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Guide to Playing Darkest Hours
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A Weekly Review of Sunday Newspaper Highlights
Sundays are for rooting out clothes moths. The wool-devouring bastards have started cropping up all over my flat. I’ve put traps down but that’s only dealing with the ones which have already hatched and taken flight. I need to work out where they’re coming from.
Valve Uncertain About Future Price Drops for Steam Machines, Acknowledges Potential Consumer Exclusion Due to Costs
Well, that answers that. The new Steam Machine, which Valve have just opened to randomised reservations, starts at £879 / $1049 / €1039 for the base 512GB model, and costs £1149 / $1349 / €1359 for the 2TB version – climbing to £1208 / $1428 / €1428 if you bundle in a Steam Controller.
To paraphrase my Steam Machine review stance on those prices: they’re pretty chuffing high, even if the Machine itself is a nicely designed (and unusually specialised) piece of lower-end kit. As for what Valve themselves think, I asked designer Lawrence Yang and engineer Yazan Aldehayyat ahead of today’s sort-of-launch, both of them pointing to the ongoing component pricing/availability hellscape that is RAMnarök.
“How Smaller PC Hardware Manufacturers are Navigating the RAM Shortage Crisis Through Innovative Strategies”
Far from ushering in a technological golden age, artificial intelligence is giving PC hardware its most trying time in years. As huge, hyper-rich tech companies go about building resource-intensive AI data centres in pursuit of future wealth, the resulting memory chip shortages have detonated consumer-level pricing for RAM modules, graphics cards, SSDs, and even ancient hard drives.
Doubling or tripling street-level outlays without harming sales would, you’d think, make a lot of gaming gear makers – especially their accounting departments – very happy indeed. But as those chips have become a scarce commodity at the supplier level, even the bigger hardware businesses are being squeezed as well, and it shows. Razer can’t decide how much their next laptops should cost. Valve are running out of Steam Deck stock and delaying the new Steam Machine. Zotac Korea called the RAM shortage an existential threat. But what of the industry’s smaller players – those producers of the niche, the quirky, the retro?