They could sell them at a loss assuming the average Steam outlay per device exceeded the loss. This figure would be dragged down by people buying them as generic portable PCs, using them solely with emulators, using them as drone controllers (apparently the Ukrainian military do that), and such.
Comment on Gaming handheld prices are out of control, except for the Steam Deck
potoo22@programming.dev 1 day agoProbably the biggest advantage they have is that they can sell devices at cost or even at a loss and still profit from increased Steam game sales, like how other console makers operate.
3rd parties can’t compete with that. Not even close. If there’s no profit from the device itself, there’s no motivation to make it. And apart from the hardware cost, they also need to pay for the R&D and corporate maintenance. They can’t compete with the Steam Deck. If they made an exact Steam Deck clone, they’d have to make it, idk ~$40 more to make a profit, but no one would buy it because the Steam Deck is the same for less. They have to give it slightly higher specs to give it a niche. That might take hardware cost up to $700 and then charge $200 more to make up for the distributor fees and then $100 to make it actually profitable.
AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 9 hours ago
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 hours ago
Yep, this is a good explanation of more of the nitty gritty of it in more granular detail!
When you can afford to eat some of the cost… or… you don’t have shareholders telling you not to do that… well, then you get good ole ‘how capitalism is supposed to work! ™’.
Problem of course being that uh, you can just chase the luxury market for greater profit margins, stop making shit for the poors… this can work well in the short/medium term, but in the long run… if everyone does that…
… then you destroy your customer base, and the entire economy, and probably yourself.
And that’s not even getting into how companies have their own version of ‘keeping up with the joneses’… its called going into massive debt to fund an expansion because your competitor just did that… and then going into more debt to finance a stock buyback… but hey nbd, companies can fail and go bankrupt, no problem, everyone other than those helming the ship get fucked, they get golden parachutes.
Sure would be neat if we maybe had some other kind of system idk
kadup@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
The Steam Deck is not sold at a loss. The initial pricing for the 64 GB unit was barely profitable, but this quickly changed with production ramping up.
This was confirmed by Valve themselves in an interview that happened months after Gabe’s famous comments about the pricing.
So yes, Valve profits from the games too, but that’s not used to subsidize the Steam Deck’s price.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 16 hours ago
Could there be an argument about the R&D costs not being factored in there? So for companies that can’t compete, its literally a skill issue.
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
Not like the companies releasing these things have been making PCs and peripherals for decades or anything lol