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Valve says it isn't subsidizing the Steam Machine's $1050 price because of its "religious" refusal to "build a more closed system" (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] -3 points 1 month ago (5 children)

They shouldn't subsidize it but they should at least sell it without profit.

The increase in price from 512GB to 2TB is more than what consumers would pay which shows they are profiting. It's even cheaper to get the 512GB version and buy a 2TB SSD yourself, plus you'd still have the 512GB drive for other things.

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

    Employee need to be paid to build it, ship it. You are asking them to sell at loss. But okey.

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

    You misunderstood. No profit does not equal loss.

    The employee builds a Steam Machine with either a €100 or €250 drive. All costs are the same except for that drive. However, the difference in price the end consumer pays is not a €150 difference but a €320 one.

    This implies Valve takes their costs and just adds a percentage margin over it for profit. And I'm saying they shouldn't do that. Pay what must be paid and let us pay the same.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago*

    Can't be the exact cost of a drive, you have to market research to buy the best for the system. Then marketing etc. Cost are never just hardware for a corpo, but yeah in a dream world corpo should not be evil. If it is the same producer of disk I may be wrong, though one the part you pay for research of the best sdd.

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

    Surely you can't be serious.

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

    I am, because I think every body have to get paid. And if you are considering corpo should give us money you don't understand corpo well enough, even the nicest corpo is still a corpo. Can't trust any company which isn't a cooperative, I seen corpo change leader and destroy their strong points often enough . And another guy made a good argument that it would be considering building a monopoly. Game seller which build a machine cheaper than any conccurence which can easily run it's store.

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

    Well Sony sold the PS5 at a loss, so maybe we should stop their bullshit first. I just think Steam should play the game but draw the line at the cost instead of a loss.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago

    Valve can make a profit from their products just as you can make a profit from your labor. They aren’t a charity.

    But market right now can only support so much. If it goes up much more I doubt it will sell well

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

    What even is their profit margin after all of the software work they've done for it?

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

    Valve probably wants consumers to have a machine in their home that is dedicated to running their marketplace. They don't care if it's hardware they sold. They want the same accessiblity to their store front that consoles have.

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

    You can easily separate Proton development costs from the Steam Machine.

    I have been buying Proton supported games on Steam and they know it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    What's the profit margin on that do you think?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    I have no idea, but Valve does because they have the analytics for it. They can see what games are bought, played and ran on Proton.

    And it seems profitable.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    I'm not seeing a 2TB M.2 SSD for less than $250. Depending on the speed they put in it, it could easily be market price. The current Amazon best seller is $350 and is over 2x the read speed of the cheaper one.

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

    Market price for a 512GB is $100.

    1050 - 100 + 250 = 1200.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago

    You're comparing high end 512gb prices with low end 2tb prices. I somehow doubt Valve is selling this with a no-DRAM-cache SSD. It's only a $50 different if you compare fairly, and I doubt you'll find anyone willing to buy the old 512gb for full price either.

    Valve's pricing is incredibly normal here. Yes the price is high, but they're not straight up ripping you off like Apple's RAM and SSD upgrades.

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