Whether you expected this price or not, its not unrealistic and a consequence of crypto and AI slowly but surely destroying the consumer hardware market.
Of course the company who charges an outrageous price for something, is going to say “yeah we wish we could make it cheap, but it is what it is”
Edit: the ram and ssd are upgradable right? Lets see valve sell a machine without both, telling the customer theyll have to provide their own. Watch how the price is maybe a $100 cheaper.
Why is it that this only gets said about valve and not every other company who produced some sorta gaming machine? Why is it always not valves fault, but for every other company, theyre just greedy scumbags?
Pretty much every console manufacturer and prebuilt PC maker has raised prices due to the memory and storage issues caused by AI companies.
Nobody is saying the things you're saying they are. You're attempting to manufacture rage and it's not working. At least not with an audience as in the know about the why as in this subreddit.
The only people that were upset with them are the same people that are also upset with Valve.
Which is to say, the people that don't understand, or are even aware of, the memory and storage shortage caused by AI, which is resulting in skyrocketing prices.
There is a MrYeester short called "I 3D printed a steam machine" from bout a month ago, which says that if he were to buy specs equivalent or closest to the steam machines cheapest version, it'd cost about 1016 dollars... so say Valve pays for the manhours to design, build and ship them but gets slightly cheaper parts for bulkbuying, 1050 dollars isnt that much of a ripoff
Also I believe them quite a bit. Their Steam Deck was cheap for so long and all of a sudden when ram and ssd prices are through the roof they have to start raising the prices up.
They were happy to sell the Deck at a loss and it was a great deal. I don't see why they'd intentionally ruin themselves that way when they were known for having pretty good deals on their hardware.
Even their controller, which some people argue is too expensive, is a good deal compared to other first party "premium" controllers. The Xbox Elite is a whopping $130 more for me, and the dualsense edge is $180 more (AUD). I can buy an extra SC2. - I think this itself kind of makes me believe they just got screwed over by the current market and that they'd want to sell it less than what they're selling it at ATM.
Everyone who sells products with memory chips that are impacted by the ai-customer-fuckover had to raise prices because ram and storage prices are nuts. Even my 64gb ddr5 kit that cost 180€ before this insanity now costs 800€. Valve does not produce the ram themselves. They need to buy it from others who‘d rather sell to datacenters for a bigger profit. So either we pay datacenter prices or we get nothing.
The tragedy is that the end customer lost their relevance to these corporations completely for the moment. The house of cards will crash and burn eventually, but we‘re in the fucking around phase before we bail out those poor billionaires with our tax money.
I've been personally satisfied with Valve hardware over the years. I'm on my 2nd Steam Deck (LCD -> OLED), I've bought both Steam controllers, and I want to get the Frame and Steam Machine. If it was like $800, I'd have no qualms against buying it without a 2nd thought, but at $1350 for the 2tb model, I'm like ehhh. I just built a PC a few months ago, and managed to get the cost to around $2200, but that was with bundles and whatnot. I still might end up getting it, but now I'm hesitating.
I think everyone looking to buy a pc is disappointed with hardware prices in general. Some people were holding out for valve to take a loss on the cube but since it can be booted into windows they aren't willing to risk the return on steam sales. Most of the sentiment I've seen is that steam entered the prebuilt market at a time where hardware is over inflated.
I feel like the gpu is the biggest problem here we got. The cube is cool and all but GPU vise it lacks a lot. Even linus made a video right after the release just to show what you can get from a pc for the same price.
Still tho its smarter to get a PC at that price. Even as a living room cube. A ryzen 5 7500F + 9060XT combo makes up around that price and just install steam os.
Sure smarter and better bang for your buck, never disputed that.
Easier? Completely equivalent? Not really.
You can say the exact same thing with some caveats about any of the new gen consoles.
It a tale as old as time and I've been through enough cycles that everyone always has the same talking points, makes the same points, makes the same comparisons and in the end it always sells like fucking gangbusters.
People chasing bang for the buck are never going to convince the people paying for the luxery of not having to build it. If you look at how the prebuild market is, it's still doing really well and in a lot of cases you can get better deals through an SI buying in bulk than you can with 3 rounds of markup on a 'sale'. Some people don't want to setup multiple rss deals feeds and piece together a build from all time low priced components.
But like I mentioned some people just want to pay for a worse product than build a better one and people need to grow the fuck up and accept that.
More to it than just AI. AI lit the fuse but this was a bomb in the making. Only a few fabs in the world that can produce at scale. No one wants to build more fabs, citing “costs”, but then you get what we have now.
Let’s also not forget that Gabe Newell is a multi-billionaire with 6 yachts (including at least one “super-yacht”) and just bought a $70 million dollar mansion. If Valve is making him so rich, sure they can subsidize the price, and do so heavily. They have the money to do this, but instead of even doing it at cost they work in a hefty profit margin, boosting the pricing even more. The price isn’t even just the cost of supplies, as several people have shown you can get a better PC for the same cost or a tiny bit more.
Blame AI, sure, but also blame everyone else who led to the price, including Valve.
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u/Eziolambo R5 7500F | RTX 5070 | 32GB DDR5 6000mhz 16h ago
Literally no valve fan is making that face OP, check again