Previously serving as the president of SIE Worldwide Studios for Sony and then becoming the head of PlayStation Indies in 2019, Shuhei Yoshida retired last year. He has since taken to giving industry analysis over on X. With the Steam Machine and its mighty price tag serving as a big discussion point, Yoshida has had a couple of hours with the machine. So far, he doesn’t seem mighty impressed.
Yoshida recently said on X, “3D performance is just…meh”, going on to add, “The system recommends to default to 1080p—am I going back to PS4 days?”
This middling performance is something our Andy said of the device in his review. We saw performance sitting at significantly less than even comparably priced mini PCs, with the Atomman G1 Pro handily beating it. The Steam Machine’s RDNA 3-era graphics hardware seems to particularly struggle with ray tracing, but it’s not particularly pretty across the board when you consider the price.
Yoshida is critical of this, saying, “But the price was very unfriendly. Hard to recommend to people unless for research.” He also finds that games take a “loooooooong” time to boot.