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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Sorry not my native language, I mean hoarding money is not the reason why they have huge amounts of capital.
Ok. So explain where the investment is. What does "eating the loss" do for them in the long term? How do they recoup that loss? Loss leaders (the Costco hotdog, PlayStation consoles etc) are used by businesses as a way to get people to buy into their other products that do make healthy profits. Costco's hotdog gets people in the door, and those people buy other stuff because "while we're here". There's a psychology to that strategy.
Sony uses sales of the PlayStation consoles to get people locked into their platform where they spend money on games, and skins, and micro transactions etc. People used the PlayStation to play Blu-ray (also a Sony property), and DVDs, and stream content like movies, and music. This nets them healthy profits while selling the hardware at or below cost.
Nintendo is said to do the same thing with the Switch/Switch 2. So there's a cost to benefit ratio equation going on in each case.
What is the cost to benefit equation for Valve selling the Steam Deck at a loss? Their e-shop doesn't depend on the hardware to sell games. They aren't locking people into Steam in a way that's meaningful because other hardware exists with the same or better ability to play all the same games. The Steam e-shop doesn't require you to only play games on the Steam Deck.
So that's where you lose me.