Valve Built the Right Machine at the Wrong Time | An Analysis Of The Steam Machine And It's Polarizing Launch
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People are already preordering gta 6 for 100€. I think they will also buy many steam machines.
It's a great machine, they just got kicked in the balls on pricing. Like we all did. They didn't do anything wrong, and they still haven't. I hope the economics doesn't make it fail, but if it does, so be it. Economics is failing all of us.
Why they didn't lock in memory contracts before they announced it I will never understand.
Memory OEMs only offer those contracts to megacorps, primarily data center providers. Even the massive consumer giants like Dell and Lenovo are second tier and only get the leftover contract deals from the first tier which they often mix with spot price purchases. Everyone else has to buy at their spot price.
It's why Micron shut down Crucial and Samsung isn't even providing to its own consumer division. They saw the AI moneybags and ran as fast as they could.
Which leaves SK Hynix as the only OEM which is the the RAM used in the Steam Machine.
What they could have done was stash stock as much as possible before the big panic buy happened but I'm guessing they didn't react in time.
China's production also won't catch up for at least another year to make a dent in the massive lack of supply (and therefore the price), otherwise they could have followed Corsair and gone with CXMT.
The memory manufacturers don’t do contracts like that. There was no way to lock any price. Check out the Gamer Nexus steam machine benchmark video, it has a segment where they interview Pierre-Loup from Valve. He says they had to call a guy and either they buy at the price the guy says or they never hear back from him again.
That was after the memory apocalypse happened though. Before that memory was abundant
So the trick is to stay ahead of the curve and order stuff before an entire market segment is decimated.
Yeah, Apple did it. Although it's close to expiring or already has.
Apple's hardware sales are probably a few orders of magnitude higher than Valve's. Do you suppose that would give them some options a small time hardware vendor wouldn't get?
look, i am not asking them to predict the future 8 months ago, ok. they had steam machine in development for years, it would be natural to arrange it for production before they announced it, right? and to setup production, it would be natural to secure some parts. had they done that, they would have avoided being caught in the ram apocalypse.
they didn't need to predict the ram price would skyrocket, they just had to do what a reasonable hardware manufacturer would naturally do.
That's just not how it works
Oh, why didn’t they think of that!
I don't think it's polarizing. It's just sad.
The machine is a pretty decent deal at current prices. Not much to be done other than wait for the bubble to pop.
We're really not going to need this many data centers. AI is not going to replace most labor as they expect.
I’m curious to see whether companies will actually reduce prices back to the norm after the bubble pops tbh. Historically, inflation only goes one way.
Inflation only goes one way because deflation isn't really good. It creates a situation where not spending money nets a return. Inflation means you need to spend or you lose value. The ideal is wages keep up with inflation (which they aren't).
Now, I don't really buy into the Keynesian economics idea like I used to, that forcing spending is a good thing for the economy. Yeah, it boosts economic activity, but does that net really help the average person or only the elites? However, I still think deflation, especially to any significant degree, is almost certainly bad. It would cripple economic activity, which would cost jobs, because the best thing you could do is spend as little as possible.
However, computer hardware prices aren't really inflation. They effect the measure of inflation, but they aren't caused by it. They're caused by incredible demand, and a lack of supply. There's some inflationary effect to it, but their price has increased far faster than the price of their inputs.
This is all hanging on the word "inflation" in his comment, which wasn't really referring to general inflation like you are. It was clearly restrained to computer equipment, where the current bubble is.
Maybe. Generally when people use the phrase "inflation only goes one way" they're talking about general inflation. Inflation is rarely used to mean price increases. It's used for the overall decrease in buying power per unit of currency. Obviously prices do sometime come down.
The steam machines has been very unlucky, both the first and the second one.
Oh no don't buy it, it's shitty and definitely don't sign up it's too expensive and not worth it ahhh
They built the right machine. They showed how expensive the consoles will be, while having the advantage to play any game. In my opinion, the only thing that will save Playstation and Xbox are exclusive titles or maybe some novel type of input device (similar to Nintendo, which is why they are still successful).
I hope they will make it illegal to have platform exclusive games for longer than 2 weeks, because if this is the only way to get money, you didn’t deserve it in the first place.
the advantage of the console is that you can go to your local library. some of us don't like piracy. some of us (and i know this sounds ridiculous) can't risk it for professional reasons. like there's urban legend in grad schools about this one time this dude lost his licensure for hopping a turnstile in NYC and pleading guilty it's ridiculous.
Oh, I didn’t think of this part, and you are right about the library.
The best part is it feels like blockbuster. And at least at mine you take the case up to the video game/librarians chair desk and get to gossip with the librarians about how the local cat colonies are doing and how your godchildren have been
oh right. i love towers.
Its ass, but lines up with the prebuilt prices. Its even a little cheaper compared to some. Most are probably buying these prebuilts on Amazon. Not people like the average fediverse user, I think I might be able to build something close with the spare parts I have. Which sucks I would never buy one of these and they look cool, maybe if my kid who doesnt have a PC wanted one. But I'd debate it and probably just make one from the spare parts I mentioned.
Gamers nexus did a cost analysis. The valve tax was something like 76$. Steam deck is similar from what i recall, they just want to get the hardware out so people use steam. And they dont lock it down either, SK they can't sell it at a loss like someone like Sony can.
You gotta respect that. Of course people will bitch about the price, but that's not valves fault.
I didnt say it was Valve's fault but just because your golden company made it doesnt mean the price is good. Its not. No fucken electronics prices are good right now. I wouldn't suggest anyone buy. I'd pay 600-800 bucks at most for this. Just like I'd pay 600-800 dollars at most for the laptops my employer is forking over 1.5k a piece for. Valve isn't malicious, the market is fucken ass.
I think everyone knows this. I'm having a hard time understanding your comments trying to find out if you're mad at the market or valve or both lol
Mainly just the market. Like what the fuck man this shit is absolutely insane. Valve is just caught in the cross-fire. I'm disappointed I'll probably build some scrap unit when I actually want to buy this. But the fucken market.
Ya I'm just holding on to my steam deck and old gaming PC. I'll play lower end shit for now, deck serves the same purpose as this but with less power.
Blame the elite pushing the AI to steal the jobs while simultaneously wrecking the market and climate.
We could a had a bad bitch. If local, smaller more focused models had taken off (because they are fucken better) consumer GPUs would have sold to nerds at home and blackwells wouldnt have been made. But that was never going to happen.
The price does line up with current pre builds but from what I’ve seen the performance is less than that of a ps5. You can’t even play cyberpunk 2077 on max settings on the SM so I don’t imagine it will run things like GTA6 and future AAA games that well.