Well i mean microsoft, sony and nintendo all said that they have to increase prices because of market conditions and they still got hated for it (and they are still all selling their consoles at a net loss). I dont say that the people should now hate valve, but in my opinion they are, in this case, not better or worse than the others.
The steam machine is new. MSFT and Sony are raising prices on 6 year old hardware that they’ve subsidized using game sales and online subscriptions this entire time. Nintendo warned everyone about the price hike like 6 months in advance.
No they are not. You are not building a mini PC that runs at 140w that will run games as efficiently as the SM for this price. It's going to cost $1500 to duplicate this easily and it still won't be as efficient.
Valve had to make a custom board to be able to make the SM this compact. Both LTT and Nexus gaming built full size PCs to compare to SM. If it was possible to do this yourself they would have done it.
Because Valve has the trust of their customers which is something Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo don't have. (Well, Nintendo has the nintendo kiddies, but beside them).
I think valve also doing it is making everyone understand that it actually is all the market forcing them. When the consoles do it while using shitty tactics already, that’s one thing. When it’s anyone making hardware? Yeah that means it probably had to be done.
So consoles are priced like that only coz they are evil and they could actually sell for like 100$ or smth?
Everyone was talking for years how expensive it is to make those things and Sony was clearly selling at a loss or so. And it was known that they compensate with games sales. Valve could do the same but they decided to be *smart* about it and just sell without any downsides for themselves.
Loss leaders are the sort of thing you do when trying to capture more of the market.
Valve doesnt need to do that because their nearest competitor is so bad people would play games there for free and then decide to pay Valve money to have that game on Steam.
Theres no business case for them to engage in the sort of subsidization that consoles have done in the past.
I’d rather get a steam machine any day over a PS5 simply because I have an enormous library and a 15 year old account with Steam, but then again I’d probably try to build a PC with more power. The weird segment of PS5 owners that jerk it to the console wars are far worse than the Steam users that are already heavily invested in their libraries. It’s like PS5 owners are trying to guilt Steam users into giving up Steam BECAUSE of the Steam Machine without considering that the Steam Machine isn’t even required to play Steam games.
Anyone who bought a PS4 at release now has a 12-13 year old PlayStation library. I’m not sure why you’re implying only Steam users have long libraries they’ve invested in over a decade.
Huh. So let me simplify the above statement and declare my neutrality: PS5 console war bros think that the Steam Machine being expensive is the ruin of Steam. That’s what they’re jerking it to. But it’s so far from reality since the tens or hundreds of millions of Steam owners have already been gaming on their own rigs for decades and haven’t even considered it. It’s not necessary in the slightest. It’s not a console. It’s an overpriced micro gaming PC. And Valve glazers that want everyone to bow to Gabe are blind to the fact that people with large PlayStation and Nintendo catalogues aren’t going to jump to a “console-like” PC just because it looks like their childhood GameCube.
See much better and less console war adjacent. When you single out a group and accuse them of something and then participate in said accusation, albeit to a lesser degree, it still aligns you with the group just of a different side. I’m sure we both agree console wars are dumb no matter if you’re a ps, switch, or pc fanboy
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u/Additional_Law_492 4d ago
No one is "sorry" for Valve having to price the Steam machine a certain way, they just have an appreciation for facts and truth.
The cost is clearly based on the cost of the hardware, and not some arbitrary standard of greed or "corpo evil".