At this point, try closer to $1200-$1500, and that's for the BASE model.

Pretty sure it always was. Tge steam machine was already fucked by the time aome random guy wrote an article that just randomly assumed it's gonna cost 500 dollars for no reason at all

SM?

have literally made personal computing unaffordable

…not if you buy our XBOX GAME CLOUD!!! and WINDOWS 365!!! rent forever and own nothing! the future is looking bright 🤑 /s

unaffordable for the next decade

If you're talking RAM prices, those are expected to come down in early 2028, so 18-ish months.

Valve doesn't have 50+ years of hardware experience though. Sony, Nintendo, and Msoft can all swing their big dicks all over that industry and get whatever the fuck they want, Valve cannot.

Valve can and does strongarm the software side all the time, the gaming industry would have died instead of exponentially surpassing the film industry if it weren't for Valve setting strong precedents.

And finally how in the fuck are you blaming AI at the same time that you are trying to defend Sony? The company that's adding AI to PLAY THE FUCKING GAME FOR YOU?

They lost their minds because Nintendo said:

Last week, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa told shareholders that the house of Mario had no current plans to raise the price of its $449.99 Switch 2.

Then they raised the price of the original switch and a bunch of the accessories.

Then the tariffs in the US were deemed to be illegal and they sued to get their ~~money~~ profit back and didn't want to repay the price increase they passed along to their customers.

There's also the fact that Nintendo was on a lot of people's shit lists for their litigiousness and other anti-consumer crap they had done so people were already mad at them before they raised prices.

When you look at it that way, Sony (who were also on people's shit lists for a laundry list of reasons) are no better in many's eyes.

Also, this completely ignores how small a company Valve is in comparison to Nintendo and Sony. I think that's the main problem actually. Valve isn't a hardware power house and they can't command the kind of sales contracts or parts/fab that Nintendo or Sony can. So they are less likely to be able to withstand raising prices on their hardware as a result. The fact that they have raised prices so late in comparison to their counterparts in the space is interesting even if you don't find it laudable.

At the end of the day, the backlash that Sony and Nintendo faced wasn't because of the price increase so much as it was because of all the other stuff.

Requiring proprietary hardware for $80+ games that almost never go on sale or have online subscription services that also keep going up, and then anti-consumer practices like (in Sony's case) the whole have to have an account to play their games on PC and not wanting to issue refunds where a PS account wasn't available but people bought the game and oh well we just won't port our games to PC at all then, and so on.

Like. There's way more to it than Valve good, Sony/Nintendo bad.

I hope people here give Valve the same flack they gave Nintendo and Sony for raising prices.

Narrator: they did not.

Nah, that's not true. All of these companies would absolutely love to charge less for the console up front so that they can get recurring payments out of you elsewhere. It was a regular occurrence for decades that console prices would drop dramatically over time.

Because producing chips requires a complicated supply chain.

1. Taiwan. China wants to own it for the same reason they can't just bomb it to smithereens. Producing chips requires human hardware engineers, possibly thousands depending on the complexity. Each engineer specializes in specific tasks and processes.

The human talent element is the most fragile and least replicable piece of the supply chain.

2. Taiwan is close enough to China to take advantage of cheap factory labour for anything that doesn't require engineering skills.

The geography of Taiwan & China is the backbone of the supply chain.

3. Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems. ASML from the Netherlands owns the proprietary design for the massive and complex machines that print microchip transistors onto silicon. US/Netherlands have restricted the sale of the most advanced systems to China.

The machines that allow for microchip production are all owned by one company

4. In retaliation to the above China has restricted Rare Earth Metal exports to western manufacturers.

** Video Game components are now military assets**

You called it. Still sold out in less than 24 hours.

It'll be a few years of pain, but once the bubble pops, we can start to return to normalcy. Take good care of the hardware you have in the meantime.