this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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Valve confirms Steam Machine will be priced ‘like a PC with the same level of performance’ (www.videogameschronicle.com)
submitted 3 days ago by simple@piefed.social to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

In most cases, yes. But you have to remember, this is Valve and not some ordinary company. They have extremely deep wallets and a lot of responsibility and expectations on their shoulders (importantly, not the stock market!). If they charged what it cost for hardware and what it cost them to do r&d, it would likely not be in consumers favor.

Like even just get off the American-bad thing for one second: pricing it as a standalone pc basically just means "the cost of the parts". They've put a lot of time and effort into this across their core employees and likely outsourced stuff because they couldn't, in-house. Actually listening to people and charging relative to that is actually a great way to be fair and make people happy, guaranteeing positive impact of your product. I guarantee they're paying attention to what people say ALL over the place. Like.... Why do you think "it's done when it's done" is their pace?

[–] SparroHawc@lemmy.zip 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

They're buying the parts directly from the manufacturers though, so cutting out the retailer middle-man could offset the R&D costs.

[–] Uebercomplicated@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Research and development is probably very high when you consider Proton, SteamOS, and the semi-custom CPU and GPU. Something between $50 to $100 million would be typical. Silicone is famously expensive in R&D, Proton has continuous costs (and has for quite a while now) that rack up, and SteamOS is literally an operating system. That's a lot of salaries to pay.

I reckon they're taking advantage of being private and playing the long game. Very, very long game. They're not really in danger as long as Steam is successful, but I can't blame them for wanting a decent gross margin so they can at least cover hardware costs. Especially with memory prices right now, I wouldn't be surprised at 1000€ here in Germany, though I wouldn't be happy about it. I would happily buy at 900€ (≈$1040), and be ecstatic at 800€ (≈$920).

[–] SparroHawc@lemmy.zip 1 points 22 hours ago

Personally, I wouldn't include Proton in the costs of the Steam Machine. The Deck already is benefiting from it immensely, and I would consider it to be a cost of expanding into Linux gaming in general - especially with the Lenovo handheld and other devices starting to jump on the bandwagon as Microsoft continues to take repeated dumps on their userbase. Its R&D costs are being won back by the market % Steam takes on any games bought and played in Linux, which means that it can benefit from that continued revenue stream rather than the one-off hardware sale.

The hardware has to break even. The software already has.