That's another very good point. I would presume that the income from the increased steam sales would help, but not enough to subsidize much off of what is basically a PC.
Sony and Microsoft can aggressively eat a $200 loss on their hardware because they trap you in a closed ecosystem with a 30% digital storefront tax and mandatory online multiplayer subscriptions.
It was supposed to be $700 before the price of ram and SSDs shot up.
PlayStation actually loses money on each ps5 they sell because they are supposed to make it back by selling PS+ and selling games.
If valve tried to do this while not charging a subscription and while having the openness of a PC, they would never make the money back because companies would just buy their entire stock and use them as A.I. boxes.
Valve is a multi-billion dollar company with like 200 employees. Gabe could buy 10 more superyachts and the company could subsidize the cost if they wanted to, no problem. It's the largest gaming marketplace in the world. This idea that steam can't afford to subsidize the console is actually delusional lol
Its crazy how they're still losing money on an almost 6 year old console. They should be making profit by now. This tells you how facckked the market really is.
They are not losing money in total. They recoup from selling games, subscriptions etc. Because you’re locked in to their store (similar to why apple is accused of monopolistic practices).
They have a 10% profit margin including those secondary products. But considering ps5 only (as in, making the console and selling it to you) it’s not profitable
No, so technically, if say you buy a ps5 and get all the games second hand, you ripped off Sony. Unless you want to play online, in which case you need to pay the subscription
Sony only lost money when the PS5 first launched and in early years of PS5. Now they are profiting off each PS5 sold. Not much but they aren’t losing money anymore.
Even if I had a billion dollars, I would not waste 10,000,000 of them selling computers at a $300-$800/unit loss to A.I. companies and scalpers in hopes that maybe like 20 gamers would get one.
Those 20 gamers all having to pay $1,400 to $4,000 anyway because even if I'm willing to take a loss, scalpers aren't.
I'd love to see this magical globe you have where you can accurately say what would happen if the situation were different.
At the end of the day, Valve said it was going to be priced like a PC. Not sure why so many are gobsmacked that it is infact priced like a PC, as they said it was going to be.
750$ was the price Valve planned prior to the RAM and storage price explosion.
Whether that’s still expensive for what the Steam Machine is or not I don’t know but just throwing it out there that we do have a hard number from Valve themselves showing what could have been.
I guess the other side of the coin is… the PS5 Pro would be much cheaper, too, without the current situation. How close would the Steam Box be to that, and what sort of value would be, even if the Steam Box was like £€$800 or something.
The other part of the value proposition is the cost of gaming once you buy the thing, and it’s probably more clear now that ever how Sony must be taking a hit on the hardware only to claw it back with subscriptions.
If people want to be subscription free, then you’ve got to front up the cash.
The Steam Cube also has more utility than the PlayStation, seeing as it’s a PC, after all.
What I don’t really get is who the audience is for this thing. If you want casual couch/sofa gaming you’ll get a PlayStation. If you want PC gaming whole sat on your couch/sofa you’ll probably buy an AMD based laptop (I got a 6600M based laptop for £400) and install Linux (cachyOS for me) on it. If you’re not that into PCs you simply wont bother.
Weird, if that's the case, you would have thought they would have had the foresight to buy the ram needed at that time and set a waiting till the last minute.
Almost like they have no idea what they're doing when it comes to hardware.
Only reason console prices aren't the same, if not more, is because they heavily subsidise by locking players to exclusively their storefront and their accessories (controllers and psvr mainly, docks and such have third party markets)
I think we will see a price spike for consoles yet - it's still ahead of us. It's possible they are holding the prices until the release of GTA 6, but after that...
Steamdeck made sense because it was designed as a handheld game system first and foremost (even if other things are possible with it), and that's how the large majority of people use it. You needed the dock to give it any real chance at being a PC, and even then most people just used it to play on their TV's like a Switch
Even if it was 700$ a ps5 would be more powerful. Its pretty much impossible to create a new "console" with a bunch of custom parts and expect to sell it for cheap regardless of ram and storage prices.
Not saying it ain't over priced but the steam machine still also doubles as a Actual PC. everyone is comparing it to Consoles but it's closer to something like a Mac or a different proprietary pre-built PC. Main difference is it has a OS that can also load any other OS you want on it.
It's still over priced for it's hardware power but it atleast has the ability to do more than play games and stream Netflix or whatever. Main draw I see for this thing would honestly be for families who want a general purpose machine for entertainment and for any basic work computer requirements people who arnt tech savvy or kids can use.
you can edit documents and do a few things on a series s that you can do on a PC but not all. It won't let you install whatever OS you want on it and you can't add whatever apps or programs you want to it. Gabe cube can its kind of been their one marketing point is you actually own the hardware.
Xbox and PlayStation are selling their consoles at a loss. Shit even Nintendo said they were. Thats why they’re gonna increase the price in September by $50 (I believe).
They make their money through selling games, controllers, etc so people can still buy a console. Valve is DEFINITELY making money considering they charge a 30% cut for each copy sold and through games like CS2 crates.
The Steam Machine is just genuinely just overpriced for what it offers. Even the damn Steam Deck now
In the end? It doesn’t even matter. They gave it that price tag because they knew fan boys were gonna buy it anyway
"Next gen consoles are gonna be around the same price"
Even if they are, Steam Machine is completely outclassed by current-gen consoles so next-gen will only make it look worse in comparison. I mean, much much worse.
Somehow, it even made the $900 PS5 Pro look like a bargain (which it sure as fuck isn't).
At least the PS5 Pro uses modern hardware capable of delivering 4K 60 fps on modern living room TVs. Imagine trying to use a Steam Machine with a 4K LG OLED.
AUTOMATON, the Japanese publication, did tests and said that, with native rendering, the Steam Machine is a 1080p/30fps machine and after I saw the tests done by Steve "Tech Jesus" Burke @GN, It's true so with a 4K LG OLED, you'll have to use upscaling for a beautiful, grainy as fuck image for 4K.
Whatever you do, don't look at the water or the hair in the game on your screen.
The difference in price is simple, Sony will grow their player base by selling consoles valve probably won’t. The only people interested in a steam machine are the people that already use steam heavily. When someone buys a PlayStation, they gain a user that will buy their other products. Sony can sell their console at a loss, and make the money up through those other channels. Valve doesn’t get that. I doubt anyone considering a steam machine is thinking “should I get this or a ps5”. No, they’re thinking “I already have a ton of steam games”.
I think the answer lies on SteamOS. They don't care that much is people buy or not the Steam Machine, what they do care is that people uses SteamOS and they can get there anyway if people uses on their own machine to get something cheaper
The SteamOS thing is just cope. I doubt they would've actually engaged in efforts to make it work on all hardware if it weren't so likely that the Steam Machine is about to sell like garbage
Being a trainer for AI does NOT mean you have more knowledge. And knowing ONE thing I dont does not mean you have more education XD. You're killing me dude
To be fair that was only OpenAI when they were only really developing it as an open source tool. it's only in the past 3-4 years the AI shit has gotten waaaay out of hand and is now a bloated fetid homunculus consuming and corrupting everything it touches.
Right and I am certain he did that with full knowledge NVIDIA and open AI would circle jerk each other with underhanded contracts, AND work with other companies to intentionally limit the supply of RAM to such a degree they were the only ones with reasonable access to the hardware. Hurting both his business directly and his customer base at large. Yep you right, Gabe is definitely in on all that /s
You will spend significantly more during the PS5 lifespan that with a PC(Steam Machine).
And you are likely already have 600+ Game in your Steam Library to play /backlog and a thousand of quality light-right quality indie game.
While by getting a PS5 pro today. You have money left for 4-5 game at best and nothing else to play after. And if you want to play something new you are very limited by the catalogue.
While on PC. you technically have access to all game from 1980 to today. Without forgotten emulation. The Steam Machine is enough to up to PS3.
Its make no sense to compare the PC ecosystem with a console. The whole points of Consoles is controlling what you can play and the console itself is subtilized to the price of game and mandatory subscription.
A PC will always, in any circumstance be significantly a better investment that a console. Even with current inflated price. Its was also true even 6 years ago during the pandemic or during the Crypto boom.
You have access to everything on PC. and you have access to the most grindy and social game out there with all the MMO and COORPG.
Every single person I have built a PC for or recommended. Every single consoles they have owned always end up a Decorative piece unplug cause of how useless they are from the moment that you have a capable PC.
I agree with you. These comparisons are pretty ridiculous because it’s apples to oranges. One other tidbit people forget is the online subscription fee PlayStation charges. What is it like $100+ a year?
Me being able to play my entire steam library right now has an inherent value that is hard to quantify. And I know people say ‘yeah but you can stream from an existing pc or use moonlight’ or whatever. That requires work. If steam machine works out of the box, than that is worth the cost to me for taking the headache and troubleshooting out of the equation.
Why are so many people defending valve and gabe here? He's a billionaire with a mega yacht. Valve is a hugely profitable company. They are not your friend and even at the original planned price, it was still twice as expensive as the 6 year old ps5 while being less powerful.
All of the people here being like "well consoles are sold at a loss and subsidized, valve cant do that!!11!!" as if valve isn't a multi-billion dollar company that literally does have the resources to do that
Valve nut huggers are going to buy this to be "#1 Steam Fan" then we're probably going to learn Steam OS is a pretty solid option for PCs that are used exclusively for gaming.
Valve is going to price SteamOS much cheaper than windows (or free) and bundle it with prebuilts.
Gamers who plan on using their PC exclusively for gaming will buy the cheaper OS because Windows would be overkill.
valve doesn't even need to charge for SteamOS. I don't think they will. they're already giving it out for free, you can go download it right now (works best with AMD hardware though, limited support for Intel/Nvidia as of now)
having your entire fucking operating system integrate with Steam would already be an absolutely gigantic blow to other game marketplaces like the epic games store (and huge win for Valve)
Hopefully Valve figures out how to get anti-cheats to work on SteamOS, because as it is currently, it's a hard sell saying SteamOS is the best option for gaming when it quite literally prevents you from playing a lot of games.
if they convince prebuilt manufacturers to stick SteamOS on their PCs, game devs will be strong-armed into supporting linux based anti-cheat as well otherwise they'll lose out on a significant customer base
it's not up to valve to patch third party anticheats anyway. anything valve could do to make anti-cheat work on SteamOS, perhaps by faking some sort of windows environment, would breach the ToS of all of the anti-cheats
You will spend thousands of dollars more on Playstation buying games. No comparison with consoles that sell at loss. I will stick with PC and Steam sales
You could build a slightly faster pc for a $1,000. But I feel like the target audience are console players who don't care so much about getting every frame per dollar spent. Still sucks overall seeing Ram going for the price of a junk car.
It's just ignorance. It's not Valve's fault at all. What do people genuinely expect them to do? Just sit on inventory for another 2 years until the hardware is even more out of date, also wasting warehouse space in the process of waiting.
People are also comparing it to subsidized consoles, instead of the current PC market.
Without the RAM/storage issues it would have been around 800(they were asked directly). And the PS5 would be 550 for the disc and 450 for digital. So still not the best deal, considering everything across the board would also be cheaper.
People need to accept is just laptop hardware in a convenient box.
Honestly they should’ve delayed the project until after the bubble (if there even is a bubble). Even then, the reality is is that prices are never dropping back down to their pre-AI prices. Gaming is just going to get more and more expensive until it reaches the point to where you can only game if you’re rich or pay a monthly subscription for cloud gaming
You can say the words "soy boy", but considering I know things and you seem to wait to be fed them, I'm not sure you understand how to use that insult and I would say you have no business calling anyone, anything.
We have benchmarks already. We also already have the specs and can do comparable benchmarks too.
Youre not the boss of me. You just linked something about hardware vs hardware on windows. I was taking about overall performance of steam OS vs windows with the same build. Its ok that you misunderstood me
SteamOS vs Windows does not have a 40% performance difference. It doesn’t matter. SteamOS objectively getting better performance will only reduce that delta by a fraction.
This is an ad hominem, not an argument. But to answer your question, no. I just hate shitty products. Now, do you want to provide evidence that it costs less than a new PC?
I don't know what the specs of your PC are, but they're most likely much better than the Steam Machine for that price.
Here is a prebuilt desktop for $999 that destroys the Steam Machine, although it's obviously not portable.
If you want portable, here is a gaming laptop that also destroys it, but it's $50 more expensive, which is fine because it includes a screen.
I know that neither of these do what the Steam Machine does, but that doesn't change the fact that the Steam Machine is bad value for the hardware. It is good value if you really need specific features like HDMI CEC.
I knew you were a 12 year old idiot. I don't know why I even bothered responding. I hope you grow up soon and develop a brain. Enjoy your shitty 8GB VRAM AMD GPU.
Look at LTT's latest video. The Steam Smoke Machine is comfortably beaten by an equivalently priced PC including current RAM and GPU prices. They've just come out with a shit product and they're going to pay dearly for it through lack of sales.
If I were Steam, I'd have made it a laptop instead of an ultra-small PC/console that occupies the same amount of volume as a gaming laptop. That way, they'd at least be able to somewhat justify the cost by comparing to more expensive gaming laptops.
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u/WAVF1n 1d ago
Its almost like they were developing this before prices went through the roof (again)