The goal of any business is not to eat the loss, if its not important for survival. The Steam Deck is not crucial for operation of their business. Compared to consoles where its their only income (usually) and they depend on the number of sold units. Also compared to consoles, Valve is not in a position where they heavily compete on price and need to bring it down to price of competition.
In short, there is no need for Valve to eat the cost. It’s already a good price too.
Fecundpossum@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
There’s a reason valve has an absurd amount of money.
dukemirage@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Yes, having a quasi-monopoly on selling PC games online. They are constantly burning money.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
And do they eat the loss on this quasi-monopoly, or do they make a healthy profit?
dukemirage@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
It means that they can spend money on “hobby projects” like employing gamedev teams that don’t actually ship anything and prototype until everybody leaves with boreout or their other hardware endeavours, the Deck itself isn’t even that profitable.