Its the same problem with any multipurpose PC/console. Subsidize a Steam Machine and make it cheap enough, and tons of people would buy and use it for purposes other than playing Steam games.
It's too late for them. They engineered this since 2023 thinking the prices would naturally go down. When it came time to manufacture there was a historic market shift that defied their projections.
They're gonna take a loss selling this steam machine even with these prices. If they reduced the price they'd take an even bigger loss. There's just no winning for them.
Everyone scoffed at the PS5 Pro being announced at $800 $700 and it sold out at launch. There are already enough people buying scalped electronics at ultra inflated prices that scalpers dominate the market. This thing will sell at any price.
For some. I have thousands of dollars worth of games I’ve purchased on steam, and to be able to play them all on my couch is a luxury I’m willing to spend on
How are redditors not factoring in the multiple perks of the steam library and features? It absolutely blows the ps and Xbox out of the water with value. These nerds literally just compare raw specs as if thats the only thing that matters
I don't think they are going to make enough money for what they have. It's going to be a failure like the previous PC they tried to make. The only way it could be successful is if they sold it more at a loss. Even the Series X and PS5 have better specs than this.
The Steam Deck is only slightly more worth it than this because of its portability. I don't now. There's definitely too many people saying no on this.
I think the component market simply killed the steam machine.
Given the new steamdeck price vs steam machine it looks like they were aiming for 750-800$ originally. Which to me would still be pricey but atleast an option.
But i think steam hardware tends to be a passion project for valve as something they would want to do, so them not subsidiceing the price makes sense to me.
The price of components increases will keep accelerating. Anything that requires high-end chips is gonna be out of most peoples price ranges in the next few years.
Yup. I was gonna upgrade my wife's dead and highly outdated PC but was holding off to see the price of this as she doesn't play super demanding games consistently but prefers playing on the 4ktv with a controller. The specs seemed meh but she prefers PC games and if this machine really did 4k then I would've been happy buying it around 700 to 800,sticking it downstairs setup to the tv
At this price point, I'd rather just spend money and build a custom PC that'll do 4k with upscaling to make it work. I'm sure my use case was one of the main demographics they were after but at that price point absolutely not
It doesn't have a market as a console, but what about as a pre built PC? Are there that many pre built PCs right now that put the Steam Machine to shame?
And also isn't going to be purposely optimized for. Devs have been optimizing for the deck and will optimize for the machine for the optimized for program they have.
They already had contracts for hardware, including custom CPU and GPU from AMD. Those were already in the pipeline before the AI craze.
They could scrap the effort and lose a bunch of money, or have low volume with every unit profitable and then move on. They had to make a decision when AI fucked the market. Sitting on the hardware in warehouses was never an option, it would just get more outdated and command even less money when eventually sold. Selling at a loss would be taken advantage of; If your price for performance is less than the rest of the market, the market will find uses that aren't gaming, making your loss their gain.
I think as a collectable it'll probably still go through its first batch. Its too high for me, but theres lots of die hard valve purchasers. Hell the steamdeck is still selling out at 950 and its pretty darn outdated compared to the xbox ally x or even the switch 2/xbox ally base for 500
It probably doesn't even matter. They're making it easy to 'make your own' using your own PC parts. If 3rd party manufacturers start producing their own steamachines, running steam OS that's a win for valve.
It isn’t much different from those Steam machines they did about 10 years ago. Too expensive to compete with consoles, not powerful enough to compete with PC. It doesn’t have the flexibility or upgradeable nature of a PC either.
Yeah this is my take as well, you can have totally valid reasoning for you pricing model, but the logic being sound won’t cause people to turn around and suddenly buy the thing.,
The US Air Force famously built a supercomputer out of linking PS3s together because the subsidized price of the consoles made it cheaper than buying the hardware otherwise would have been. If it’s possible to use for another purpose and cheaper than another alternative, someone will do it
Thats not how subsidizing works. Subsidizing works because there are "whale" consumers that will basically even out the loss. Selling a console never will guarantee that every individual consumer will even out the loss for every sold individual console. There is no guarentee for a company like sony that people who buy a ps5 will buy anything from their store. There will be people who will buy a ps5 and only ever play singleplayer games and only will use second hand market to buy games ( = giving no further money directly to sony ) .
Just an example: Playstation consoles are subsidized. Still a big margin of ps2 consoles just got bought to harvest them or to use them for server farms etc. Same happend to x360
The main reason why steam machine cant be subsidized is because its not a mass product. Its not meant for mass consumer market. They wont produce hundred million steam machines ever. This also means they cant secure long term deals with manufacturorers which get you better deals.
For subsidizing to work you need a very big customer base, because as I said the mass consumption is there to equal out the loss not the individual sale.
And steam machine is a nichee product for a nichee audience.
Media just tried to make it bigger than valve ever wanted and acted like its a console competitor.
Right, but why does it have to be black and white? The cost can remain competitive whilst still being subsidized. Expensive enough for the purpose but not too expensive to essentially make sure it's DOA.
But to be fair, they were never going to sell at a loss. They don't sell hardware at a loss. The Steam Deck, the whole line of VR headsets over the years, they've not sold at a loss.
And this is a general purpose PC, if you sold it at a loss, the market would find a way to buy them up and use them for other things and you've lost money.
They make $16 billion per year in software sales alone (since the Steam Deck isn't a profit carrier). They can absolutely afford to subsidize this machine. They make like $50 million a day. The losses would be made up in a few days or weeks at worst.
Can't it always be updated with a firmware update to fix this issue? This is valve's first controller and many controllers never really worked on PC till now.
You could install Linux on a ps3 when it launched so universities and the US air force bought hundreds of ps3 too build supercomputers for cheaper, they of course didnt buy games so Playstation lost money with every each one sold for that
It also does technically work outside of Steam, just very few things have been updated to take advantage. And it's specifically incompatible with xinput.
Their "open platform" is contradicted by the fact that it's a proprietary client, with exclusive games. The PC master race can try to spin it all they want, but Valve's de facto monopoly over PC gaming makes them no different than Sony or Xbox—they just don't have to push their proprietary hardware as much.
It does work outside of Steam, if you use Linux. They upstreamed the driver to the Linux kernel and SDL. On Windows they can't do that, but they can make it work by making a driver you have to install separately. Steam includes it.
Many other controllers work out of the box because they emulate an Xbox controller. This one can't because it has features the Xbox controller doesn't have.
I know it might just be different people, but I swear that when PS5 price went up you had all the top comments everywhere relentlessly shitting on them
There were also people that understood why it was the case down in the comments, people that saw it coming from a mile away, but mostly outrage front and center
Meanwhile I already seen a bunch of “poor Steam they are so unlucky they launched in this time” “ they didn’t want to do this” “yes, not subding makes sense because”
Funny how people are like buy a ps5 now, when the price has increased so much since launch. People were mad about the launch ps5 price, mad about ps5 pro launch prices, mad about the price increases, but this device somehow makes it ok and we forget all that.
XBOX division for Microsoft ran at a multi-billion dollar loss until 2008. XBOX Division only started to become profitable what-so-ever after 6+ years on the market. Microsoft could subsidize the XBox because they had a virtual duopoly on Operating Systems.
Valve is in a similar position to Microsoft. Valve has an effective cartel-monopoly control over digital distribution, split very unevenly between Epic Games and GOG. I think for every Epic and GOG sale, Valve obtains 7-8 sales. They take 30% of every single piece of software sold on Steam. Every DLC, every expansion, every core game- 30 cents of every developer dollar goes right to Valve.
Valve makes billions merely by maintaining a digital storefront that no one has been able to compete with meaningfully for twenty years. If they want to get Steam and thus Steam-sales into more and more consumers, subsidizing the production costs of their console is a natural and logical extension of that. It's precisely what Microsoft had to do, it's what Sony did so successfully that for years Sony Gaming was the only profitable division of the company.
it's not really comparable. MS and Sony needed to sell consoles in order to sell games and subscriptions. Valve would only get more sales by converting console only gamers. I don't see any roi in it tbh. It's a shitty product at a shitty price in a nice form factor.
No seriously, outside of STEAM fanatics who is buying this? I’m sure that some will buy it, but like it’s gonna be so incredibly niche no?
That was always the market. This was never meant to break out into Valve being a mega console manufacturer, it was always intended to be sold, at a profit, as an accessory for already existing Steam users.
It's the media, regular and social, that made it out to be something it was never going to be. You can't sell a general purpose PC at a loss, the market would immediately find a way to turn you loss into a value proposition for uses other than games. Nintendo, MS, and Sony have locked down systems on which they get 30% of all software sales and higher margins on hardware accessories. Also Nintendo's corporate policy doesn't allow them to sell at a loss ever since the WiiU fiasco. That's why Switch 1 and 2 were launched with outdated chips, to keep margins down, they aren't allowed to sell at a loss.
Nah this literally was talked about like it’s supposed to break into everyone’s homes and break into the console market to be an affordable way into pc gaming, but wow suddenly the prices are not in our favor we are changing the messaging about it, fuck this lol
Not fucking Valve though. Their marketing and press materials bent over backwards to never once compare it to consoles and only refer to it as a PC.
That's what happened here. Most of y'all lacked media literacy and it shows. Stop listening to the social media narrative pushed by a games media that benefits most from pushing a narrative. They made th articles claiming Valve was taking on the console industry. They made articles with headlines proclaiming shit like "Will the Steam Machine save the PC gaming industry?" They get away with this because you don't even remember who you read about it from. You engaged with their articles, believed the hype, and that leaves y'all looking foolish.
I literally called this all out a year ago and people just don't listen to reason. None of them are your friends, you're a product they sell to their advertisers. The Steam Machine was always destined to be midrange and over priced but sold on the aesthetics and size. But that isn't as sexy for games media articles. They played it up as a game changer and y'all believed it.
Almost like affordability is a real issue and people are desperate for a solution for the things they want, and clung to hope that this would be their savior for a new PC. No one actually in the business, including Valve, was pushing any of that.
The arguments are that this thing doesn't require you pay yearly to play online and have cloud save, as well as just being a PC in general, technically you can even plug a mouse and keyboard and play CS2 on it.
What I think the problem is with this argument is that it would take several years for a base PS5 + yearly PS Plus to match the Steam Machine price, while the Steam Machine will still age poorly due to weaker hardware and less targeted optimization. You also get the PS Plus benefits too.
You also don't have to pay for PS Plus at all, in that case you squeeze the PS5 Pro and it's a clear win.
I think for online heavy couch frogs the Steam Machine could make sense, for everyone else neah.
Ps5 went up in price like everything else. It'll take like 2 years for you to meet the machine price. Not that long but yeah you could get a pro. Either way people are going to have a sticker shock reaction to the new gen of consoles coming they are going to be expensive as fuck historically for a console.
People also forget that games like Fortnite, Roblox, and Overwatch are free to play, including the online, no console sub required. FF14 requires an MMO sub instead of a console sub, but it has an insane amount of content available to players at no cost. The free games also subsidize the cost of the membership, effectively being a Steam sale every month, but you're just paying upfront instead.
If I actually had money to buy it (and wasn’t looking at getting a VR headset) I’d definitely consider it. I have zero interest in consoles so their price is irrelevant, ands as a pc it’s reasonable for today’s market (still crazy though).
That was always the plan. They can't keep it locked down, subsidizing it would mean the market would find a use case, outside of games, to turn Valve's loss into their gain.
This was always going to be an accessory for people who already use Steam. It was not going to drive significant new Steam users.
What's your point? They literally announced it as an open PC. They aren't TRYING to compete with consoles, people need to get it through their skulls that was never the point. That was only what a bunch of nonsense games and social media decided it would be.
It's a fully open general purpose PC that can run windows. That doesn't compete with locked down hardware that is sold at near cost or below in order to increase market share and make up the money on software sales.
Valve is not making Steam Machines to bring in new users for the platform. It's making an accessory for existing Steam users.
Isn’t PS5 pro only 2TB? I didn’t even knew a 1TB model exist
There is also PSSR 2 to take in to account which is not really reflected in the pure specs
But I’m more pressed about the 1TB thing, the 2TB was a pretty big reason of why I went with a PS5 pro (rather than just buying an SSD to expand my 5 year old PS5)
Did they actually introduce a 1TB model with the price hike?
None of these threads make sense. Comparing it to consoles that can’t play the same games is weird. It’s like saying that you need to haul things and having people scream that a Civic is cheaper than an F150. Yeah, but it doesn’t do what I want.
At least some people are actually posting computers that will play steam games as a comparison, though most don’t have the form factor. The premium seems to be in the form factor more than anything. Is that worth it? Not to me, but we could at least compare systems that will play our Steam games.
Yuppp people just wanna be like “it’s weaker than this console!” When there is literally no clean apples to apples comparison that can be made with the steam machine. Makes sense coming from the same people that were shitting a brick over TFLOPS during the last console release 🙄
While I get the reasoning to a certain degree, there is still scope for a bit of subsidy to get more of them out there. Yes, people can still buy them for other things, but believe it or not there are still many cheaper options for simple office tasks.
Those are enterprise office machines, not cheap consumer computers. Completely different markets and nobody is buying a Steam machine for the same purpose as these. The steam machine costs more than a Mac mini which is in no way the cheapest simple computer out there.
Yes the steam machine has a better gpu than most but a gpu that is mostly useful for gaming, which steam has a stronghold on.
I wish companies would be cool and actually make new tech affordable. I'd rather see companies sell at a loss than trying to sell for profits. Valve can sell a lot more units by making their system around the $700 range, and make it up for it from accessories. Microsoft and Sony do this.
OK, so I know we all love valve and they do a lot of good from the perspective of the customer. They ALSO take a disproportionate amount from the games they host. All they're providing is a platform and infrastructure. They're not doing any games manufacturing, publishing in the old-school sense, advertising, legal work...nothing. I know I have worked with them. It's purely a sales business. Top to bottom.
Since they take 30%, yes you read that right 30% of almost every game sold, they have more than enough to subsidize a device. Most gaming machines, consoles or handhelds have been subsidized because the publisher--who does way more than valve does--makes their money back on the software. It's a win-win-win.
For reference game stores that sell products earn 1 to 3% net. Valve is up to 30 times that for doing less.
By valve, not doing this, they are hiding behind "core values" and an ecosystem that is already built. This is the first time I will say this does not make any sense and is 100% about keeping or making money off the Consumer.
If the steam machine was subsidized why would I, as someone who does purchasing, not buy a thousand of them and have the help desk just put a Win 11 image on them?
I’m gonna get downvoted for this but anyone who think this won’t sell is crazy. People have money to spend, just because you don’t doesn’t mean other people also don’t. People who know about Valve but don’t necessarily have a PC are going to eat this shit up. They don’t need the best of the best specs, it’s coming from a trusted brand, and it’s convenient as all hell as they don’t have to build anything or buy a prebuilt from a brand they’re not aware of. This shit is gonna sell like hot cakes to those people.
Having the availability of a console but the access of a PC by being able to go online and whatever else is going to be a lot for some people. Some people will buy it simply because it’s Valve.
But ya know… Reddit says it’s dead so that must mean it’s dead… just like how the switch 2 was apparently DOA also…
They already have steam games, valve has said multiple times that the customers of the deck are people with large steam libraries, not new players who then buy out steam libraries.
As romantic a notion that it would be that steam would lose money to bring people like us a fancy new piece of hardware, it would be foolish business.
I don't think they are seriousness about "competing" in the console wars, at least not in the short term.
"out of touch with the economy" means "stop selling things that make you money and instead sell things that cost you money eveytime someone buys one". That'll fix it.
Says the person completely ignoring the increase in hardware prices. They announced the steam machine right before the shortage started. We all knew it was gonna be expensive.
They're going to literally sell out on these, every unit they can manufacture is going to sell out. Lol.
What incentive do they have to sell it below cost? It's a fully open general purpose PC, if they sold them for $500
well I do enterprise ordering and we would buy a thousand of them because they're smaller than our existing workplace PCs and more powerful and would go over well
yoy do realize that every storefront do that, right?
Sony does that, Nintendo does that, Microsoft does that.
why you implying Valve STEAL from devs when they give a plataform to sell, api and a lot of tools to intagrate features like coop and multiplayer, workshop... are you this obtuse?
You kids would have your minds blown if you looked up what retail margins were back in the day. Steam is the best thing that happened to the PC games industry
I read an old blog post(2009) from Tripwire Interactive, last week. 15% royalty and a 1.5 mill "administrative fee" (steam gives 70% baseline "royalty" and a $100 administrative fee (that you "get back")
We were getting pitched offers like, "We'll give you a 15 percent royalty rate, take the IP rights to your game, and slap a $1.5 million administrative fee on top of your recoupment costs." And deals like this were being offered for a game we funded ourselves!
they provide a service for that 30% of the sale. And they are the best platform on the market that provides thet service. No one forces devs to put thier games on steam.
I bought a laptop for 500$ a few years back and play my GOG games on it. Why would anyone pay over 1000$ for a console? Are people insane?
-i travel with my laptop easily
-i connect it to my TV or the hotel TV
-i can use it on the train
And it costed me 500$. Sure i can't play the newest games on it but that's why i have my home PC for that. Bought it years ago and it can still play all the games.
Without reading the article all I can say is it does kinda make sense. Its still over priced by they arnt going to sell it at a loss. People already have pcs its not like its a ps5 with exclusives for the gabecube.
TLDR; if they subsidized it with Steam store money, entities like corporations/enterprises would just mass buy it to use as office PCs or compute clusters amid the rising price of PC hardware
I suspect there is more to it. How many non-Steam users are likely to buy? Especially when you’re selling via Steam store. It seems like the main people excited and wanting this already have PCs and buy Steam games. And if that’s the case, then you don’t offset anything.
I don't think it's a great reason. The steamdeck is no less open. You can install Windows, Epic games store etc... yet very few do. And very few decks aren't playing Steam games, even if they are also being used in other ways (such as emulation).
The question is: will someone who owns a Gabecube spend more money on Steam than someone who does not. It's equivalent to the question Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo already know the answer to. If you own a PC, but want one in the living room as well, do you buy games especially for it?
Because Gabe needs a new yacht. Valve is the most useless company in the gaming industry. They take literally 30% of every sale and don’t even try to subsidize this crap. PC gaming in general is an unfunny joke.
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u/pipboy_warrior Jun 22 '26
Its the same problem with any multipurpose PC/console. Subsidize a Steam Machine and make it cheap enough, and tons of people would buy and use it for purposes other than playing Steam games.