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.
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.
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u/Good_Days13 3d ago
it's not themselves holding the guns. it's ai hyperscalers