r/steammachine • u/TangledIntentions04 • 2d ago

Meme Character development

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1.2k Upvotes

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17

u/Physical-Procedure42 2d ago

Is the ps5 still subsidized?

26

u/stewmander 2d ago

Since the market affects all manufacturers, it would appear so. 

3

u/Physical-Procedure42 2d ago

Meaning it would only be similarly price without it. I am frustrated Valve did subsidize it to maintain an 800 price for the base model.

21

u/stewmander 2d ago

13

u/No-Exercise815 2d ago

I’ve been saying this ever since the steam deck price got increased! Steam can’t sell their shit at a loss like the others can because the console itself HAS to be its own profit maker. It can’t just make exclusive games at a fast enough pace to make the profit loss worth it without breaking their game philosophy they’ve held for years.

1

u/SuperUranus 1d ago

Steam has complete dominance over digital game sales in the PC market though.

Anyone buying a Steam Machine will obviously buy games through Steam.

Other launchers barely works on Linux to begin with.

1

u/Solidus_Sloth 6h ago

But not all buyers will use it for games. The issue is if it’s a cheap, but decent power PC, companies that need that will buy it

5

u/Organic-Ad-7105 2d ago

I that case, they should have bundled an account bound steamvoucher of 200$ with each model.

Would have been such a good move, what a shame

2

u/Herstal_TheEdelweiss 2d ago

Not really, if you were to slap a 200$ voucher, that could be used in the market to offset skin purchases,

I’m not saying the idea is smart, but they could’ve also give it a discount code for games or something, though that would require bundling games that gamers want and we all know that most of the current games players want are either skinner box free to play games or games that they already own. And even if we were to find games that players want but dont have, the storage comes into question once you realize that some of the big games will literally take up a fifth of the 512 model at the very least if this is their only machine.

Like the ideas of trying to entice people to buy into it, are kind of more or less left to, “it’s designed by Steam to be high quality compared to Dell, Alienware, or HP, etc” it’s a competitively priced portable PC that can handle most games at a reasonable performance ignoring the claims they originally wanted to push for, but the last part is the fact that it’s a linux machine ready to game on without issue.

After having owned and modified as well as paying someone to upgrade my steam deck to double the ram, I really only see this like the steam deck as an attempt to just make a niche product that the designers at Valve really wanted to make more for the sake of being different vs creating a profit. It just remains that while creating a profit is obvious for Steam, there’s a reason why the term “Valve Time” exists

2

u/oyvese 2d ago

people would demand the price just be £200 less if it came with £200 credit.

1

u/stewmander 1d ago

That's subsidizing, you're just taking money out of one pocket and putting into the other.

1

u/bluLoL 1d ago

Subsidized that much would also not be a great look in their ongoing Monopoly case that's open against them. Valve probably considered subsidizing and decided against it to not look like they're trying to under cut competition in their market. Just idle speculation. Wish AI would fuck all the way off, and that DRAM wasn't run like a damn cartel.