Valve has said repeatedly they won’t subsidize it heavily because it’s more of a generic desktop than the deck was. A low subsidized price could attract buyers that wouldn’t spend on games (ie. using for office machines)
Comment on Why $700 could be a "death sentence" for the Steam Machine
Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
With all the revenue from Steam, how much of a loss could they afford to go all in on with these? Do they care about profit or shifting the market from Windows to Linux (or, hell, just giving the finger to Microslop)?
CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Ulrich@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Exactly. And we saw people doing that with the Stream Deck. Disney was using it to control their robots. Ukraine was using them to control IRL turrets.
DScratch@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
They would instantly catch an anti-trust case from Epic for trying to use their dominant software position to undercut hardware manufacturers and take control of both gaming hardware and software.
Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
They were supposedly able to take a loss on the original Steam Decks, at least the lower priced 64GB models. There’s also an argument to be made that this device is primarily competing with consoles, where Steam doesn’t have a monopoly. Steam also allows games from other stores to be run on their unlocked device, it’s not their fault that Epic decided not to make an offical linux launcher.
But I’m not a lawyer, and I’m sure Epic will try to start anti-trust investigations over anything they can.
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
They were supposedly able to take a loss on the original Steam Decks, at least the lower priced 64GB models.
They. Did. Not.
The only thing remotely suggesting that is GabeN saying the price point was “painful” in a single interview.
Valve has stated that the Steam Decl wasn’t sold at a loss. GabeN was likely referring to the profit margins being very low, which is not the same as selling at a loss
Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
Sweeny would sue Steam becsuse Gabe farted and Tim didn’t get to smell it.
FishFace@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Do they think valve’s lawyers are not as good as Nintendo’s or something?
doublah@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
The problem with a price war is Valve is “just” a multi-billion dollar company, very impressive for their size but a $100bn company like Sony and especially a $3 trillion company like Microsoft could squeeze them out of the market.
And they would have to subsidise the cost by far more than Sony/Microsoft do due to the smaller scale of production and more expensive newer contracts.
x00z@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Valve stated that they want this to be self sustaining by selling it at a normal profit.
Maybe with the RAM prices they’ll turn this back and just sell without a loss and focus on profits from Steam itself.
Right now I don’t think even they have the answer yet. They don’t have the volume to get the RAM prices down or stable so they’re getting buttfucked as much as the rest of us.
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
The problem is that these are computers. If they’re too cheap, companies will buy them in bulk, slap windows on them, and use them for office PCs
pory@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Valve could prevent this by doing it like the Steam Deck and requiring an x year old Steam account with at least y game purchases on it to be allowed to order one. Businesses aren’t going to grab secondhand consumer hardware to save a buck, and even if they are the majority of Machine buyers wouldn’t be looking to sell (and the margin necessary to get someone to effectively put the price of a Machine on layaway then ship it to some business and pay taxes twice will probably erase any gains the company would possibly see from using Steam Machines instead of Optiplexes)