‘Am I going back to PS4 days?’ Shuhei Yoshida says Steam Machine is ‘hard to recommend to people’ at its current price

Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida has shared his thoughts on the Steam Machine, calling it “hard to recommend to people” at this time.

Yoshida – who spent 31 years at Sony where he helped to launch the original PlayStation and served as president of SIE Worldwide Studios between 2008 and 2019 – recently got his hands on a Steam Machine and took to X to share his initial thoughts.

Criticising the Steam Machine’s performance, Yoshida said its “3D performance is just… meh”, and noted: “The system recommends to default to 1080p – am I going back to PS4 days?”

He also complained that some games take a long time to boot (“what is it doing?”), that the Steam Controller’s sticks were a bit looser than he’d like, and that the touch pads on the Steam Controller are nice to have but “very ‘touchy’ and hard to use”.

Yoshida did have praise for some elements of the Steam Machine, however, saying the system UI is “easy to use”, that being able to boot the system by pressing a button on the Steam Controller is “a killer feature” and that the changeable face plates are “nice”. He also noted that “the small form factor and quietness is super good”.

Concluding that the price is “very unfriendly”, however, Yoshida said it was “hard to recommend to people unless for research”.

Valve launched the waitlist for its Steam Machine last month, announcing that its compact system designed for playing PC games on TV will cost $1,049 for a 500GB model and $1,349 for a 2TB one.

The company conceded that the price is “significantly more” than it wanted to charge, but said it “reflects the price of the components as we’ve secured them over the past 6 months”.

Valve had originally described the Steam Machine as offering “4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR”, but later changed this to “up to 4K gaming with FSR 4.1” after initial reports questioned its ability to consistently hit 4K60 with some higher spec titles.