Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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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)?
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. And if they're sold at a loss, that then turns into a huge loss
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)
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 money on games (ie. using for office machines)
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. That's just what we know of.
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.
Do they think valve's lawyers are not as good as Nintendo's or something?
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.
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
Why the hell can't this myth just die already?
Sweeny would sue Steam because Gabe farted and Tim didn't get to smell it.
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.
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.