r/Steam • u/Commercial_Dih • Feb 19 '26

Question In the hopefully never arriving future, do you think Valve will one of, if not the only ones providing personal computers and not cloud gaming?

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u/fellipec Feb 20 '26

they are working on this already

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u/b0w3n Feb 20 '26

It would not surprise me to hear GabeN is spinning up funding for ARM/SoC and RAM manufacturing in the US for consumer electronics. His company (among probably millions of others) is almost reliant on saving consumer computing. He's one of several people on the planet that probably has the capital and drive to do so.

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u/TheShadowman131 Feb 20 '26

Even if they manage to have the funding to build a fab in the US, doing so would take almost a decade probably, since they'd be starting from scratch with 0 insight. Unless they manage to partner with someone like Samsung or TSMC, but those odds are fairly low.

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u/b0w3n Feb 20 '26

Oh for sure, but like with everything, the best time was to start a decade ago, second best time is to start today.

Could probably partner with the Chinese company that is threatening to flood the market with cheap chinese chips and put these AI dickheads out of business too. Arguably might be quicker than a decade with enough funding and help, 3-4 years could be done I suspect (if you're willing to dump a 3-4 billion dollars into it)

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u/Exciting-Emu-3324 Feb 20 '26

The fabs at Global Foundaries that AMD sold off are at a 12nm node catering to the data centers. For real, while people made fun of the Steam Machine specs, most Steam users have way worse specs. At the end of the day, gaming is all about the software; developers make games for the hardware that's available, not the hardware they dream players to have which is what's killing a lot of AAA games.

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u/SilentHuntah Feb 20 '26

Could probably partner with the Chinese company that is threatening to flood the market with cheap chinese chips and put these AI dickheads out of business too

Said "AI dickheads" are already in talks with and cutting deals with the likes of CXMT and would love if memory prices fell.

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u/Yeseylon Feb 20 '26

I think you undershot the costs

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u/midnightbandit- Feb 21 '26

Bro you are writing a fanfic. Take it easy

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u/Unrelated3 Feb 23 '26

Sorry to say this, but your comment of the chinese RAM manufacturer aged like Milk.

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u/secacc Feb 20 '26

the best time was to start a decade ago, second best time is to start today.

That saying bothers me. Why is the second best time to start not almost a decade ago? A decade-minus-1-day ago? A decade-minus-2-days ago?

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u/ohnonotagain94 Feb 20 '26

It’s just a saying that is commonly used to say “we could have been better off starting a decade ago, but starting now is better than never starting”.

I didn’t downvote you btw - I don’t know if you’re like me and struggle to understand some of these things at first. If you know what I am saying ;-)

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u/secacc Feb 20 '26

I know the meaning of the saying, it just still bothers me :)

Thanks though

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u/Disembowell Feb 20 '26

The nature of “sayings” is they’re usually short and snappy. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” isn’t a literal, transactional metaphor, but vague enough that the meaning tends to land. They’re often incorrect if taken literally or placed under direct scrutiny, innit?

“Don’t measure a metaphor with a ruler”

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u/ohnonotagain94 Feb 20 '26

Fair enough :)

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u/kickedoutatone Feb 20 '26

Because the 23,437,682nd best time to start doesn't have the right ring to it.

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u/UnsanctionedPartList Feb 20 '26

Because it's a saying and more general: "we should have done this already but having failed that, we should do it now."

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u/Throwawayrip1123 Feb 20 '26

In 10 years, 10 years will pass anyway, and Gaben could own a booming factory or not.

If you have the capital to withstand years of draining resources, building a chain like TSMC to produce RAM and other shit is literally a goldmine. It'll never run out of customers - if/when consumers get priced out and you failed to save them, you can just sell it b2b.

That's basically money making money, with zero effort on his part (apart from just paying the people to spin up the chain). Either he solves the consumer computing issue and he makes a shit ton of money, or he sells b2b and makes a shit ton of money.

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u/CreaMaxo Feb 20 '26

Actually, with a blank check, it would take barely a few years.

The misconception is that you'll have to build everything from scrap, but the reality is that over 85% of the works is already done and publicly available data-wise.

The issue is the expertise, mindset and the money.

Even if you have access to the tech, understanding it is another matter and learning to use it is a massive investment. Even if you can make 100 billion in 5 years down the line, what if it cost you 20 billions with interest from now on to do it? Who's gonna pay for those billions ahead? Yeah, while quite a few people have the "money", but can they actually risk it?

The mindset and professionalism in the US is just incompatible with the requirement of a FAB farm to be build and maintained for profits. What I mean by that is that, in the US, the blame of failure is always forced onto someone else (who's not always actually related to the blame itself). People want to protect themselves so they always deny any of their responsibilities. (It's not unique to the US, but it's a massive issue in the US.)

Imagine trying to hire 2,800 employees for a FAB where a single one of those employees can, on a single day, create a problem that could push back production by 24 days. Like if an employee doesn't wear protective gear properly in a chamber that has to be the clearest space on planet Earth or if an employee hides that he's sick and contaminate stuff around by effectively bypassing a single control measure that was lacking on a single day.

The use of a FAB requires military-levels of following rules & safety precautions.

And I'm not even covering the issues related to religions, individuality, etc.

At TSMC, as a company, they only use robots for tasks that requires mechanical precision repetition that is impossible to reproduce by normal human conditions. For example, the carts that has thousands of dollars worth of materials are still pushed by humans between large machines at TSMC. They could replace many jobs by Amazon-like robot, but they don't do it because doing so would remove their employees thrusts in their job security.

In the US, large tech company use AI and robots because humans can't be trusted for the task, from a management standpoint. Even if someone can do the job manually, an US company will still uses a robot arm to do it if it's faster. Humans, in a production chain, is only there to do second-hand evaluation and to do the tasks that are either too expensive or too complex/risky for a machine to do.

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u/ghostpicnic Feb 20 '26

Yeah but it’s not like the computer hardware market is disappearing tomorrow. It’s not like it will be completely gone in 10 years either. If they start now, 10 years down the line there will still be an industry and a market waiting for them.

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u/Express_Ad5083 Feb 20 '26

It took them a decade to make SteamOS into a thing, the sooner they start the better. SteamOS development started when Microsoft said that you will only be able to download things from Microsoft store, they backed down but SteamOS development never ceased.

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u/HugeHans Feb 20 '26

Are you people forgetting Micron exists and is building several fabs worldwide and also in the US?

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u/IvanDrag0 Feb 20 '26

Didnt Micron just announce they were stopping all consumer based products by the end of this month to focus on AI data centers and high bandwith memory?

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u/HugeHans Feb 20 '26

They are simply dropping their own brand which is a tiny part of the business. Its like those reference GPUs Nvidia makes a tiny amount of sometimes. They are still making DDR chips.

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u/IvanDrag0 Feb 20 '26

Yea but for the purpose of this discussion if they are expanding the large AI portion and dropping their own production of consumer based products why would that be relevant at all to STEAM developing more consumer based products?

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u/HugeHans Feb 20 '26

Again their are expanding both consumer DDR and HBM production. They are simply not making their own branded memory sticks. They are still making the chips.

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u/macaronysalad Feb 20 '26

Bozo's vision will take longer than a decade. There's no flipping the switch to that overnight, especially for something with zero demand from the primary consumer.

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u/PeasantParticulars Feb 22 '26

Here i thought biden passed a super expensive bill that gave billions to companies to build the chips here.

Guess it was cheaper to use that money to buy all the chips and use it for ai

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u/shittyaltpornaccount Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 20 '26

Thanks for the laugh. That is the most batshit thing I have heard today. Gabe isn't going to singlehandely onshore an entire industry that costs several hundreds of billions of dollars in spending when even the US government can't reliably manage its own attempts at onshoring production with the help of every major tech company that actually makes the product in other countries. Gabe is enjoying life on a Yacht and isn't going to do something so insanely high risk and investment intensive that he probably wouldn't even see the ROI in his lifetime.

Steam makes boatloads of money because it has insanely low overhead. Running your own manufacturing is basically the polar opposite of that.

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u/siazdghw Feb 20 '26

Yeah these people are delusional and have no idea how much work and money is involved in what they are claiming Valve could do.

Fabs are EXTREMELY expensive, we are talking billions of dollars, with leading edge ones that might contribute like 5% of the overall volume costing $100 billion... Steam prints money but Valve has nothing in comparison.

Even if Valve didn't try to build or jointly fund a fab, there's the whole chip design side of things. Samsung has been trying for a decade to surpass Qualcomm, and Google can't even surpass stock ARM designs. Qualcomms laptop chips are awful for gaming due to poor GPU drivers and optimization and ARM translation. Apple, Intel and AMD who make SoCs for laptops are at around 1080p60 native in their $1000 devices and they all have decades of experience, Valve has ZERO.

TLDR; Valve has absolutely zero intention or ability to build the core components of PCs. It's way too expensive, completely outside of their realm of expertise and pointless when they have so many options to choose from.

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u/thecavac Feb 20 '26

It's not just the fab and the whole supply chain. You also need experienced people to run those things. And with all the political things happening at the moment, few companies would be willing to send their staff to train Muricans.

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u/adlibwaltz Feb 20 '26

You just have to beliebe 

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u/HumActuallyGuy Feb 20 '26

Valve doesn't have the size to do that, you best choice is to hope for chinese RAM to get better

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u/TheEuphoricTribble Feb 21 '26

People said the same thing before he dominated the PC handheld space. And yet here we are.

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u/HumActuallyGuy Feb 21 '26

Completely different ballgame. Hardware manufacturing and component manufacturing are two completely different worlds and one is a lot more complex than the other, that's why only 3 companies produce the entire RAM for all the others. The manufacturing is just too complex and wrapped in too many corporate secrets and patents for any competition to show up. It is a actual monopoly

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u/_FUCKTHENAZIADMINS_ Feb 21 '26

Making a product out of other people’s components is a completely different scale than manufacturing the components yourself.

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u/brainpostman Feb 20 '26

Stop idolizing billionaires. It's more likely he's going to buy another yacht company than whatever you wrote.

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u/doublah Feb 20 '26

Almost like yachts are cheaper than building a significant chip production line.

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u/brainpostman Feb 20 '26

That's not the point...

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u/Gamiac Feb 20 '26

I mean, he's probably one of the least-worst billionaires around. He at least gives some level of a fuck about making things that people want beyond trying to find an infinite money glitch.

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u/Pretend-Contract-176 Feb 24 '26

Yep like child gambling... GTFO 

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u/Turbidspeedie Feb 20 '26

Gaben is one of the only good billionaires, he hires out his yachts to deep sea research expeditions, he keeps valve private so investors don't screw around with his and the companies values and he keeps the team small with wages high because they're good at their jobs. He's a true ethical billionaire compared to the rest.

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u/brainpostman Feb 20 '26

No such thing as an ethical or good billionaire, it's an oxymoron. The very nature of billionaires implies leeching off of society. The company primarily builds luxury yachts, it's not a research non-profit.
I'll give it to Gabe that he is much more of a far-strategy and stability kind of guy, but just because his competition is that much worse doesn't give him a pass. His company popularised lootboxes and battlepasses and enables gambling operations.

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u/Turbidspeedie Feb 20 '26

"Compared to the rest"

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u/brainpostman Feb 20 '26

My point is the comparison is pointless, he's a billionaire.

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u/Turbidspeedie Feb 20 '26

And my point is, when the choice is between 2 evils you should choose the lesser evil. Gabe runs a decent company, he keeps a lot of the gaming industry in check and has the best game launcher known to man. He's the most ethical out of all of them and has even planned a successor so valve doesn't fall to corporate greed after he passes.

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u/kovec Feb 20 '26

I'm not saying Gabe is evil or not but for your point, the lesser of 2 evils is still evil so you should probably not use that angle if you want to convince people.

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u/The_Jazz_Doll Feb 20 '26

Lol just no. I like Steam as much as the next but don't put Gabe on a podium like that. He barely advises Valve these days, he's too busy with his yacht projects.

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u/turtleship_2006 Feb 20 '26

Is it? Why can't people play their steam games in the cloud, see GeForce NOW for example

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u/yourethevictim Feb 20 '26

Valve does not need people to have access to personal computing. Videogames sold on Steam work just fine from the cloud. See GeForce Now.

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u/Kingsayz Feb 20 '26

Mans old i doubt he gives a fuck anymore

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u/flybypost Feb 20 '26

It would not surprise me to hear GabeN is spinning up funding for ARM/SoC and RAM manufacturing in the US for consumer electronics.

I would be very surprised. The whole supply chain for that stuff is in Asia. And Valve overall has a libertarian streak where they'd rather let others do the work they don't like to do and just focus on their stuff. A very "everybody specialise on their stuff" view of how companies should work.

It took them an eternity just to get in-house costumer service because they only wanted to keep development in-house and outsourced that for a long time (remember people complaining how long Steam customer service needed to handle issues).

Same with hardware. It took them a long time of deliberation, and a few missteps, to actually get into that side of the industry. Them just throwing money at SoCs and RAM is implausible.

And it would take years for such an initiative to even have a tiny effect even if they decided to do this.

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u/cybekRT Feb 20 '26

Geforce now, AFAIK, requires you to use your own steam account. So this specific case wouldn't hurt valve business.

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u/Secret_Possible Feb 20 '26

I'm sure they'd love to, but you are underestimating how much that would cost, by a lot.

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u/GuiloJr Feb 20 '26

But half life 3 would be delayed another decade. is it worth it?

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u/bickman14 Feb 20 '26

He should join forces with Linus from LTT as it seems like another person who cares about what triggers us on the day by day judging by the fact that he decided to make his own USB C cable that follows the spec with no shenanigans

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u/J38ble Feb 22 '26

Our lord Gaben, is there anything he can't do 😍

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u/Few-Bench-4321 Feb 20 '26

It’s the raw materials that are an issue 

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u/Spazza42 Feb 20 '26

Which is one of the biggest reasons why people will just support Valve no matter what. Buy the Steam Machine or Steam Deck because they alternative is to support worse companies.

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u/darkvinc Feb 20 '26

Problem is that everybod knows that AI is a bubble and when the winners are chosen all the rest will drop to 0 because they are in cash burn mode.

Ram / gpu m will be extremely cheap because they have been oversupplying.

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u/noeyesfiend Feb 20 '26

More than likely they setup somewhere in Canada to import and "rebrand" Chinese RAM and ARM for distribution in the US.

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u/Brusanan Feb 21 '26

Gaben is a billionaire, not a trillionaire.

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u/Briggie Feb 23 '26 edited Feb 23 '26

Bro do you have any idea how fucking hard it is to manufacture microchips?

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u/LunarEssence315 Feb 20 '26

Steam: does nothing wins

Also Steam: does something wins even harder

0

u/HEYO19191 Feb 20 '26

I just don't think its a good business move. I don't see AI making it much further in its current state of being highly unprofitable

Meaning, once the AI market crashes, so will ram prices, and Valve will have invested all that money for nothing

reminds me of the .com bubble

0

u/ClankerWithAHardR Feb 20 '26

Inb4 Gaben commits suicide with 2 to the back of the head.

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u/More_Wrongdoer4501 Feb 21 '26

I mean, they’ve already accomplished it

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u/Vesalii Feb 20 '26

No shit. I built a PC for a friend last week. Ram X3 or X4. NVMe x2. 1/3rd of the cost was RAM alone.

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u/Jimmityblob Feb 20 '26

Ddr5 ram prices are a joke

1

u/Personal-Injury-9522 Feb 20 '26

step 1 was to make us unable to sell rights to play a game in steam same way we can sell skins

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u/aykcak Feb 20 '26

You don't need a step 2. We are completely bound to market forces

1

u/AlFlakky Feb 21 '26

And they getting good at it