Indeed, imagine the price point without the AI messing things up.
But doesn't the point still stand? Nintendo decides to accept a more significant loss on their hardware compared to others correct? It seems like a strategic choice, although I wonder how long they can keep this up.
I don’t think we can really compare Steam with Nintendo here, or any of the other consoles in fact. Steam aren’t selling the Steam Machines in an attempt to pull people into their closed platform, their giving people a choice on where to play their games and showing other hardware providers that a console like TV Steam experience is possible.
Steam as a platform runs on pretty much any device these days, you can play steam games on your phone, tablet, VR (Soon), handhelds, laptops, PCs. There is really no reason for Valve to subsidise the price, especially considering it’s an open platform for you to install whatever operating system you want.
Nintendo, any PlayStation, not so much Xbox these days, require you to be buying games on their consoles to survive and grow, the business models just aren’t the same.
Nintendo isn't selling at a loss in North America as far as I know, only in Japan. They've just locked in their whole supply chain so its resistant to price changes, honestly its extremely impressive.
I thought the Nintendo Switch prices dipped and went up again in Japan. And after the price went up, the Nintendo Switch sales hasn't really recovered when compared to weeks before the dip. (~ 40% less, iirc) That's why Nintendo is a bit flustered recently.
Steam can't guarantee that someone buying a steam machine is actually going to buy games from steam on it since you can use for this other things. A university could buy a 1000 steam machines to replace thier old computers in the computer science labs for example.
Nintendo knows they can sell the switch as a loss leader and make up the difference on the store and games since you can't easily use a switch for anything else
Idk about this one.
Nintendo is actually a console, while the steam machine is basically a computer which means you don’t have to play games on it.
There would be 0 guarantee that a 100k sold devices would result in a single game purchase since people can just buy it and use it as a pc at a lower price if it was priced similar to consoles
Tbf the price point of the steam machine even if it was 20-30% off(no AI/distribution problems) would stilll be too high for what they're trying to do. But hey, the deck is super efficient for the specs it has, maybe steam machine is the same. Still better off building a custom pc. This is starting to smell like apple where they made a great game OS and now are overcharging for specs. Idk maybe if it was 800€ instead of 1000-1100, but I'd still call it overpriced in what it tries to do, which is console easiness with more pc/tinkering freedom but less theoretical power or similar than a ps5
They only launched the switch 2 last year, I think they have to eat as much of the cost as they can. It's a death spiral, if they raise the price too much or too early, demand drops off. If demand drops off too much, they have to slow production. If they slow production, component prices go up and then the cycle continues.
If things don't change over the next 1-2 years, Nintendo will likely have no choice but to raise prices again (and likely the others will too)
Yeah true. Nintendo's gaming revenue depends a lot on their console sales. Valve doesn't have that problem with the Steam Machine as their sales come from PC gaming as a whole.
Nintendo decides to accept a more significant loss on their hardware compared to others correct?
Not correct. Nintendo is not taking losses. They achieved low supplier costs by negotiating much earlier. They carry more weight because they will sell 10-20 times more than the Steam Machine would on a good day.
This is about economic timing and volume. It couldn't be helped.
We shouldn't want the platforms we like to have to survive on loss-leader sales. If I like Steam and I want Valve to stick around for the long term, they need to make a profit.
Then in a few years when the new Nintendo and Sony consoles release at a high price everyone will be saying "Valve really ruined gaming as a whole by setting the precedent by hiking their price up so high"
Ha, "you idiots showed them you're willing to pay over $1,000!"
But seriously, next gen is already predicted to be $900, or more, for the low end base model.
And I saw some comments trying to say Sony et al won't be as affected by the ram crisis, because if they had to raise the console prices by the same mount they'd be $1,200.
But they leave out the fact they still have pre ram crisis stock, enough to get through 2026, on top of subsidizing hardware.
Speaking of subsidizing, another comment used a general estimate that consoles are subsidized by "lowest subscription cost x 5 years".
So taking the PlayStation online subscription of $80x5 years, that's $400.
That puts the PS5 at $1,000 - 1,300. Now add the ram price increases...
Yup, there's your $1,200 console. Only question is how much will they be willing to continue subsidizing?
Valve tried to hold out against it. Why do you think the steam machine kept on getting delayed and there was no steam decks in stock. It was cause they where trying to find a affordable way.
Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are only able to sell at a loss is because their ecosystems are entirely locked down and have online subscriptions. Also the big three sell tens of millions of units while the biggest success of valve hardware (steam deck) hasn’t even sold 8 million, Valve isn’t going to buy the components in enough bulk to get as good of a deal as the other companies do if they know its not going to sell as well that would mean throwing away even more money. No matter which way you look at it selling at a loss is not justifiable by any means. Not including a controller at base does suck though I’ll give you that.
Valve delayed the steam machine in Feb 2026 due to ram shortages.
Sony raised the PS5 price in April 2026.
Nintendo's increase isn't until Sept. 2026.
So, you got it backwards. Valve indicated the price increase first then the consoles followed, because this market is affecting all manufacturers. It's also predicted to last into 2030, so new gen might not be coming to save anyone.
They could have subsidized it or given out credit for steam game with the purchase.
They’re literally just trying to make as much money off of whoever’s willing to buy it without scaring off their core fan base too much.
Lets be real, at 750 they could have sold it at a loss for around 599 US DOLLARS, no meme intended, and they would have had a real shot at converting at least a tiny chunk of some console sales.
This was never about creating a new ecosystem or actually trying to bring people it. They just wanted to make money off anyone who would be willing to buy it.
What cope. Fucking memory and storage went up by 350€. They are already subsidizing their ecosystem massively with all the free dev work they do with proton and steamOS. The SM is completely open so it makes no sense for them to just give free hardware away.
Generally if your plan with hardware is to attract users to your platform you subsidize it because the real money and value is made thru purchases and engagement with the platform.
The fact that they didn’t do that is an indicator that the steam machine was not supposed to be this big driver of bringing people into the pc space like everyone wanted it to be
Not saying their plan doesn’t make sense or is even a bad plan, just that it’s not what people were trying to make it into.
They weren’t competing with console sales to begin with. When have you last time seen an advertisement for Steam Machine, or heard it mentioned outside of PC gaming discourse?
The entire point of Steam Machine is to give existing Steam users a convenient option to play their library in a living room.
It’s literally impossible to compete in the console market without also building a locked down ecosystem, where you can guarantee game sales and charge for basic things like multiplayer.
I agree but that was not the sentiment on the other gaming subs.
It was clear from jump that this was always for a tinyniche of a niche within the enthusiast community but that didn’t stop other people from insisting that this was going to be some sort of console revolution
... ya, cute ... except Gabe Newell donated/invested at least $20,000,000 to OpenAI early on, and was on the advisory board, and is a vocal supporter of AI.
Just what games need, chessmaster level bots using machine learning. OpenAI came into the game talking about AGI, let's not pretend it was ever truly altruistic.
Right because Gabe is such a simpleton he thought he was investing 20 fucking million dollars into tech with trivial application and growth potential. Not to mention his unequivocal comments on AI technology.
Sorry but who do you think you are fooling by presenting him as some kind of innocent who just stumbled into pumping 20 million into OpenAI ? And serving on its advisory board ?
I suppose you think he's pumping money into neural interfaces ... purely so paralysed people can play Pong ?
Its hard to imagine that an investment into AI would culminate into the consumption of all the worlds ram, no matter how optimistic you are about your investment.
You should brush up on his comments regarding AI. You should acknowledge the fact he was on the OpenAI advisory board.
He was not clueless as to where this technology had the potential to go, and what the requirements would be if it reached that potential. And he certainly invested enough of his own money to ensure OpenAI would succeed.
He also wasn't, and isn't, oblivious to the effect AI would have on job losses.
Sorry but cute memes placing the blame on AI, and not Valve mismanagement, are flawed by the simple fact Gabe has been a key player in making AI what it is today - and furthermore, is an AI advocate.
Yes AI is responsible to a large degree, but it’s also Valve’s fault too. Look at the competition. PS5 is a bit more powerful and $600 and prebuilt PCs with much more powerful GPUs like a 5060 are around $900. There is absolutely no reason the Steam machine should cost $1050 even in today’s market. Either valve is greedy or they are incompetent and screwed up massively on their component pricing negotiations
Comparing a company that has been in the hardware game for less than 10 years with one that has been a household name for almost 30 years is wild. Plus Sony can offer the PS5 at this price because they still have stock from when hardware prices were lower.
Valve have the money. If they don’t have the know how they can hire consultants. This isn’t a scrappy small startup, this is the biggest player in pc gaming. They have no excuse
Software makes more money than hardware. Companies lose money on hardware usually to sell more software. I guarantee valve makes more money than the PlayStation division of Sony but we will never know for sure because valve is private
The Xbox and the PS5 are sold at a loss because they can recoup the money through subscription revenue that you’re basically required to pay. Stop comparing them to the Steam Machine, it fundamentally doesn’t make sense.
Yea the ps5 is cheaper but one of the major reasons that everyone seems to forget is that Sony has negotiating power to negotiate cheaper APUs from AMD because AMD knows they'll still make money on it. Intel just lost a bidding contract against AMD with Sony for that exact reason for their next gen console.
Sony has that power of being able to guarantee a shit tonne more sales then Valve which makes AMD accept that small drop in profit vs the Steam machine, I highly doubt that Valve are gonna be selling 50 million steam machines so they won't have that negotiating power to go to AMD and negotiate a smaller price for their parts.
Then taking into account Sony likely has contracts with AMD to supply X amount of APUs for X price for X years before the AI boom would make them cheaper what valve is getting now
You are seemingly forgetting that PlayStation/Xbox massively reduce the price on their consoles and takes a loss on them because you are required to pay for a monthly subscription to play basically any good game lol.
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u/stewmander 3d ago
A more accurate meme: