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Valve’s Steam Machine looks like a console, but don’t expect it to be priced like one - Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)

submitted 4 months ago by otters_raft@lemmy.ca to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca

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After Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine living room box earlier this month, some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales. In a new interview with YouTube channel Skill Up, though, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais ruled out that kind of console-style pricing model, saying that the Steam Machine will be “more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market.”

Griffais said the AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 GPU in the Steam Machine were designed to outperform the bottom 70 percent of machines that opt-in to Valve’s regular hardware survey. And Steam Machine owners should expect to pay roughly what they would for desktop hardware with similar specs, he added.

“If you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at,” Griffais said.

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[–] SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 29 points 4 months ago

The steam machine looks awesome but I’m really excited for their controller.

The steam deck feels great to game on.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 23 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales

Name and shame:

Superdata Research founder and SuperJoost newsletter author Joost Van Dreunen
Pitchbook‘s Eric Bellomo

What a stupid idea. These forced comparisons to consoles lead people way astray.

Obviously the strategy of a closed ecosystem vendor who can expect to sell new software for each generation of hardware wont at all work for the vendor of a device in an open ecosystem who must expect people to play their pre-existing libraries, and who must expect that people could buy their hardware for literally any other computer use than the software they sell.

[–] Midnitte@beehaw.org 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I mean, I feel like that's fine - you're likely saving a tremendous amount in sales from Steam anyway compared to traditional consoles.

Now I'm more curious to see if they cut the price of the Frame much more dramatically...

[–] RabbleRebel@lemmy.wtf 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I think that's the right move from Valve. No need to subsidize hardware when you already have a massive market share with Steam. Plus, consumers will still save money compared to traditional consoles. Let's hope they also bring down the price of the frame though!

[–] Midnitte@beehaw.org 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yea if anything I think VR is where they need to mature and grow the market. How many copies of Alyx sold?

[–] RabbleRebel@lemmy.wtf 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

~2.88 M by Gamalytic ~3.00 M by VG Insights ~4.73 M by PlayTracker

https://steamdb.info/app/546560/charts/

[–] Midnitte@beehaw.org 2 points 4 months ago

Ah nice.

Half-Life 2 has sold ~140% more, maybe 30% of US households have tried VR, so it definitely has room to grow for audience.

[+] Zamboni_Driver@lemmy.ca -22 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Valve's steam machine looks like a console, but don't expect it to sell like one.

[–] watson@lemmy.world 34 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

If it did, there’s absolutely no way that valve could produce that many. They don’t have a global manufacturing and distribution network. it took Microsoft and Sony literal decades to build that up. If valve sold that many consoles, there’s no way they could possibly produce them fast enough., nor get them to where they were going.

Also, they are selling exclusively through their own store rather than on Amazon or Best Buy, Target, Walmart, etc. this is an excellent way to keep the price lower, because they’re not paying affiliate fees.

But even if valve sold 8 million units as opposed to 80 million units, it would still be a runaway success

[–] Toneswirly@beehaw.org 14 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I dont think Valve wants it to. This is another in a long line of experiments to push gaming in to more user-friendly and unified ecosystem. The money will come steadily as it always has, as long as they innovate and treat their customers like people rather than metrics.

[–] dualpad@lemmy.zip 2 points 4 months ago

I don't think their hardware sales becoming insanely profitable is their main goal and their focus on the finance side might be to at the very worst break even.

Their main goal I believe is to try to increase Linux usage so the holdouts against it might start allowing their games to run on Linux, and devs may feel that with Stean machines out there that can run their more resource heavy games better than the Deck it is worth it to pursue proton compatibility.

They probably learned from the mistakes they made in the past when they pushed Linux adoption attempts on to third party companies. They realized they needed to provide some standardized hardware instead of leaving the work to others if they wanted Linux to start being taken more seriously among devs with how small the userbase still is even with the Deck success.

[–] HurlingDurling@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I mean I get where you are coming from because most people are like Steam = PC = complicated AF, but PlayStation\Xbox\Nintendo = not PC = easy and its only reinforced by "influencers" that are just pushing corporate crap to consumers for comisión \ free shit.

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

This. Unless you're modding, PC gaming isn't complicated. Every game nowadays automatically picks out options based on your hardware specs. While tuning options are there, they're not required

[–] HurlingDurling@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

And that includes Linux gaming

[–] gila@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 months ago

Generally, games cannot tell what the performance bottleneck in your configuration is, especially taking into account things like upscaling or playing at scaled res. This is pretty significant for mid-range configurations. That people want plug and play doesn't mean they're happy for games not to take full advantage of their hardware.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 1 points 4 months ago

Yeah, the last batch never did either.

It's going to be priced like a PC and most PC gamers unsurprisingly already have one. You can already stream that to another room in your house with zero lag.

Steam Deck does well because it adds portability into the mix. Something PCs have always struggled with.