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Valve Built the Right Machine at the Wrong Time | An Analysis Of The Steam Machine And It's Polarizing Launch (opnforum.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/pcmasterrace@lemmy.world
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[–] 96 points 1 month ago (1 child)

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.

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  • [+] -23 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Why they didn't lock in memory contracts before they announced it I will never understand.

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  • [–] 42 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [+] -13 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    That was after the memory apocalypse happened though. Before that memory was abundant

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  • [–] 19 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    So the trick is to stay ahead of the curve and order stuff before an entire market segment is decimated.

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  • [+] -8 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 month ago*

    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.

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