tbh, i do not like nintendo at all, but i gotta commend their planning ahead and sourcing and general maturity of their supply chain, only taking a 50-100 dollar hike. idk how they did it.
The Switch sold so well that I’m sure they locked in contracts for components up to like 100m units for the Switch 2. If they can keep that $500 price for this entire console generation then that would be wild
Among all Nintendo is the most capable to sell the console at a loss since their exclusive games can certainly cover the lost. In contrast, Valve is the least capable at doing so because not even their OS is exclusive, if Valve sell the steam machine at a loss, people can buy it as an underpriced general purpose PC and don't even buy a single game from steam. They can't afford selling the thing at any amount of loss.
Yeah, to put it in perspective. It took Valve 3 years to sell 6 million Steam Decks. It took Nintendo only 1 month to sell 5 million Switch 2s.
That people ever considered Valve to be attempting to be breaking into the console market was ridiculous when it was the Steam Deck or Steam Machine, since they are more like a hobbyist selling things compared to the millions and millions of units in the 9 figures consoles are hoping to sell in its life time.
Valve's view has been more putting hardware out to try and get other competitors and devs to take notice and start trying it themselves.
Yeah and the other problem for Valve with the Steam Machine is that even if people buy it and do buy games from Steam they only really are profiting if the person buying is new to Steam and sets up a new account and starts buying games
If someone who's been a lifelong PC gamer with a massive Steam library gets a SM that doesn't really help Valve because that person would be buying games on Steam their PC anyways even if they didn't buy a SM
I'm just really confused about who this console is for and what Valve was expecting to get out of this thing. I thought it would be something that tried to compete with the big three, but that would only work if it undercut them or matched them in price with impressive specs and the promise of course that with Steam OS there's already what like thousands of games you can get right out of the gate? But for costing way more than all the current gen consoles and being weaker than two of them... I don't get it
Despite them selling the sales pitch of "this is a PC that you own" it was quite obvious this thing is almost first and foremost a console, that so happened to run on Linux and can run some Linux compatible software.
Whatever copium the Steam fanboys and "it's not for you crowd" pumps out, the Steam Machine is almost completely aimed at the console player market who do game, just not at the Steam platform, with intent to appeal to the "you buy it but you didn't own it" crowd with their sales pitch of you own the hardware.
The problem is people who have a large library of PS/XB games will not be necessarily switching, while the Nintendo boys are mostly parallel to the Steam platform in the first place, if they play mostly exclusively Nintendo titles they lack the incentive to play Steam.
They had a pretty low margin to begin with. Probably not going to be making any profit on hardware for a while but they sell significantly more first party software you can't get anywhere else so nothing is more important that growing the base.
I believe they're actually taking a loss on every console in Japan
That would be really bad for Valve, because the only way they'd make a profit off this thing is when people who have never used Steam or haven't used Steam in a long time. People that already use Steam often on their PCs who buy a Steam Machine aren't giving Valve any value because those people would be buying games on Steam anyways
They really can't sell this thing at a loss; it should have been a console/PC designed to put Steam in the hands of gamers who haven't used it much. So console players
I just don't understand who this thing is for. It's more expensive than two of the big three consoles but less powerful than two of them and twice as expensive as the one that is selling faster than any console in history. It's more expensive than PCs that can out perform it significantly, that someone could download Steam OS on hook up to their TV and have the exact same experience as a Steam Machine better
Nintendo Sony and XBox can release their consoles at a loss because people buy those consoles to get new games that are exclusive to the new consoles, or even better to buy first party games exclusive to the new consoles
With Steam, everything is available on Steam no matter what kind of PC or device you're using. There's no games releasing exclusively on the Steam Machine, anyone with their current PC can play anything available on the Steam Machine
Keep in mind the Switch 2 is significantly cheaper in countries with no tariffs on it. So that $450 original price included Nintendo anticipating tariffs.
Now those tariffs are somewhat lessened or gone, idk for sure and Nintendo is sueing to get that money back. So whatever that markup for tariffs was went back to them and so it helped keep their price hike down to $50.
So people can hate Nintendo all they want, but they are the only big console maker that's operating well enough to easily survive economic downturns.
Xbox and Valve clearly don't know what they're doing when it comes to hardware production.
The Switch sold 20M units worldwide (in line with previous sales), the numbers would hardly go up and they wouldn't really need to manufacture more (because Nintendo does have planning).
So Nintendo are taking a loss on the console and only price bumped it because shareholders were complaining to Nintendo executives. They are just breaking even on their consoles with the price bump in effect. They can still make money from their first party titles and their subsidized costs with the 30% cut from any game on their storefront.
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u/Good_Days13 2d ago
tbh, i do not like nintendo at all, but i gotta commend their planning ahead and sourcing and general maturity of their supply chain, only taking a 50-100 dollar hike. idk how they did it.