The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blackeco.com/post/2330473
I don’t think that Valve will sell the Steam Machine at a loss.
Closed-system console vendors often do, then jack up the prices of their games and make their money back as people buy games. So why not Valve?
Two reasons.
They sell an open system. If Valve sells a mini-PC below cost, then a number of people will just buy the thing and use it as a generic mini-PC, which doesn’t make them anything. A Nintendo Switch, in contrast, isn’t very appealing for anything than running games purchased from Nintendo.
They don’t have a practical way to charge more for games for just Steam Machine users — their model is agnostic to what device you run a purchased game on. So even if they were going to do that, it’d force them to price games non-optimally for non-Steam-Machine users, charge more than would be ideal from Valve’s standpoint.
While I think you’re ultimately right, 6 years ago I would have said the same thing about the Steam Deck idea, so I’m compelled to offer counterpoints.
Valve, very uniquely, does offer the best Linux-based digital games storefront to use on that Linux gaming PC you bought. So, they’re very much positioned to take advantage of the hardware purchase. Users aren’t “locked in”, but they are compelled in, and users may have a smoother time getting games on Steam than trying to set up controller-based launchers on Heroic or something.
It’s like when the pet isn’t literally fenced into the house, and is allowed to roam free, but is reminded that its fluffy toy and warm meals are all back at home, so it’ll never go far.
Valve also might just be more forward-thinking than
most game companiesmost COMPANIES these days. They build goodwill this way and get people obsessed with their brand by having more wins like this.Steam deck has customization you can buy with their points, I could see them getting some extra game sales that way
Hah, this is where they get you and I’ve been dogpiled for raising this as an issue continuously. This is an illusion of an open system. Where are you going to buy games for Steam Machine? Steam obviously, there’s no competition. Then as your library grows you get more and more vendor locked. Then Valve does an Android application notarising switcheroo and you have Linux machine that’s no different from a Mac or an Android phone. Of course they can subsidise it because they can recoup it thanks to 30% cut and it’ll only accelerate the process.
Simply not true.
What is the competition on Linux? What’s their market share?
Heroic launcher lets you install games from other launchers although Steam experience is better. But, biggest thing is you can just install Windows, which those who play games that refuse to enable anticheat on Linux will end up doing if this is going to be their main PC.
Like imagine if you could pick up a PS5 or Xbox and install Linux or Windows on it. Id pick one up for that purpose completely negating the reason Sony and Xbox put out the hardware, which is to get people to buy from their store and take 30% of every sale so even if they sold at a loss they are guaranteed to recoup it. Open that hardware up though and they’ll have system that are just going to be a loss.
Does Heroic launcher guarantee that the game you bought will not break Wine compatibility when patched by the developer? What kind of consumer experience are you trying to sell here?
What’s to keep Windows from deciding to get rid of allowing people to install any exe? What’s to stop them from deciding to charge a 30% fee of all transactions from exes that they allow to be published? Whats to stop them from banning Steam, Epic, GOG from existing on their OS so everything is through the Microsoft Store?
What if? What if?
What stops Windows? Business consumers paying for the OS and the fact that they don’t have any successful app store. What stops Valve?
GoG, epic, any other store really. Proton is made by valve but it works in whatever, and there are tools now to use proton (not wine, proton) outside of steam to get all the goodies you got on top. Heroic launcher does that for the games you get from the Amazon store, gog, epic, and any other exe you got.
I even installed battle net, and once you open it everything you install from there works in that bubble and work, I played plenty HOTS games.
I play modded D2 without much issues.
You know why the steam market share in Linux is so high? Because they are the ones that put the work to make windows games work on Linux. Yes, wine existed before but they both adapted it for games and contributed to the overall wine project a ton. Also, iirc, steamdecks make up for 30% of the Linux machines from valve’s yearly reports. The market is tremendously tiny yet.
What is their current market share on Linux?
Why is that even relevant? You said people can only get games on Steam and that’s just not true
If they have no market share then that competition exists in theory only.
You’re not seeing the forest for the trees. Just because other game distribution vectors lack market share does not mean there are no alternatives to Steam. People have options, but they overwhelmingly choose Steam based on the quality of their product and service. If others decide to improve those things or a particular game is better priced or contains more content on another service, the consumer is free to choose that distributor.
Market share is completely irrelevant in this case.
You can launch any .exe through Steam using Proton… You don’t even need to buy the games if that’s your prerogative.
Where the software is from is entirely irrelevant.
Well that’s certainly an…unusual position.
There’s definitely competition. Is the competition great? Not really. But you can still buy and install games from Epic, Itch and GOG and run them on Steam hardware. It’s just not as convenient. There’s not really anything they can do about that. I hope one day soon someone makes a better frontend that supports other platforms better, and if they do, you’ll be able to install it on Steam hardware, because that’s what an open system means.
Closed hardware looks Like PS5, XBOX and Switch. No browser. No desktop. No access to any files. No mods. No emulation. No third party stores AT ALL. And in fact if you try to do any of those things, they will remotely brick your device.
Not sure how you get there…
Heroic Games Launcher isn’t that bad IMO. Though I haven’t checked if it has something equivalent to big picture mode, which is kind of a necessity to compete with Steam on the Steam Machine. But on PC it’s fine. I use it for my free Epic games lol
Heroic doesn’t have controller support. It also doesn’t have all the menus.
What you’re saying doesn’t contradict that on Steam Machine you’re going to buy games from Valve only so it doesn’t matter that you can, in theory, buy from somewhere else. The bigger your library grows, the less likely you are to start buying games in another ecosystem. Valve doesn’t care if you „jailbreak” with a web browser for now. They’re in for a long game and there was no better time than now because in the US they can get around tariffs by selling this console as a PC.
What you’re saying is just false. This is not a theory. I’ve owned a “Steam machine” for several years and regularly acquire and play games from other stores. Whether you buy games from Valve is entirely up to you.
No. That makes zero sense.
There is no jailbreaking. There’s nothing to break. The system already allows you to do whatever you want. Just go into the menu and select “exit to desktop”.
Why would you think PCs aren’t impacted by tariffs?
Different rates for different products. I don’t follow US domestic politics that closely but last I’ve heard computer parts, displays and smartphones are at least temporarily exempted while toys (that’s consoles too) are subject to highest tariff rates.
Also, I’m describing how Valve plans to corner consumers, not the current state. So far they’re very much on track.
They are using a modified arch distro with KDE, yeah it defaults to steam big picture on launch but that can be changed, specially on the GabeCube. It’s a computer, a literal computer with all the capabilities and support systems of arch Linux with KDE.
The amount of contributions they have done to the Linux gaming world to then use it in their consoles is insane. They didn’t built it for themselves, they built it for everybody, then made it popular in their consoles so they get money back from increased sales on the games.
They did sell the deck at a loss, but that was a new concept and people were weary, price needed to be good. Now people know that the idea works, the picture changes.
I don’t really care if they sell at a loss or no, I’m not buying one when I basically have the equivalent already at home, but saying that their plan is to corner consumers sounds like the other side of the lunacy spectrum as those that treat steam as religion.
Hmm. It seems you’re actually correct on that one. Although I think they might have a hard time arguing that it’s “just a PC” when it launches straight into a dedicated gaming environment on boot.
They import Steam Decks as PCs currently. I’m pretty sure this is also a part of consideration regarding next gen Xbox.
Theoretically people could use it for a cheap non-gaming PC, except the cheapest non-gaming PC would be non-gaming specs.
Anyone using it for cheap crypto-mining is an idiot, the cheap option there is a rack full of bang-for-buck GPUs.
Are there any other use-cases that involve gaming-PC specs? Making videos, perhaps?
In this context, “generic mini-PC” doesn’t need to even be “non-gaming-PC”, just not a platform for buying Valve’s games; a razor-and-blades model requires that you be the one selling the blades. If someone just goes and runs games purchased from GOG, that’s already an issue for them.
It’s why inkjet printer manufacturers, who do use this model, try to make it so stupendously difficult to use ink from competitors (outside of the bottled-ink printers, which don’t use that model, where the manufacturers are fine with you doing that).
If it’s priced well and idle power usage good, it can be a great home lab. Run all sorts of services on it. Host your own Google Drive/Docs/Photos alternatives with all the automated categorization like face detection sorting. Should be strong enough to run a lot of unrelated services off one machine. If I ever had gigabit internet, I’d probably try stuff like hosting a Matrix server. Self hosted RSS feed.
Would be great for videos. RDNA3.5 has good AV1 and HEVC encoder and decode I believe. I think h.264 got solid with RDNA3.5. Good for video usually means good for photos too. Probably audio. Blender support for AMD graphics cards continue to improve and game engines have generally always been good. Great for a computer lab to teach something like Godot
The compact media creation thing would be the big thing for me if I needed a computer and this was substantially cheaper than a Strix Halo minipc. Darktable, Kdenlive, Krita, Ardour, Godot, Blender. I’d have people in mind where a $500-600 just under an ~RX 7600 would be a huge upgrade for their personal art workstation and the compact form is a big plus
Could be good for some home automation workflows- plex server, transcribing security cam video, doing object detection on said video.