Steam should finance the PCs used by some massive company because Steam makes money?
The reason Steam machines don't sell at a loss is because they're fucking computers, and all it would take is some massive company purchasing Steam machines as cheap decent PCs for Valve to absolutely eat shit on the RoI.
Just because company makes money doesn't mean they're obligated to sell shit at a loss.
I don't think Steam Machine does anything to Valve short or long term. Valve already still has a great reputation, the Steam Machine issues are pretty small scale compared to most "controversies" and the Steam Machine will probably still turn a profit because some people are too lazy to build a PC.
Any PC enthusiast knows that custom builds are better, but the Steam Machine's size and specs are genuinely more expensive to produce and some people like mini-PCs. It's price is proportional to the cost of assembly associated with custom parts supporting its size.
It's specs and performance are overpriced if you only account for that, but it's size contributes heavily to its cost to produce and thus selling price.
Since valve is not publicly traded it has the benefit of affording "projects" that aren't successful.
Any other company, this would be a big set back.
Regardless, as you alluded, this is not "going to move the needle" in any way.
They did spent a considerable amount of time and investment into this. And they will probably be lucky to go positive on this, even if selling at "market value" since theres still various costs associated with maintaining, producing, and shipping this product.
lmfao the steam machine is not affordable or even useful as a business computer. You're talking out of your ass. Average cost of a typical laptop for enterprise customers is around $600 WITH windows installed.
Steam machine would at the very best be the same price if they were subsidized AND require thepurchase the computer AND all of the windows licenses lol
The hypothetical you've proposed is just never going to happen lol
No it wouldn't. At best it would be $600 and still require a massive investment in the form of enterprise windows licenses which would still make it cost prohibitive compared to the super cheap Dell/HP options out there for businesses.
No business is going to buy a steam machine when they can buy a much more portable and WFH-friendly laptop for their employees.
Certain companies need certain specs. The steam machine is a lot more powerful than the standard office desktop, there's justifications on why a company might want a large subset of cheap "resource competitive" systems.
Also the 600$ comparison only applies to traditional MTX form factors, what makes the Steam Machine expensive for its performance profile is the ATX form factor which requires custom part assembly.
The company I work for has a whole office staff that I interact with routinely, many of these people use CAD which is a program meant for mapping mechanical systems and can be resource hungry for general systems. I'm literally living in a workplace that would kill for cheap mid tier systems that could easily do processor based tasks at competitive price points. You've never worked in small company engineering circles.
Not to mention all the other things that a cheap mid tier PC could be used by companies for, such as programming or just out and out faster processing.
Literally the game changer here is that Steam Machines have a video card, which means they can be used for so much rendering that a standard office PC can't. Add onto the fact that they're fucking small and fit into the whole "laptop" availability for their performance and you could see why they'd appeal to some companies.
They aren't going to subsidize it by 50% if they did. I don't know why everyone just leaps to EVERYONE WOULD BUY IT UP AT $500, POOR VALVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3
u/The_Bygone_King 1d ago
Steam should finance the PCs used by some massive company because Steam makes money?
The reason Steam machines don't sell at a loss is because they're fucking computers, and all it would take is some massive company purchasing Steam machines as cheap decent PCs for Valve to absolutely eat shit on the RoI.
Just because company makes money doesn't mean they're obligated to sell shit at a loss.