this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2025
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Can everyone please stop claiming and speculating that Valve's new hardware will be loss leaders? If you watch LTT and Gamers Nexus's first videos on the announcement, they actually spoke with Valve's engineers. And the Valve representatives already said that the new hardware WILL NOT BE LOSS LEADERS.

There isn't even evidence that the Steam Deck was a loss leader. All GabeN said was that the lowest cost launch model was priced "painfully", which doesn't necessarily mean it was sold at a loss, it could easily have been sold at a very tight margin.

And no, low margins does not meet the definition of a loss leader. A loss leader is a product sold below cost, in that every unit sold actually costs the seller money.

I get the desire to speculate on new hardware. It's fun and it helps pass the time until we hear more info from Valve. But there's limits to what is reasonable. Valve has already stated that the new hardware won't be loss leaders, so hoping and/or claiming they are isn't reasonable.

Sorry for the rant, but all of the comments that seem to have only skimmed headlines are quickly getting to me

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[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 73 points 2 months ago (5 children)

It can't be a loss leader.

The steam machine is, hardware-wise, just a regular Mini-PC. Valve even lets you put whatever OS you want on there. So if this was a loss leader, that would mean that non-gamers and even small businesses would buy these, would install Windows on them and use them as office PCs, with Steam probably not even installed on the PC.

With the Steam Deck, the form factor made it impractical or at least really weird to use them as office PCs. The steam machine doesn't have that issue.

[–] entwine@programming.dev 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Lol this reminds me of that time the US Air Force built a giant compute cluster using PlayStation 3s. Idk if Sony sold those at a loss, but they certainly didn't see any game purchases coming from the US Department of Defense

[–] Datz@szmer.info 9 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I was thinking that they might require a Steam account to order, the same way they stopped scalpers for Steam Deck, but there'd be ways around that.

It'd be hilarious if you needed something like "profile level 10" to order though.

[–] StopSpazzing@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

Ohhh only allowed to buy steam level / 10 whole numbers only. I could get 9. Woot.

[–] pory@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

This part's basically guaranteed, yeah. But there's a secondhand market and also surely some scalping companies saw the Deck launch and went yknow what? It doesn't cost us much in the long run to make a few hundred Steam accounts now and buy some $0.10 team fortress hat on them just in case Valve does the incredibly predictable thing of releasing more desirable hardware.

[–] Joelk111@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Exactly, but I don't see anything keeping them from selling the Frame at a loss or tight margin. What else are you going to use that with but Steam games?

Even the Steam Controller is useless without Steam Input, but I'd argue it won't necessarily sell more games. Maybe they could include it with the Steam Machine for "free" to bump the price of the machine up enough to not make sense for a company, but still sell it at a tight margin to sell more games.

[–] Don_alForno@feddit.org 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Why would they sell any hardware at a loss at all? Console manufacturers do it to lock people into their ecosystem and sell them games at a premium, Valve doesn't need that, people are already overwhelmingly favoring their store.

[–] Joelk111@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The same reason people go into debt for a burrito. It's easier for people to justify a smaller cost now, and valve will make than money back later with extra games sold, especially in the case of the Frame.

[–] Inkstainthebat@pawb.social 1 points 2 months ago

As someone who loves VR gaming, isn't that a lot of faith for the unpredictable at best market that is VR games?

[–] overload@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I see what you mean, but this device is a little overtuned for an office PC, at least GPU wise.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There are quite a few office jobs that benefit from a decent CPU. Anything to do with images/photos/video/rendering for example.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Plus PCs cost fuck all compared to staff, may as well get them efficient tools if they will be using them a lot.

[–] IMALlama@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

You're 100% correct at a sane company. At my employer the hardware team is incentivised to cut costs and impacts to productivity are someon else's problem. Corporate metrics lead to some pretty hilarious situations.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 4 points 2 months ago

You get what you measure

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

This happens so often. The new version of the framework our frontend developers use has massive performance problems, which meant that our FE devs couldn't test their changes locally, they had to upload a release to the cloud to test every single change. That reduces productivity to close to 0. A developer isn't cheap, so you'd think the company would be quick to issue macbooks that we are also allowed to have so that they can work again.

Nope, it took 3 months for our manager to convince the helpdesk that they can get macbooks. Helpdesk originally said they'd have to wait for 2 years for the scheduled replacement of the laptops.