"It's too dangerous for us to speculate": Valve don't know if Steam Machine prices will drop in the future, after admitting that "some people are going to priced out"
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/steam-machine-price-valve-interviewOpen linkView original on lemmy.zip
They should offer a B.Y.O.
DDR5 SODIMM/NVME 4 2230/2280barebones system. 🥹 😭That’s gonna be a no from me. If it’s not at the very least as cheap as a console, I’m out.
I love how you get a downvote for that, as if your decision not to pay an inflated price offends someone.
I won’t be buying it either unless it’s reasonably priced. I can’t take it anywhere with me, they already have a system for that and I have a PC.
Probably downvoted because it's much cheaper if you account for subscriptions and higher sales prices.
I see the value for some, I saw mention of people who want a pc at their telly, some who don’t have a pc and yeah, it’s probably good value for those.
I’m annoyed we didn’t get what we would have without this AI boom
I trust the prices will go down if they can. On all of their hardware.
The real question here is if console manufacturers can sell consoles at a loss expecting to make up the shortfall with game sales, why can't Steam? Gabe/Steam have billions and could easily do this. The only answer I can think of is greed.
If it's cheaper to buy a steam machine than it is to buy another pc with the same or weaker specs companies would just buy out all of the steam machines to stick in their offices with windows booted on it. Games consoles don't have a use outside of gaming but a pc does. Not to mention the lack of vendor lock in to recoup costs by selling the games at a higher markup.
Because console manufacturers can rely on their customers buying stuff at their store.
The game store that has so much of the PC market that people call it a monopoly can't?
That doesn't make any sense.
If it's sold at a loss, then you would get companies buying them in the thousands and installing Windows for office use.
Remember the old story with the US military using PS3s as a supercomputer because they were sold at a loss and so were the best value for getting lots of compute? That's what you get, except with the Steam Machine using it for something else is just straight up a supported use case.
I guess this explains it better than I could: https://lemmy.world/post/48534116
Yeah, I see your point. To paraphrase, it says that they have to make a profit and can't guarantee game sales from their own store to offset any potential subsidisation.
My point is that Gaben/Valve have billions and don't need the profit from it. So what if some people use it to play games from other stores? They'll be in the minority for sure.
I guess everyone is too capitalism-brained to see past the profit motive.
I'm not sure you do see my point.
To be clear, nowhere in that article suggests that valve would be making a profit on the current price, or that they "have to make a profit" - just that they would not sell it under cost.
I'm genuinely confused how that becomes "profit motive", or shows greed.