some bot or some moderation thing as Spotify has been being weird. They've been bugging Max Fun about it. We've had to respond. It's been a whole pain in the yes.

It really just, it's a sign of kind of, I don't know, it's some new displace. functional program at Spotify. Who knows? Kirk just said pain in the ass. Pain in the ass. Yeah. I think I was going to say pain in the neck and then I changed my leg. I was like, no, it's really a pain in the ass. I'm going to swear just a little bit. Anyways, so far it has not led to anything actually happening because we just respond and say like, what are you doing? You're tripping. And then they leave the episodes up. But there's just a chance that like an episode could get pulled for a totally random reason. So I just wanted to let people know

that that is a possibility. If you use spotting. to listen to the show and then suddenly you don't see the newest episode. The episode is probably out. It's just not on Spotify because of Spotify reasons. So you could always consider using a different podcast app to listen to the show. Spotify just like shares our RSS feed with everybody, just like anything else. So you can just download the show directly from us or for maximum fun if you want. The episodes will be out there, but there might be an issue on Spotify.

So I wanted to let people know just that that was happening. And hopefully they'll chill out or their AI, their like moderation AI will chill out and leave us alone. One other thing I want to announce before we get into the subject for this week is that I went on the ranged touch charity stream a couple of weeks back. It was super fun. We raised a ton of money for a very worthy cause. And during my hour, I made a pledge to play the new Rhythm Heaven game, which comes out this week, to play it on stream. So I'm going to be streaming that on the triple click YouTube channel. And I had made the pledge to play it on the second, which is Thursday, but I'm actually going to have to break that pledge already and play it on the third.

So I think everyone will forget me for that. So on Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, I will be streaming the new Rhythm Heaven game on our YouTube channel. Our username on YouTube is Triple ClickPod. We'll have a link for that in the show notes. Come hang out. It'll be chill. I'm just going to be playing the game. It'll be silly. We'll have a good time. And we'll see how good and or bad I am at Rhythm Heaven. Yeah. Sounds good. So let's get into this topic for this week. We have long long as long as well. been thinking about talking about affordability in video games, how expensive and or not expensive games may be, ways to save money, just sort of how video games fit into everybody's lives.

And because the three of us get a lot of stuff for free, because of our jobs, and because our jobs are playing video games, we just kind of think of them differently from most people. Because for most people, video games are just a hobby. They're just one part of their, you know, family expense, you know, expense, you know, expense, plan and just a hobby at that, so not even a professional expense. So it's just really different for everyone. So last week we asked for your emails about how you approach budgeting and video games, how you think about money and how you spend money on games.

Wow, we got a lot of emails. Jason, how many emails do you think we got? Several hundred. We got several hundred emails, which was really cool. We will not be able to read them all on the show. I will say for my part, I had a great time reading these. I just read through them all over lunch for several days, and it just provided a really cool view of our audience and of, you know, we have a lot of different kinds of listeners.

I would say one unifying trait that our listeners tend to have is that they're very well spoken and thoughtful, which I suppose speaks well of us. But it is the kind of thing I've noticed at our live shows, too. But it was really cool, just how thoughtful and interesting all of the emails were. Yeah, I really appreciated getting how diverse of a picture it is in terms of. terms of class, location, interest. I mean, everyone plays games who listens to our show, but they all have different ways into them. And I think we're always aware of that in the listener emails that we already get. But this specific issue really allowed our listeners to talk about exactly what their

lives are like in a way that I often are other kinds of emails don't. And that painted a really cool picture for us. Yeah. I don't know. Jason, any takeaways from reading all those emails? You're the when fueling them. Yeah, when I ask people to please keep them short, nobody really listens. But no, it was, yeah, it's interesting.

I was actually more surprised by the people who make less money and write in because I think we talked about a stat a little while ago from CERCANA, the market analysis firm, that the majority of console owners,

or people who buy consoles, have a household income of more than $100,000 here in the U.S. So I was surprised to hear from a lot of people who don't have a household income of that much, but are still finding ways to play games. Oftentimes it's not buying the latest and greatest console. Oftentimes it's finding cheaper ways, whether it's buying games in the library

or buying cheaper games on Steam and whatnot. But still, it was really helpful. And I appreciate all the people who shared specific numbers, because that is just a helpful metric to use. It's helpful to just put things in perspective. Yeah, I agree. It was definitely cool to see just a huge range of people at different points in their lives. Yeah, different ages and different family permutations.

Right. A significant income variance, you know, people making, you know, working and just kind of entry-level service jobs right out of college and not making that much up to, you know, people who'd been a senior engineer at a tech firm for many, many years and were making like five or six hundred, thousand dollars a year. And so we had this like huge range. And the majority of people fell in the middle, you know, right around the middle, um, with a kind of combined household income somewhere in the like 80 to 150,000 range. There were a lot of those. But really, it was just all over the map, which I, yeah, I thought was just kind of interesting to read because I've never just read a bunch of emails from people like that before. Yeah, it was cool. It also kind of, I think it cemented a theory that I've had then that we've all talked about and thought about, which is that

the kind of the older you get and the further along in your career you get the more money you wind up making most of the time but also the less time you have and that was kind of an ongoing theme which some with some of the higher income folks who reached out is just that they don't have time like they don't worry about buying games so much for the money they worry a little bit more about the time spent yeah for sure there's and there's a big divider just between people who have kids and people who don't like that seems to make a obviously that makes a huge difference for how you think about your budget and how you're kind of rationalizing your hobbies to yourself, like just how you think through, you know, am I going to spend this money on, you know,

myself, like on this game that I really want to play? Or am I going to have to, you know, think, no, I should spend this on something the whole family can enjoy or a vacation that we're all going to take together or that kind of thing. It just seemed like that was a big dividing line for a lot of people, which is unsurprising, but still a neat thing to see, like specifically in the emails that people sent in because each story, each family is a little bit different. Kids are just little money suckers is what we've established here. Yeah. Well, your kids get everything for free along with you, Jason.

So, you know, that's nice. They're going to play Tomodji life. The games. When you say everything, let's be specific. When I say everything, I mean, everything in the context of the specific thing we're discussing today. Yeah. When I say kids are little money suckers, I'm talking about other things. You know what?

The biggest expense, the big surprise expense is summer camp. That's the thing that really just like, It blows your mind at how expensive that's the other. Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. So there are some recurring topics, some recurring themes. I think we should start just with this email. Maddie, how about you read this email here? This is from an anonymous writer.

That just seems like, let's just throw this out there at the beginning of this conversation. Yeah, this is kind of a manifesto that was given to us from an anonymous emailer. I think it's fair to call it a manifesto, but you be the judge as I read it. Here's how it goes. I think this is obvious, but deserves to be said. The affordability of games isn't an issue with the price of games or gaming hardware, recent AI bullshit accepted. It is pretty simply an issue with wage stagnation and is an issue for affordability of all hobbies. My first job was at Subway in 2006.

I was 16 and I made $6.25 an hour in my state, which was the new upcoming minimum wage increase. We had $5 footlongs back then. The current minimum wage is only $7.25 an hour. Only $1 more after 20 years. Here's many exclamation points and capital letters on that one. Federal minimum wage, to be clear, a lot of states have higher minimum. It's true. It's true.

This person continues. The, quote, games are actually cheaper now, end quote, crowd, are correct, but the wages are lower and necessities cost more. So it doesn't really matter what gaming does with prices until people actually have disposable income to spend on games. Every entertainment company should be trying to find a way to open up more disposable income for people to spend on their products. but they instead will charge you $55 to see Credos in a string bikini in Fortnite,

misguided priorities IMO rant over. Good pod. So this is an important thing, I think, to throw out there at the beginning, partly for the specifics that this e-mailer brings up, but also just to keep in mind that when we talk about affordability in video games, we are talking about it in the broader context of wage stagnation, of increasing costs, of inflation. I mean, groceries to me are by far the most intense,

I mean, lately, going to the grocery store is crazy. And I know that that's true for everyone else. You know, the Times is where I read a lot of my political news, they've been doing a ton of reporting about this, just talking to median people, like median voters and being like, what's your number one concern? And everyone is like, I go to the grocery store and it's crazy, dude. Like, it used to be $200 for X amount of groceries. And now it's $300.

Like, it's just increased by that much. So this is in that context. And I think that is just an important point that this is like a hobby for people. and so they're going to think about their hobby in terms of their overall budget. And when their budget is really getting squeezed, that's going to change how they think about how they spend money on their hobby. Yeah. And another stat from Sarkana, the research firm that I mentioned earlier, is that in the U.S.,

about 63% of gamers by at most two games per year, which I think kind of fits neatly into that. I mean, how many people can actually afford to buy more than two. games per year. Has the question. Yeah, a lot of the emails that we read just in broad strokes were talking about how they decide on the two games. And that was fascinating. I mean, we're not going to read all the hundreds of emails as we've already made clear. We've chosen some excerpts today. But seeing those broad strokes of people who are like, my disposable income is limited, so I have to really consider every purchase that I make and here's how I'm doing it was also pretty fascinating to me. And I appreciated every one of you who said triple click was part of how they made the

decision. By the way, this is a little bit of a tangent, a little bit of a side note, but I found it really fascinating to look at some of the numbers and see people talking about living a comfortable life on, I don't know, $70,000, $80,000 a year in one part of the country, whereas if you live in where I live, that is much, much harder to do. And I think that's really interesting. also because I think as the numbers expand, you might have a salary that in one part of the country seems like outlandishly high and another part of the country seems like what you need to get by, which I just think is just kind of says a lot about a lot of different things. Yeah, the regionality.

That's such a good point. Like the cost of GTA, for example, which is a game that came up a lot for a ton of emailers of something they're thinking about. it's almost like it costs something different for everybody around the country, not just based on their income, but based on where they live, which is just a real weird thing about the United States and just how wildly vacillating cost of living is here. Yeah, because like just to use some numbers for a second, if you make $80,000 and you live in, I don't know, rural Pennsylvania and maybe you're kind of at the end of, after all your expenses and rent or whatever are paid, you have, I don't know, $5,000. $100 a month in saving. That looks much different than if you're making $160,000 and you're in a higher cost of living area, so you still don't have that much at the end of the month, but maybe you have double as much at the end of the month. So you can fit in something like GTA a lot more

easily if you are in a higher cost living area making more, assuming that you were budgeted in a similar way. Right. I was also struck by some listeners who pointed out that because they live in a lower cost of living area, the wages aren't as high. So they're not making as much money as they would be making if they lived somewhere else. Which, of course, doesn't go, like, it's not a one-to-one, you know, there's not a set ratio for that or anything, but it does affect people. And then also, we're talking about America, but we got a lot of emails from people who live in other countries, and that's wildly different. I mean, we got a listener from an Australia, or we got an email from an Australian listener, basically say, yeah, we've been paying

up more than $100 for video games. know for a really long time. So hearing you guys complaining about Grand Theft Auto being $80 or whatever just feels to us like, yeah, same as it ever was. We've always been paying that much. Yeah, do we want to read that Australia email just to give an example? I just pulled it up. Yeah. Hey, Jason, how about you read this email from Dave? Sure. So Dave, Dave writes, I'm a gamer in Australia. The discussion about American prices has always felt very distant to us here. A new release game has typically cost $110. The American reaction is the latest Mario Kart release at $80 is cute for us here down under.

A AAA title released at that price in Aussie dollars is a bargain. So worth noting, according to Google's conversion rate, that 110 Australian dollars is equal to $76.12 U.S. dollars, just some context for that as well, which of course doesn't mean it's equivalent because that doesn't mean that Australian salary is. Right. This is part of why it's kind of an interesting equation. Yeah, yeah, because yeah, it's all relative based on what your wage actually is, which is why, I mean, it's kind of a broken way. Conversations around pricing are often broken just because of that because it's all so relative and nobody's wages are rising in proportion to this stuff. Right.

It's part of what made reading all these emails interesting to me is just because they're all specific. Like they're all their own, you know, they all tell their own story. and that's because everyone lives in these very specific circumstances, and it's very hard to generalize. I really like this actually right underneath Dave's email as this email from Mikey. Mikey writes, I am Mexico living in Mexico, Baja, California, and it's always been interesting to me

comparing the difference in the spending habits across the borders since I've experienced both having family in the U.S. Here in Mexico, even when things were more affordable, most people didn't really get new generations at launch. That's always been seen as something for rich people. My family waited for the generation, to be almost over to get into it, and we went to a game stop in the U.S., traded whatever we could, and got the cheaper games for a kickstart, like launch titles or hidden gems.

And after that, we mostly just buy used. I'm 30 years old now, and I have a somewhat respectable salary for the area. My girlfriend makes about the same as me. We're living together. In this past year, we went into debt getting the Switch 2 for my son for Christmas, and I got a Steam Deck OLED from Facebook Marketplace, which is what most people will do around here, buy used or refurbished. The state of things is dire here.

It's always been a prohibitively expensive hobby, but now, oof, piracy is a big deal in Mexico in most of Latin America. And there's always someone offering modding services at farmers' markets, et cetera. I learned to emulate Nintendo 64 games when I was 11 years old so that I could play Nintendo games on the family computer. People are going into debt to get a Switch 1. Mexico has a really big Zelda fan base. A lot of it built through emulation.

You can guess why. So the O'Rean of Time remake announcement caused shockwaves, and the memes were out of the game. of control, people were talking about giving away their savings to get a switch to so that they would be able to play it. So he then points out that regional pricing makes a huge difference. So I just think that's like a really interesting email to read because that's not an experience that I was familiar with at all. Well, the regional pricing, this last part is interesting, actually. He talks about how a steam deck made sense to him because steam sales are a lot

are actually affordable because of regional pricing and steam is the main one doing that. That's really interesting and kind of puts in perspective the pricing on the steam machine, which is a big reason that affordability has come up recently, is that Valve is charging more than $1,000, $10.50 for the base edition of the steam machine. That is the cheapest, the one with the lowest amount of storage. And something I posed this on social media a couple weeks ago, and I don't really know the answer to this. I just thought it was an interesting kind of thought-provoking question, which is that, like, in the long run, if you buy a steam machine, are you saving money as opposed to a PlayStation or Xbox just because of all those sales? A couple of people pointed out to me that since, in recent years,

there have been a lot more sales on the PlayStation and Xbox store, too. But the regional pricing part of it is something I hadn't even considered and might make the steam machine itself a different sort of equation if you are outside of the U.S. Yeah, we got an email from someone who moved to Armenia after the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine who said that the regional pricing in Armenia, that some new AAA games were, they said around $30. So, like, new AAA games would be a whole lot cheaper because of regional pricing on Steam, which I'm not totally sure how regional pricing works across every storefront, like if it's

consistent or what, but that is a huge difference. Yeah, it was also just generally. interesting to me how many of these emails described PC gaming and specifically Steam as being more affordable because I also think, especially in the context of what we talk about on this show, of PC gaming the old school way as being the most expensive way that you could play a game. And in the kind of romanticized sense of having a really fancy computer that can play every game at the best possible resolution, like better, quote, unquote, than a console. That would be prohibitively expensive for the average person. But in part because of the Steam Deck, which a lot of

these writers tended to mention, even though the Steam Deck is itself expensive, according to some of them, it is sort of equivalent to a pretty good gaming laptop, for example. I know we had at least one email or mentioned the Steam Deck dock and like buying an off-brand dock and having that be their equivalent of a steam machine? Because once you have this device that you know is designed to play all of these PC games at least relatively well, you're getting a huge amount of value from it. Because there are so many games that are coming out on Steam, period. Yeah, I was struck by the console gaming thing too and by people who think of the Steam deck that way. And also who would buy a Steam Deck used. And just the whole, the used piece.

piece of this I think was also, it was helpful for me to be reminded how important that is, especially as someone who just gets game codes from publishers. And like I don't really seek out physical copies of games. I don't have them anymore. There was a time where when you wrote about video games, you got sent physical mailers, you know, of the games. I remember Microsoft would just send me like every, even like Just Dance, all these games I didn't really want to play. And now people just send codes.

And it's so much easier to do that way. But as a result, I just don't really engage with used games. But use games are a huge deal for so many people and specifically related to affordability. Bing. Kirk here, and I just wanted to mention we actually recorded this conversation before Sony's announcement that after January 2028, they will no longer be releasing physical games. So that is timely news related to this conversation. But we don't mention it.

And I just wanted to say that's why it happened after we recorded this. Okay, back to the conversation. Bing. There were a lot of people who talked about buying a game new, knowing that they could resell it on Facebook Marketplace or, you know, whatever, I guess taking it to GameStop or something like that, too, and get back a whole lot of the money that they paid for it. A whole lot. I don't know. GameStop always kind of ripped you off for that. Well, I think that on Facebook Marketplace or when you're selling it yourself and you're getting it all back, that is, that's like an easier way to offset, offset your expense. Fair enough. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense that that's emerged. sell your GTA box without the key. Right, which is then that was something a lot of people felt very strongly about,

and that's the reason why. I think you can think of physical games as being a collectible thing. Like, oh, I want the physical copy because I like having a collection of physical media. But for a lot of people, they're thinking, okay, I'm going to get the $80 version of GTA 6, but if I buy the physical copy, then I can sell it, you know, when I stop playing it whenever that happens, and get back some of that money. and that's like a big part of their budgetary analysis. And back in the early 2010 slash late 2000s,

used games were seen as this buggyman for the video game industry. Everybody thought that used games were killing the games industry. They tried so hard to find ways to eliminate it. Remember when EA games would have those like codes that came with it that you had to like install to like get the multiplayer working game keys or whatever they called key pass or something? Yeah, it's so funny to think of that now. It's like now it feels like that is a huge problem.

it's killing the affordability of games is that people can't buy them used anymore because physical games themselves aren't a thing. Well, the publishers won that battle. So now the industry is, I believe sales are depending on the publisher, but between 80 and 90% digital is what a lot of publishers are reporting these days. I think it was what's the real shame is that publishers back then didn't use this as an opportunity to be to be like, hey, we're going to, we want use game sales to stop, so we're just going to sell you digital games for cheaper, since we're saving so much by selling digital games. But those costs are not reflected to the consumer, despite the fact that a game publisher is making significantly more per digital sale than they are per physical sale.

The prices are the same. I think the reason they didn't do that is because retails would be pissed if they were seen as undercutting the physical sales by selling digital games for cheaper. But now that retailers are not really a thing anymore. We're actually seeing Nintendo start to experiment with that. And this year, they've announced that a few games they are selling for $10 cheaper digitally than physically, which I think is a really interesting experiment. We'll see how that works out. Yeah, that makes sense to me. And I think that that part of it, the physical resale, the fact that you're buying a physical product, it does factor into this, you know, an analysis of this that says basically, well, games have stayed the same price for decades, even though inflation

has, you know, ramped up. So, you know, I'll take Alex's email, for example, who writes in, says, you know, he's single, mid-40s, professional, low six-figures income, lives in a high cost living area. He says, I am in a privileged position to have this opinion, but I find people complaining about video game cost kind of irritating. When Ultima 3 was released for the NES, I remember being blown away at how expensive it was. It was being sold to the local department store for $65. That was in 1989. How much wouldn't that expensive game cost? now, $60 to $80. It's been 37 years.

He then goes on, when I was in high school, movie tickets were $5. Cheap fast food burgers cost 50 cents. Good burgers were a dollar. Movie tickets are now $15 to $20. A quarter pounder costs almost $10. A cheap burger is three. So he's basically saying we've been spoiled. And it's true, and it is interesting that games have not really, like the software

hasn't really changed in price. That's something to keep in mind. Even while it is also important to consider factors like we're talking about, the fact that you were buying a used, or I'm sorry, you were buying a physical object that you could then resell. Like it had much more value than what you're paying $70 or $80 for now, which is essentially a license to play the thing on your machine that's basically valueless. Plus the wage stagnation issue that we mentioned at the very top of the show that, of course, Alex doesn't get into when listing all of these other numbers. But I have also had the same

series of thoughts that Alex has had, especially when we talk on this show about how much more expensive video games are getting to make. Like, I don't know if we want to look up how much $65 was in 1989, but like, I know it was way, way more money. Jason's looking it up for me right now. I could see him typing. It's just, it's wild to think about how that price hasn't changed. And we definitely had a few other emailers besides Alex, who were noting that and we're actually making the case that video games are a very affordable hobby because of this, because the price of games hasn't changed in 40 years. And as these folks have, usually it's the older gamers, I think, to make a generalization that are kind of voicing this opinion are people who grew up

seeing these prices stay the same the entire time. And they're like, well, hey, at least it's actually technically cheaper now. So $65 in 1989 have the same buying power as $179 in 2000, 26. I think, Okay, so the movie tickets and burgers, that's an interesting analogy and certainly makes sense as an argument. But, I mean, I think the bigger problem is when you compare the price of a house from 1989 to today. Because that's the thing, the kind of the bigger ticket items, like rent costs. Like in 1989, you could feasibly have a four person, five person family with. on one person's salary and still manage to live a middle class life where you buy a house and and I don't know send your kids to a nice school pay off your your school loans easily yeah have

have two cars and pay off your say yeah not worry about school I mean school loans where yeah that's a whole other example way less so like it's not the movie tickets and burgers are not the the avocado toast is not the issue the bigger bigger picture I mean the price of a house that that cost uh like a house that costs a 50 grand in 1989 today costs more than million dollars. That is the kind of bigger issue, is that the kind of living life, the quality of life you expect is not quite as affordable. So that's, but yes, I mean, to that point, I mean, it is true that, like, you can get more bang for your buck. If you buy GTA for $80, you were probably getting a lot more value out of it in time, at least, in pure hours spent with it than any other piece of entertainment. If you

count the number of hours, like, in relation to the number of dollars that you're spending. Yeah, I think an important part of this also is the increase in hardware costs, and then specifically the very acute increase of hardware costs that's happening right now because of the RAM crisis and all the shortages of components driven by AI, you know, building AI data centers and AI companies like hoovering up all of the available computer parts, which is how I'll say it as to not try to sound overly technical. when I am not actually a very accurate. It was accurate enough.

Yeah, fair enough. There's a big vacuum and it's just sucking up all. And they won't turn it off. They just keep vacuuming. Sam Altman just refuses to flip the switch turn from on to off. They're taking all of those little parts

and then they're turning them into wrong answers to questions. There you go. It's really an amazing kind of alchemy. It's a machine that takes memory chips and turns them into misinformation on Google. So, you know, that is, I think, a piece of this It's part of what we're talking about it, is talking about the steam machine specifically. So, Jason, you and I each have a steam machine that we've been using.

Valve sent us each one. It's the kind of thing that I would not have bought at its current price, just because I have a gaming PC and don't need one. It's incredibly cool. It's the kind of thing I could see having worked much better at the lower price that Valve has said they wanted to sell it at. And it brings into a certain relief what's happening right now with hardware, which I think is then driving a lot of people's feelings

in general. I definitely, I mean, it is consistent across so many of the emails that we got that people are like, well, I'm not buying new consoles. I don't buy new hardware. What I look like I'm made out of money. Like we have a switch and we play that. We have a PS4. Some people are like, I haven't even bought a PS5. Some people say the games don't look that much better. There's still so many games I can play on these consoles that I have. There's just no need. And I I think that that hardware cost is a big part of people's thinking in general. And I guess some of that also is that since we're talking about historical prices, consoles did use to be a lot cheaper, relatively, like adjusted for inflation than they are today.

So that's also a big part of it. It's just, it is more expensive to buy gaming hardware in 2026. Well, they used to go down. That's the biggest part of that. Is that easy to be able to wait and hardware would go on sale? Now it's gone up. It's not just the seam machine. I mean, the seam machine seems particularly expensive because Valve, unlike the other console

makers, doesn't want to sell its hardware at a loss. Xbox and PlayStation have also just risen the prices of their hardware or two. I don't even remember what they're at now, $700, $800 for each of them these days. And that's even with those companies subsidizing the hardware. It's crazy. It's totally crazy. If you had invested in an Xbox in 2000, 20, the returns are better than like most stocks.

Something I notice a lot of people talking about that I feel as well is they were lucky to have built a gaming PC in like 2022, 2023, which was right around when I built my PC. And for reference, I bought a like 4070 TI, which is my graphics card. And I wasn't planning on getting a graphics card that I would probably just keep for the next however many years, who even knows. But now, like, that thing is doubled in price. I think it costs almost as much, like, a new one of the type that I got, would cost almost as much as a steam machine, as, like, just a whole steam machine,

which is itself quite expensive. So, you know, you could build your own steam machine, just like you can build your own PC. Valve has kind of, you know, their software will run on something that you build yourself. It won't be as slick as the steam machine, but at the same time, it'll also be upgradable. That's definitely a big weakness. that the steam machine has is that it's kind of a closed system.

And that's a benefit that a PC does have is for a long time, what I would do is I would just buy a new graphics card, you know, four or five years into a PC build. And I'd sell my old one for whatever I could get to offset the cost. And it was all pretty reasonable. Now, because GPUs have gotten so expensive, like, I don't even know. I mean, I don't want to buy a new one because it would cost like upwards of, I don't know, $1,500 or something, which just feels insane. me to pay for a graphics card. But anyways, that feeling of I'm bought in, you know, I'm kind of

locked in now. Like, I hope none of my shit breaks because I'm just going to be playing games on the stuff that I own now. I think that's a very common feeling that a lot of people have. So I want to talk about something else in regard to the question of like games getting more expensive versus games actually aren't getting more expensive. They're just as, they're cheaper than they've ever been. I think that there's certain things that really devalue games in people's mind in the same way that, I don't know, having access to thousands of movies on Netflix and HBO Max and whatever makes you feel like, why would I want to spend money on a movie or why would I want to spend money on cable or whatever? I think if you have access to Game Pass,

if you have access to a bunch of free-to-play games, that kind of makes it even more pronounced how much a $70 or $80 game is because you're thinking about your entertainment from games in a very different way. And that, I think, with both positive and negative effects, has really changed the kind of value proposition. I'll give you guys a good example. The mobile ecosystem has essentially made it so it's impossible to sell games on the app store

and survive and make a hit. I mean, not impossible. Maybe it's very, very difficult. And I know people who, like, back in the day, I was telling them about threes. And I was like, you should check this game out. It's like my go-to, like, time-killer game. It's my favorite, one of my favorite games of all time.

And they saw it, and they saw the price was $3. And they were like, why would I spend money on a game? I remember that. And that's like, that's how mobile gamers think. And I think a generation of free-to-play games, like League of Legends at Fortnite and Roblox have trained a lot of PC gamers, especially younger generations, to think that way, too. Spending money on video games? Like, why would I do that when I could just go and play Fortnite with my friends and

maybe convince my parents to get me some V-bucks or whatever, but I don't think of this game is something that's... And so that, I think, makes it even more striking when a game comes out, and it's like, oh, my God, this is $80 because a lot of this stuff has just devalued how people think of games. It's trained them to think of games as free. And GamePass is probably the biggest defender there, because that is trying to be Netflix. And when you're trained on that kind of brain, you don't think of games as something that you need to go and buy. In some ways, I mean, I think the three of us, given that we get games all the time for free, I think we kind of have been trained to think about games the same way.

Like, I don't think of games as something I spend money on. I think of it as like, oh, okay, I can just check out that game. I can check out this game. A little different because I'm doing it for work purposes, so kind of different mentality than just like playing games for fun on the side. But still, it's just, it changes your value proposition for video games, stuff. Yeah, that strikes me as one of those things that probably keeps video game executives up at night, or at least it should, since that's such an existential risk. I mean, this is something

that happened to the music industry 25 years ago, right? Like when Napster... Yeah, that's a better analogy than TV. I forgot about that. Yes, 100%. Yeah, so when Napster hit and suddenly everyone could get every album for free, I think like the whole music industry's life flash before its eyes. And they wound up cobbling together these solutions. This is like a whole long saga leading to Apple opening the iTunes store, selling songs for 99 cents apiece, which eventually led to Spotify. And now we have Spotify and Apple Music and title and other services, but Spotify is incredibly dominant in this space. Careful, don't get us another copy rate. Well, he was saying nice stuff about them. We love Spotify. We love Spotify's AI moderation

bots in particular. You guys are great. Now I will play this Creative Commons Bossa Nova track underneath my voice to really drive the point home. So, you know, Spotify has certainly devalued music. I think you could talk to any musician. This is something I have felt as a musician. Maddie, I'm sure it's something that you have felt. If you sell music or make music, people do not think of music as something that you pay for because of Spotify and because of streaming. And before that, you know, because of Napster, because of Apple, like it just really lowered the cost of music. You know, in the 90s, when I wanted to buy a new album, it was like a $16 CD that I would go and buy.

Now the idea of paying $16 for an album, I mean, I will do that for bands that I like. But even I, the great supporter of music, don't do that that often. I'll go to the record store and I'll buy used records. You know, I don't seek that out, except with bands I really want to support. And that reality, if that reality comes for video games, that will be like a massive earthquake, like a global earthquake that would just like shatter everything about the industry and Forsa just complete, like they would have to completely re-evaluate how they approach the value of their product and how, you know, how it would even support an industry as big as the games industry is. I mean, it kind of has, and that's why we're at the point where

people are buying one to two games a year because maybe the rest of the time they're just playing Fortnite and Roblox. I don't know if it's fully there because I feel like the true hell is the Spotify and Apple Music World. We're actually buying music or games in our version of this future hell is becoming almost impossible to do or so unpopular as to be meaningless. Like actually owning an album, very few people in my generation younger are even doing that anymore. That's not Taylor Swift's new album sold four million copies. Okay, but I'm not talking about Taylor Swift. I'm talking about like regular people.

No, but that's the perfect parallel with a video game industry. GTA is going to sell a bazillion copies. Taylor Swift is GTA in this example, perhaps. Like, GTA will always be fine. And so that's the one album buyer a year, aka the one video game buyer a year. That's my point. Sure, but I guess I'm proposing a version of the world

that's worse in which every indie game, in every small game, even if it's like kind of a double A game, is on a subscription service and where they're all just making pennies all the time. And it like becomes increasingly futile to even talk about, sales anymore. And instead we talk about impressions and downloads and like how how often are people

playing your game for two minutes and that type of thing. So to bring it back to affordability, I also wonder, I would be curious. I don't want to get tons of more emails, but I am curious. So if you do have the thought on this, you can reach out. But I am curious if there are people out there who maybe are a little bit more cash strapped or budget conscious and they have have been playing Fortnite or letting their kids play Fortnite as an alternative because it's free or Roblox or any of those equivalents. And then the money that they or their kids wound up spending on those quote unquote free games wound up becoming so, wind up accumulating to the point where I wound up costing them more than just like buying a couple of new games a year

would. I'm very curious about that too because a lot of those games are designed in very predatory ways to try to get you to spend money and the FOMO effect, especially Robo. is really scary. So I am curious about that too because sometimes you look at these free to play games if you're a budget conscious gamer and you're like, oh, great, fantastic. It's free. Don't have to worry about spending money on this game and then you fall into that trap. Yeah. I do think we were pretty heavily indexed in our email emails we got from people who are very budget conscious and succeeding at it. Like we got a lot of kind of the opposite type of email that Jason's describing now where people are like, here's all the tricks. I'm using.

using to avoid spending money on games, which maybe we should run down some of them because some of them are actually great. Like one of them was talking about Steam's family sharing program, which my beautiful wife gets to take advantage of dating at games journalists being married now to a games journalist and getting access to every single Steam game I get. But our listeners should be aware of how helpful that program is. It's pretty easy to set up. And once it's set up, you can just.

just let your household play your Steam games. Libraries. Also, a lot of people shout out libraries. I use a library all the time. My kids is my kids' favorite place. It's just taking it in the library because they take out books from there constantly. And I always see like a big collection of games. Obviously, I don't need to use that, but it's very cool to see.

And I hope people are out there taking advantage of their local libraries. And fun fact, I think I've said this before on the show. I don't know how many people know this, but like the more you borrow from your library, the better it is for that library because it helps them boost their budget and get more resources from their local government, state government, federal government, whatever. So not only are you getting free stuff, you are also literally supporting the library by taking stuff out from there. That's cool, yeah. Yeah, that was something a lot of people mentioned and something that is worth really underlining is how great the library is. There were multiple people who were saying,

yeah, I just played 007 or I'm waiting on 007 to come in, which is a very important. very expensive game and there were other people saying, man, I want to play that game, but I'm just going to wait a year because it'll be on sale. So you can get it from the library. And then I guess I'll mention that as the last big money saving advice that people sent in was just be patient. One person Eric wrote in about how he goes a lot to the patient gaming subreddit, which is our slash patient gamers. And it's just a whole community built around being patient and avoiding hype. Like it's specifically an anti-hype video game community. which is really cool.

And also, I'm going to read just a bit from listener Ian's email, who wrote, I made a spreadsheet to track what I play along with an estimated time to beat. While I still feel the compulsion to buy new games, I first have to cross three games off of that list. If the new release is part of an established franchise, then one of the three has to be an earlier entry in that franchise that I'm behind on, which is a pretty good litmus test. If I still really want to play the new Fire Emblem after finally running through the behemoth that is three houses, then I must really be Jonesing to play it. That's good.

I think like that kind of rule, you know, I think, like you said, Maddie, we did index, I think, in our responses for people who have put those kinds of structures in place. But I really liked that. We also heard from some people who listened to us talking about a game as a way to vicariously play it,

which I thought was interesting because I assumed that people would listen to us talking about new games every week or so, every few weeks or so, and want to buy them as a result. But sometimes the opposite happens also where it's like a game sounds cool, but just hearing about it is enough. And so they don't actually need to play it, which I thought was interesting. Yeah, the last thing I guess to mention that I was struck by and that a lot of people mentioned was an overarching anxiety about the next console generation.

And I think that, you know, like we've been saying, a lot of people like haven't even bought a PS5. Like a lot of people are not interested in the most current thing. But people are looking at the way this hardware is trending and seeing, you know, okay, well, the steam machine cost as much. It was supposed to cost maybe $700,800. That's what Valve was targeting. And that was a year ago, and now it's cost more than a thousand. So what are the chances that PS6 costs less than $1,000?

And just realizing, oh, man, this is just becoming out of reach for me, which I think just bums some people out and makes them kind of feel a little alienated from gaming. I was also struck related to that by how many people said, if I just had to have one console, or if we were getting one console for the family, we would get a Switch 2. That would be it. And I think that makes sense, actually, when I think about it, because there are so many games on the Switch, and now even more on the Switch too,

because it could just play so many third-party games and non-Nintendo games, and then you get access to Nintendo games, which especially for a family are great. And though a lot of people have bemoan the way that Nintendo doesn't do sales very often, you know, you can budget in your one big Mario game or your one big Zelda game per year.

You're going to get that game for your family, but then also be able to play a ton of other stuff and I just I thought that was interesting along with the people who are like just a Steam deck you know just PC there are people who are like only the Switch 2 that would be the only console that we need I think it was mostly people with kids

who said only the Switch 2 because yeah which makes sense it does make sense it makes perfect sense but also you can still play like cyberpunk on the Switch 2 which is like very adult game like the parents can still have fun with the Switch 2 after the kids go to bed

yeah to your point Kirk it's very difficult to imagine the console makers looking around at all of this and just continuing whatever course they had planned a year ago, especially because all signs are that the memory crisis is only going to get worse and that things are going to get more expensive. I believe in Asha Sharma, the new CEO of Xbox, in her email to staff a couple of weeks ago that coincided with Bloomberg are reporting about layoffs being imminent. She talked about how memory prices are like on track to be five times as much as they were. two years ago for new Xboxes. And that's going to cause, I think, both Sony and Microsoft to really

rethink the way that they're doing things. I could be wrong. This is all prognostication. I don't know what they're thinking or what their strategy is, but it's very difficult to imagine them hitting the market with a $1,200 console. I think Valve is only doing it because Valve's goal is not to sell millions and millions of consoles. I think their goals are something else entirely. They have their own just kind of rationales and they're kind of a strange company that isn't trying to compete with with PlayStation and Xbox and Nintendo and it's it's just hard to imagine fall 27 like a $1,000 PlayStation 6 coming out especially like it's not just the prices like this was true even before this current crisis because this generation has just been so

bizarre and lacking and especially lacking in just kind of overall graphical improvements or game improvements to justify the new hardware upgrade, it's very difficult to imagine that happening. Could happen, I suppose, but I don't know, I'm skeptical. It'll be interesting to see how that goes, and definitely what you're saying lines up with my experience, certainly, and also with my feeling that both video games haven't gotten wildly better looking over the last few years,

but also that's fine. It's actually been nice. I feel like a lot of games that come out now are very scalable. A ton of stuff works on the steam deck. You know, plugging in the steam machine, I know it can't play the most cutting edge, newest game at the highest settings, but it can play a lot of stuff,

given that it's less powerful than my current gaming PC. Should we take a break and then continue that conversation? And I think we can get into that. But I do think that that's nice. That games are more scalable than ever, and it seems like that will kind of probably continue to be true for the future, which is great, because all of us can just not buy new hardware.

And I would be happy with that. I just want to play cool games. I don't need to pay more money. We're just battening down the hatches. We like what we have. Okay? We like what we already have. Just freeze this in time. All right. Well, thanks to everybody who wrote in to share your stories. I had a great time reading them and just thought it was so interesting. And it was just wonderful to hear from so many of you. So thanks for taking the time to share your stories and to write in. And also thanks for listening to the show. It's just cool that so many smart and thoughtful people listen to Triple Click. Agreed. Okay. With that, let's take a break. And then.

we will come back for one more thing. Hey, Max Fun listeners. It's me, Jackie Cashin. I have a podcast with Lori Kilmartin. Say hi, Lori. Hi, Jacqueline. Hi, Max Fun listeners. Why not very formal?

We have a podcast and it's about stand-of-comity and how much we love it and how much we dislike some of it. So listen to that podcast. It's called The Jackie and Laurie Show. We drop new episodes every Wednesday that gives us plenty of time to decompress from our comedy weekends

and discuss things. with sane level heads. No, it doesn't. But if you are a woman our age or a man our age, or you know what, any person of any age, I think you'll enjoy your podcast.

Jackie and Lori Show on maximum fun.org. Bye! Are you a celebrity? Are you searching for meaning, connection, and a little levity these days? Hi, Uncle Mel Anjiani,

actor, writer, and yes, a celebrity too. And I've got four words for you. Bullseye with Jesse Thurie. Thorn. Are you tired of junkets? Red carpets, sick of the endless spicy snacks you have to eat? Do you want to connect with someone who gets your work and laugh with you a little?

Join me, Andre 3000, Tom Hanks, Tina Faye, and many more and become a guest on Bullseye with Jesse Thorne. From NPR and Maximum Fun. All right, and we are back for one more thing. So Jason and I are sharing a one more thing this week, which means Maddie, why don't you go first? What's your one more thing? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. My one more thing is a four-part documentary that Tina and I purchased. It's not streaming anywhere.

You're going to have to buy it. But I really recommend it. It's called Balance, a perimenopause journey. And it is about perimenopause, which is something that I knew almost nothing about. And that I think a lot of people like me don't know very much about either. And then you turn 40. I know, I'm doing 40 in two weeks. This is something that I've been learning a lot about over the last few years.

Yeah, I will also say, I think many of our listeners in our kind of age group or maybe have a partner around this age who might be like getting symptoms or being like what is going on because hot flashes are the kind of cultural stereotype. But many people don't get those. They are like me and they have chronic migraines, for example, and that might change and confuse them. So that's part of why I looked into this. Because I was like, is this what's happening to me? But there's so many other things that can happen to people. And this documentary is so cool. So the premise of it actually is that it's hosted by, created by, these two female Jane monks.

And they, so Jane monks, Jainism is like a very old Eastern religion. It was kind of created around the time of Buddhism. So that's how old of a religion we're talking about here. And the important thing you need to know is that generally, They're sort of ascribed to asceticism, which is like they sort of reject physical things. And in the case of these monks, they really try not to take any drugs at all, including ones that we might see as, quote, unquote, natural. And that idea of what is, quote, unquote, natural is a really big question that these two women have because both of them are undergoing perimenopause and experiencing really severe symptoms. And one of the two female monks immediately, upon fighting this out, she's like, I'm going to start

taking hormones, like on day one, basically. She's like, I'm in, I'm going to take these. And I consider these to be natural, a natural thing for me to be taking. And the other one is completely against it. And she's like, I want to try to do everything I can to avoid this. And the documentary is these two monks interviewing doctors, experts, they're basically playing reporters and they do an excellent job and they're so forthright and both have such wonderful personalities and are so charming and different in each their own ways. And I mean, I won't, you know,

spoil that journey that the one who's decided to go, All Natural goes on. But you can imagine that over time she's hearing from more and more experts who are like, it's really not going to work. Taking a series of supplements and vitamins is not necessarily going to do the same thing. It's just taking estradiol or whatever other hormone supplement you might decide that you need or find that you need based on your results. So it's really wonderful. It's wonderfully researched. And I just fell in love with some of the experts. These women are wonderful, mostly women experts who are on this documentary.

And I just loved it. And I really recommend it. So again, it's called Balance, a perimenopause journey. You got to learn about Jane Monks while you're watching it as well, which is, something I didn't know much about either and also really liked learning about. It's funny after the conversation we just had to be like, it's not on streaming, you have to buy it. I know, but hey, don't you want to support these two women? They made something really cool.

And sometimes you buy something that you think is good. I feel like that's an important part of the affordability conversation too. That sounds great. Yeah, Emily, I mean I have, of course, talked about paramenopause and I've learned a lot about it from her. And I've been noticing a lot more paramedopause, just visibility lately in media. And it could be that I am attuned to it. Jason, your friends and neighbors, which I don't know if you've been watching season two of that. No, no yet.

Oh, Amanda Peat's character. So one of the main characters, the spouse of John Hamm, she is undergoing, she's having symptoms of paramedipause and sort of dealing with it. And it's a big part of her storyline. And they're really like, it's really like kind of visceral. They're like kind of portray what she's going through. That's cool. She's learning about it. And in that kind of way of, I don't know, I think.

think about when I got a frozen shoulder a couple of years ago, and it was this absolute nightmare that, like, significantly impacted my life for months, and it came out of nowhere. And I remember reading about it and being like, what the fuck? Like, this can just happen. And she has a sort of similar reaction of like, wait, what? This is like, this is what's going to happen to me. And so it's a, I think, a very relatable and kind of just like a cool storyline that they include in that show that's otherwise about, you know, being miserable and rich and robbing your friends. It's like a very different show otherwise. Yeah, I'm glad people are talking more about it now.

There's so many aspects to women's health in particular that it's like, why do people just not know about it? But also anyone's health, as you're getting older, people do not want to talk about it, especially in America. Older people are like, it's considered shameful to get older. And so I think we generally are like, let's not discuss these things. But we should. As we millennials get older, we're going to, everyone's going to hear about it.

We're oversharers, okay? You're going to hear about all our problems. We're the generation. We all have podcasts. We're just going to be talking about our. some things. Yeah. All right.

Tell me about the steam machine, YouTube. Yeah. Let's talk about the steam machine. So the steam machine, it's out. It's expensive. It's pretty neat. Jason and I each have a steam machine that Valve sent us, and we've been playing around with them.

Yeah, I don't know. Jason, what do you think of this thing? Yeah. I don't have a ton of thoughts because essentially it's an entry-level PC. It doesn't have any new gimmicks or software or anything that really makes it stand out, other than the form factor being sleek. It comes in this box, this packaging that is very out. Apple-like. It feels very cool to open. It's all very just kind of simplistic and Spartan and easy

to set up. It takes like just a few minutes to update. I got to play around with the controller a lot, which is really cool. I'm really enjoying that. I was playing some James Bond on it last night. On my normal PC, on my desktop PC. As far as the C-machine, so a couple thoughts. One is it's absolutely an entry level PC. 007 First Light did not look fantastic when I look at that up. We have pretty similar gaming PCs, right? You and I have the 4070 TI. And that game looks...

Yeah, James Bond looks freaking amazing. It looks much better on my desktop PC than on the Steam. Yeah, 100%. That said, I mean, it's running all sorts of... There's a lot of stuff you can run on Steam that you don't have to worry about, like the highest end graphics, so it runs things just fine. The thing that is most impressive about it is, of course, Steam OS, which, is something that Valve has just been slowly updating and tooling away with over the last few years.

But their ability to make this operating system that essentially just can take your seam games and make them run for the most part flawlessly without the developers having to actually do any porting work to get them running in a new system on Linux, I think it's pretty spectacular. And the fact that this thing functions like a console in the sense that you don't have to do any tweaking or messing around, you just plug it in and play all of your Steam games is pretty remarkable. Also, it's great to have this little box that just plays everything you already own on Steam. That is such a big advantage over a traditional console where essentially you're starting from scratch every time. I guess you can bring over your PS4 library to your PS5, but this is a little different. This is games you've owned

for 20 years on Steam potentially. So that's really cool. For me, it fits nicely into my life because I'm going to stick it in my bedroom. Because the way my house is set up, all my gaming stuff is in my office because I use it for work stuff. And so having this thing, you're just stick in my bedroom and I can play games with my wife on it will be convenient. But like, I definitely wouldn't buy one if I wasn't testing one out for coverage purposes. And if I hadn't gotten one from Valve for that purpose. And I do have some coverage plan. And I actually interviewed some of the engineers on it and got a story coming on Bloomberg next week.

I'll probably do a video about it, et cetera, et cetera. So I got some cool stuff planned. But I would say not essential, but pretty nifty. And I can see, I can definitely see who it would be for. I definitely see a potential market for this if they're willing to stomach that price. Yeah, the price is, of course, the big thing that will keep people away from this. And it's been really interesting to experience just being able to have the complete Valve ecosystem. the sort of steam hardware ecosystem, the steam controller, the steam machine, and of course,

the steam deck. My favorite, so my favorite platform. I use that for most games, by the way. Well, and, like, and now I really see the steam machine as fitting into that ecosystem, and it makes that whole thing feel a little bit separate from my gaming PC. So my gaming PC is actually in the loft of our house, where our TV is, it's kind of our entertainment room. The two of you have been to my house.

Where the three of us played Mario Kart. Yes. And it's kind of like, where all the. video game stuff is and all the fun stuff is upstairs. And I go up there to play games and I can plug my PC into the TV. I have a super long HTML cord, which I think a lot of people do. But playing the steam machine, which is so small that it just sits behind the TV on the little like entertainment center, you can't even see it. It's really remarkable how little it is. Playing that plugged into the TV, I find is a much better experience. There's a lot of sort of weird friction that

can happen when you're running like a third monitor out of your PC from an HTML cord. like the sound has to go through the TV sound bar and there's like more latency and that's kind of weird and sometimes the encoding doesn't work. What I've found so far with Steam Machine is it just like works. Like surround sound just comes out of our surround sound bar. The controller just works.

It runs at the right aspect ratio. Every game looks good. I mostly run things at 1440p and you can kind of adjust all of that because it is a gaming PC. So I find that like now that I've got it plugged in, it kind of feels to me like there's the steam deck, which is the handheld.

And a lot of the time when I'm playing steam deck these days, I'm actually playing with the steam controller and with the steam deck on. I bought one of those pillows, Maddie, the mechanism pillows. So I have the steam deck kind of floating on the pillow, like on my lap, and I'm just sort of chilling on the couch. But I have the controller in my hands because I find that's more comfortable. This is how I played me in the hollower.

So I'm using that and playing that. But then if I want to go to the TV, it feels much more like an Apple thing where, you know, you go from your phone to your iPad or whatever. It has that kind of feeling where, okay, this thing is kind of like a steam deck, but it's much more powerful and it can play things on the TV, but it's not as powerful as the gaming PC, but also it's so much more convenient. So it really kind of fits in a certain way into my gaming life. Like I've said, I mean, it certainly doesn't fit in a I would pay $1,000 to have this way. But it is cool how it kind of sets itself apart.

It is just a gaming PC, but it's also kind of its own thing, which is something that I think Valve has. it's like a sign of Valve's design skill and their software skill as well, that they've made these devices that are kind of just a gaming PC, a gaming handheld. There's a lot of other devices that are like a Steam Deck, but the Steam Deck, to me, at least, still feels like its own thing because of those, they're not intangibles, like they're tangible, but sometimes they feel like intangibles to me. Like, I'm just sort of, there's just something about it. The sum is greater than the, or the hole is greater than the sum of the parts.

And I kind of feel that way with the machine, too. Yeah, it's worth noting, by the way, on the price point that, like, I believe some YouTube or some tech YouTuber might have been Digital Foundry or like Linus Tech Tips. I don't remember exactly who, but someone figured out what the cost would be if you were to build your own machine. That was these similar specs to the Steam machine. And it was essentially the price of the Steam machine, maybe like $50 less or something like that.

So this isn't a case where Valve is trying to gouge people. it's very clear that they're pricing it this way because they have to because that's what memory costs now and they don't want to subsidize it. So that's something to consider if you are in the market for any sort of PC, which is that like you're going to be paying through the nose. Regardless, I think a lot of people won't be able to do that either way. But that is worth taking into consideration here with the price. That said, I think a lot of PC gamers just wouldn't really see a need for this thing because if you're a PC gamer, you're probably willing to spend a few more $100, maybe more than that these days, but still to get a beefier rig and to play like the highest

end games at high end graphics. And if you're more of an entry level person, I'm more of a casual gamer or whatever, it's hard to imagine spending $1,000 on a console too. So this is kind of, it's got a very specific type of audience, an audience that wants an entry level PC that is kind of console like, but it's still willing to spend this kind of money for it. I imagine these things are going to sell out just because they can't make that much supply, but I don't know exactly

how many units, how many people they're going to reach with this thing because it's such a specific market. Right, and it's made so specific by the price. Like, if this had launched at $750 or something, you can imagine there's a lot more people who would want something like this for $700

than for $1,200, $1,300. Yeah, because it is, it does exactly what it delivers. It's like entry level PC, plays games, maybe like around the same graphical powers as a PS5, which is like more than enough for most people and for most games. You don't

need to be playing 007 at the highest end graphics. So you can play most. Most of the best stuff is 2D anyway. So you're playing that. Right. Just fine. Your Steam machine. All that said, I mean, I've been so spoiled by the Steam Deck. Like I said before, Steam Deck is my favorite console by far. I play most things other than the

highest end AAA stuff. Most things I will always play on the Steam Deck. And the portability of that is just such a boon, at least for my life and the way that I fit gaming in. It is, it is just cannot be beaten. So I think the Steam Machine will be a very low, very low, like second tier in terms of my usage to the Steam Deck. Yeah, it would just be nice if the Steam Deck had the horsepower to plug into the TV and to do what the Switch does. Like being able to play split-screen co-op games or games with, you know, kids who come over that we're hanging out with, like, friends' kids,

and we want to, like, everybody plays a game. Like, the Steam machine is great for that. That's what I'll go and plug my PC in to do because I have a lot of co-op games on Steam. Like, it's good for that, and it would be very cool if the Steam deck let you do that. So two final thoughts, I guess. One is that I do think it's important

to think about the upgrade path for this if you're thinking about buying one versus making your own little Linux box and putting Steam OS on it. because it is not possible, as far as I know, to upgrade some components of this. I don't think there is any upgrade, but I don't think you can upgrade it at all. I think you can get more storage space. Like, I think there are some things that you can upgrade.

Well, you can plug in an external hard drive, I suppose. But you can't upgrade the specs. You can't upgrade the CPU or GPU, which is the important part. Bing! Kirk here editing the episode, and just to get this right, it is possible to upgrade the RAM and storage in the Steam Deck, the internal storage. It's a little tricky. because it's a very intricate little machine,

but it is possible to upgrade those two parts of the Steam machine. It is not currently possible to upgrade the integrated graphics because that's a kind of a custom job. It could theoretically be possible to upgrade in the future if Valve releases an upgrade kit for it, but it's not like a regular PC where you can just swap out the graphics card. And as we've been saying, like those upgrades aren't nothing,

but the GPU is the thing that you would probably want to upgrade at some point. Okay, back to our conversation. Bing. What you're getting for it is, like, for example, an ingenious cooling solution. Like, this thing can run everything, and I can never even hear it, where my gaming PC sounds like a jet engine when it's running anything. And I use, like, noise-canceling headphones, usually when I play. So for, like, having it in the living room, it's really nice.

But it is important to keep that in mind. That you're buying something that's, like, fixed at a certain point, and it's not going to get more powerful over time, and you can't upgrade it in the way that you could a PC that you bought for the same price and assembled yourself. But what you're getting, and this is the last, last thing I'll mention is you're getting that aesthetic, like the aesthetic considerations. For what it's worth, Emily, my lovely wife who does not really play video games, she looked at this thing

once and was like, that is the prettiest video game hardware I've ever seen. She's like, that's the first thing you've set up and plugged into the TV that I would be happy to just have in my own living room. I mean, the PS5 sets such a low bar that it's like, we're all competing with just dirt on the ground. That's true. It's a low bar. I'm looking at mine right now, this white spaceship-ass thing. It's true. So bad. It is a lovar, but it is lovely looking.

It is incredibly cute. It has these, like, you can change out the face plates, and the face plates are really neat. Like, Valve is actually thinking about the aesthetics of technology in a way that a lot of people don't. You know, that actually reminds me. Chris Person at Aftermath wrote what I thought was a really great review of the steam machine, an incredibly thorough review. and he builds his own Linux boxes. He's like the guy you want reviewing this thing.

He has put a ton of thought into these kinds of devices, and he wrote a really, really thorough. And I thought, just great review that we'll link in show notes that people should check out. It's got all the extra detail that we're not getting into. But to kind of underline a point that he makes, I really appreciate that Valve is like thinking about actual design. Like, what makes something pleasing to the eye? How do these objects fit into our life?

What does it like to have a nice looking thing in your living room? And they've really nailed it. Like whoever, whatever team of people they have designing the look of these devices, I think it's really, really cool looking. And that's just a notable aspect of the Steam machine. That's very Apple of them. Yeah. And once again, I just want to reiterate because I think this is important.

I think the fact that you can take pretty much, not every single Steam game, but pretty much any Steam game and just run it seamlessly on this thing onto what is essentially a console running Linux, I think is just pretty important. impressive, I think, what they've done with SteamOS. And the UI of it all is really cool and good and well done and well designed. And you have a ton of options for how you can organize things and sort things. And I think UI to UI, I would say it is better than the consoles, for sure. Like, the SteamOS is way better than PlayStation Xbox or Nintendo. And unlike Apple, while there's some Apple similarities, it's not a closed ecosystem. So you can

you can run outside software like the same as on a steam deck you can get into the you know go to the desktop and install stuff it's not as easy as Windows but you can run a ton of stuff on it because it is an open platform which is also really nice and something that I approve of and wish more companies did yes no no other consoles are open

open garden yeah certainly not I mean I'm guessing you could like put moonlight on it and stream from your jet engine PC if you wanted to and then it would look even better there there was it's funny you bring that up because Valve sold this thing called the Steam Link ages ago. I know I had one. Yeah, it was a cool device. I wonder why did they just, why did they

discontinue that? They stopped making those. I don't know. I don't know if they've said why. It was, I should explain it. It's like a streaming device. Essentially you could stream your desktop to a TV. It was like a little raspberry pie basically with Steam branding. It was kind of, I mean, it was neat looking little thing. And yeah, if you ran an Ethernet cable from your computer to it, which I did for a little while with mine, it worked pretty well. And yeah, I mean,

given the state of hardware, that's actually the kind of thing that people would probably really want now. And I haven't tried streaming just, I am sure that Moonlight would be better, but I haven't tried see me even using, are streaming using Steam. Yeah, they have a native, I should say, they have a native streaming thing built into Steam that I have tried and I just don't tend to use it because I bothered to put Moonlight on my Steam deck and it just works so much better. But every now and then I have tried the Steam one and had it work. It's just that I've also had it not work.

Right, it works. And I think they're always improving it, the way that Valve is always kind of tweaking and improving their software behind the scenes. Like, I think their streaming is, it's definitely better than it was three years ago when I first wrote it off and decided to use Moonlight. Totally.

So I'll try it now, especially because I have a direct Ethernet connection between the Steam machine and my computer. I wonder if it would just be seamless. I wouldn't be surprised if it was just quietly great because I feel like when they launched big picture mode, which is like essentially how they created a console interface, it was terrible.

and I remember trying it and being like, well, this sucks. I'm like, this is not even close to something I could actually feasibly use. And now it's actually really great. Well, what you just described as is, it also describes all of their initiatives. Like they also had, they also had a steam controller that was not very good. Steam itself, right? Steam itself, yeah, it was awful when it launched. They are not afraid to launch something that is kind of bad and just be like, bear with us.

And, Maddie, there were steam machines that launched in 2015 that were essentially other third-party hardware that was branded with Steam stuff. This time they said, screw it, we're just making our own thing. And it's worked out well, I think, especially with the Steam. Yeah, it's true. This sort of behind-the-scenes software upgrades, I mean, the Steam deck has gotten a ton of software upgrades and gotten a lot better. And they're very good at these kind of clever manipulations of hardware to make games run better, give you new options. And I'm sure they'll be doing the same thing with the Steam machine. So yeah, it's a neat little box that's unfortunately expensive, which I guess that's not a groundbreaking take, but it is pretty interesting in some ways,

and it'll be interesting to keep messing around with it and see how my relationship with it evolves. Yeah, I mean, I think the good news, I think the good news is that, like, unlike those previous initiatives, I think Valve sees this current slate of hardware as a success, which means that they'll probably stick with the steam machine, and hopefully in four or five years, AI, the AI bubble has popped and memory chip prices are back to normal and we could get a C-machine 2.0 that is a little bit more reasonably priced. That'd be nice.

Yeah, that would be nice. And yeah, it is neat to see somebody kind of experimenting as successfully as they have been. All right, well, that is the steam machine and that is another episode of Triple Click. Kirk, do you want to shout out your show one last time? Yeah, because we won't be here next week. Oh, yeah.

I should shout it out one last time. you're in the Portland area, come to see Strong Songs Live, July 11th, that's next Saturday at the Alberta Rose Theater. It's going to be a hell of a show. And if you're not in the Portland area, you can also get a live stream ticket and you can watch along. And it's going to be great. Man, I've just been working pretty much nonstop for the last two weeks. I've written out all the charts. I've got all the music done. I'm just practicing and practicing. We have a whole week of rehearsals next week. It's a huge band, singers. It's going to be a whole thing. There will be lots of video of it afterward, but if you really want to watch it the night of or the day

after, watch the live stream, or get a ticket, come out to the show, say hi, enjoy music in person in real life the way it was meant to be enjoyed. It's going to be great. It's exciting. And yeah, with that, I'm going to go write some more charts. Got to get those charts done. Gotta get those charts. Yeah, I'll tell you. I tell you what, I've gotten a very good amuse score over the last few weeks. Oh God, yeah, yeah, I bet. But yeah, this was fun and we'll have our double B. O7 Beans cast and the bonus feed pretty soon. And otherwise I'll see the two of you in two weeks.

See you next time. Until then. Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun podcast.

network and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at Maximumfund.org slash join. Email us at triple click at maximum fun.org and find links to our merch store and our Discord server in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows. Supported directly by you.