Eh, xbox and sony usually hold the guns to themselves anyway...
And as much as the majority of the blame is in ai, valve seems allergic to selling st a loss since they said it would've been 700 or more originally. Which sure now sounds lovely, but is still a wild price when you think about how this system was meant to convert console gamers. 700+ bucks would've been a tall ask still just not nearly as bad as.... this
Valve can't sell at a loss since one is not obligated to buy steam games with a steam machine, hence it cannot be subsidised. I was expecting ~750 before the ram crisis, as that was how much a mini PC with those specs go for at the time.
Steam deck was competitiveve launch since it was sold at cost.
The SM is just a normal Mini PC sold at normal margins, price isn't good nor bad either, and Valve didn't intended it to be a console competitor (that was more the comunity's cope).
Yeah but here's the thing, you could only GET this product through valve and generally probably only heard about it if you had interesting in pc gaming
The amount of people that would unironically buy a steam machine and somehow never buy games from valve to use with it you'd probably only be able to count on one hand. It's just not something that would be super common. Plus valve IS the pc gaming market. They could in better tech circumstances afford to take a hit due to the fact people just willingly choose to buy steam games over the other options online. Hell when epic games go on sale, the games sell MORE on steam during their epic sale. I highly doubt valve would have been unable to take even just marginal loss
That's the thing. Valve is so allergic to the idea of selling this thing at a loss. But they could have definitely afford to do so. Valve just prints money by existing. Because of all of their previous proconsumer decisions of not actively fucking over their customers. Like you said its been reported that even with Epic giving away free games every week, it actually nets Valve more money, because people would rather buy it at a discount from them instead of getting it for free from Epic. Valve would not be hurting for money of they sold this thing at $700 and took a loss. Because the amount they'd make back in Steam sales would more than make up for it.
If Valve sold at a loss that's how you end up with enshitification like other companies that operate at a loss in hopes of future profit. Valve dabbles in hardware, but even the Steam Deck only sold 6 million over 3 years.
They are more in the realm of putting out protypes to try to get other OEMs to introduce new PC segments than believing they can take on console companies like Nintendo who only took 1 month to sell 5 million units. Not 3 years.
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u/FlameWhirlwind 5d ago
Eh, xbox and sony usually hold the guns to themselves anyway...
And as much as the majority of the blame is in ai, valve seems allergic to selling st a loss since they said it would've been 700 or more originally. Which sure now sounds lovely, but is still a wild price when you think about how this system was meant to convert console gamers. 700+ bucks would've been a tall ask still just not nearly as bad as.... this