I think people really underestimate the brand loyalty that valve has. They have consistently shown for 25+ years to strive for quality and I know I’m unlikely to get a headache if I purchase from them.
Their hardware is really top notch, I have used a steam deck LCD for years and it was not until very recently that I had a single issue with a button that was easily fixable.
Probably the purchases went down due to some people buying the steam machine. I’m surprised the article doesn’t mention that.
Also, consumers are increasingly being tapped out for literally anything and everything. The demand for the things they want still exists, but they cannot readily afford it like the could in the past. Its not like all the Steam Deck customers are buying some budget friendly alternative instead. They're simply just not spending money period.
And most potential buyers would likely prioritize buying a PC before they consider getting a Steam Deck so it’s likely even more sensitive to price increases.
Also, the market eventually gets saturated when all the gamers willing to pay 400-650 dollars for a Steam Deck already have one. That's when a company usually launches the next generation of the hardware, or reduces the prices for the current generation to widen its appeal, or both. Of course, increasing the prices while not changing the hardware (and eliminating the most affordable version) is the complete opposite of this, so it will obviously lead to a sharp decrease in sales.
I generally find Valve's software quality subpar but their ethics to be vastly superior to anyone else's. For that reason they are the only place I'll even look for games anymore. They aren't perfect but they at least don't hate me like Epic does.
Also, Valve could decide at any moment what happens with your game library. Unlike GOG, where you can download and save the .exe or .dmg file, Steam can just pull the plug and make you lose all your games and money.
But the comment explicitly says the opposite, that the experience is subpar but they value the ethics more. This comment is pointing out the ethics are not so great.
No, they said the software quality is sub par. I generally agree: Steam isn't a great piece of software, but it works tolerably well and everything surrounding it makes it a better experience than any alternative I know of.
What ethics do you see being superior in the company known for exposing underages to gambling? The anyone elses must be really bad guys. Yes I like my deck and I respect their contributions to gaming on linux, but Valve is no saint.
The gaming market is full of gambling. Steam has problems in that area but they're miles better than what Apple is doing. My impression of Steam is that it's a game delivery platform where some games sadly have gambling elements. My impression of the App Store is that it's a "gambling for kids" delivery platform.
I always think now it’s funny that we Hated valve when steam was first introduced. Their pioneering of always online DRM and no physical media, soon to be followed by Bethesdas horse Armour micropayment dlc. The base line has shifted soo far from the days of freely auto p2p downloading of fan made skins on map load in q3arena.
Yes, they basically pioneered lootboxes, they shaped and scaled microtransaction economy around randomized outcome purchases under disguise of gaming and then slapped a marketplace on top of it(to take even further cut %% nonetheless).
> I can't even picture gaben with a wispy moustache to twist evilly.
Add a 500m gigayacht to the picture, maybe it will make it easier. Or a fleet.
I used to agree with this sentiment. But now I think they engage in some nasty practices, like not allowing developers to list their games on other online stores at cheaper prices. That and they take a large cut (30 percent I think) Vs epic store at 12 percent as far as I can recall.
I mostly buy from gog because they give your the download to keep for life. Also I just like them. However getting their games to work on steam deck is more time consuming than just buying from steam
I'd be happy to find out that I've been misinformed but I'm pretty certain this is all true.
Valve does allow listing on other stores at other prices. They even allow you to sell Steam keys for your game on other stores for lower prices - and they earn $0 for that while still providing the infrastructure for those players to download/play.
Edit: I think for steam key sales actually you're supposed to sell for the same price as Steam, but I can't seem to find the documentatiom stating either way
Edit 2: Ah, here is something stating it "You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers." (https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys)
However, I know many games have steam keys indeed available for cheaper on other stores. Not sure how much valve actually cares, or if they have special permission or what.
they allow selling your game on other websites, but not for substantially cheaper. Isn't this what Wolfire Games (Overgrowth, Lugaru, Receiver) sued them over?
They charge 63% for user-created items inside Fortnite as of next year. No, you don't get to build your own store inside Fortnite, but you do get to bend over to Epic's price gouging and profiteering of its own.
Steam client is pretty bad. It's slow, full of ads, inconsistent, complex ... Its only quality is that everything else is worse and that it have an interesting ecosystem and ok tier customer policies (but that's unrelated to the software).
The thing takes several seconds to start on my brand new gaming rig. Not insufferable but given its only usefulness is to list my games and start one, that's a lot.
They have a proven unwillingness over many years to do what it takes to make Steam voice chat work reliably. It seems that their objective with Steam Chat is to do just enough to ensure that all Steam item-trading communication remains on their platform (for the worthy reason of controlling scamming).
The Steam client for starters but pretty much every game they initially released since 1997 was extremely buggy. They also struggle very hard to even release much anymore. I'll give them kudos on supporting OSS and their Proton development.
I'll be interested to see what happens as more and more gamers start getting into extreme old age. The lack of right of first sale, that your many thousands of dollar catalog of beloved games & your saves kicks the bucket with you is going to be a not great look for Steam some day.
I'm also a little nervous that maybe Valve works on getting the anti-cheat solution improved for Steam hardware, but the rest of Linux gets left behind. Steam has such a halo now, and this would but a subtle but serious tarnish that would never wash off. No massive up front damage but it would be the cusp, a point that would be hard to recover from.
Like the first point, there's also the general risk that someday Gabe isn't around to keep the ship pointed on the right direction. That they turn into a Nintendo, a company who never misses a chance to squander good will, to do the most MBA thing they can, that is as un-ppen as possible by design. See for example Nintendo's recent response to customers asking for some of the tariff refund money Nintendo is claiming.
Not really. Have their Valvr Index and rarely use it. But one base station started making loud noise after 2 weeks but still functional. I was too lazy to ask for replacement, but the other one quietly (pun intended) died and when I found out it was out of warranty. Later I learned that the basestations are infested with quality issues. Pretty bad taste for me.
It's a shame because the Steam Deck is the best gaming device I've used in many years. My Xbox One and Xbox Series X are both lackluster compared to my Deck IMHO. And that's without me ever "docking" it, just using it handheld.
I won't buy another Xbox, the Series X was a massive disappointment and AAA games all suck. I found I was just playing decade+ old games on my Series X and while load times might have improved on the newer hardware, it wasn't enough to justify the upgrade. I regret my Series X purchase.
I'm not a mobile gamer so I find the XBOX S pretty good for the indie game scenario. I own both the X and S in different rooms, and I realized there's hardly any game I play today that requires the X's extra horsepower.
Well in relative terms that hardly matters for consoles due to obvious reasons.
Developers of AAA games for PC can only (or are willing to) do so much to make it run acceptably on what’s a very underpowered PC compared to their target market.
Yeah, we drove Moore's Law into a wall about a decade ago. Getting smaller and cheaper is now exponentially more expensive and slower to achieve. Call ASML and ask when you can get an EUV machine delivered.
Nintendo has already raised the price of the Switch and has announced plans to raise it more, but it's still cheaper because the hardware is worse.
I feel like Nintendo is actually really well positioned for these component price increases, because now they benefit from having the weakest hardware. There is only so much most consumers are willing to pay for a gaming console, and now the Switch may be the only one in that price range.
If competitors are not raising prices dramatically, then they're eating that loss. Steam should follow suit—at least with something like a loss-leader model.
When I rewrote/released an old shareware game to Steam some years ago I made just enough money to buy a Steam Deck. Since then OLED Decks came out and I'm jealous.
(With the prices of the new Steam Decks, I'm wondering now if there is instead a way to retrofit my old Deck with an OLED…)
Yep. I love valve but let’s not forget that they are making 17+ BILLION dollars a year, 50+ million per employee. Gabe seems like a pretty good guy but he bought a $70m mansion and builds yachts as a side business…
If they want to increase or keep market share they need to eat costs somewhere in this. Maybe they are positioned to do that soon if they anticipate another doubling of ram prices like Microsoft does, we can’t know their plans for future price increases.
Reports I’ve seen suggest that they are making a roughly 10% profit per Gabe Cube right now, which is considerable.
Valve will cite the idea that Sony/nintendo/xbox can sell at a loss because they are bundling in the profit from sold games on their digital stores, but there’s no guarantee Cubers will do the same. But that’s bullshit, we all know 99% of cube users will be buying shit through steam, it’s a weak defense.
They are not complaining that Gabe makes money. They are pointing out that Valve can actually afford to make the cube affordable while still making money if they wanted to. It's a choice not forced on them they way it's forced on you.
> They are pointing out that Valve can actually afford to make the cube affordable while still making money if they wanted to.
They could, but since its literally just a PC it would just be subsidising PCs for something they likely aren't gonna make their money back, unlike XBOX or PlayStation, which are locked down and you are forced to use their store where they make the money back.
Will they make some of the subsidisation back? Sure, there will be some gamers that will be able to buy it just from pure numbers, but I feel like a massive chunk would just end up as office PCs with Windows on them in some office if subsidised.
The deck might make more sense to subsidise, but to do it for the gabecube doesn't make sense in the world we live in.
>Gabe seems like a pretty good guy but he bought a $70m mansion and builds yachts as a side business…
As if that was a counterexample to him being a good guy? Who cares what he buys. It's his money and its legal. The "billionaire bad" brainwashing needs to stop.
Prices for other handhelds have gone through the roof, too.
And no, there probably isn't a way to retrofit. Deck OLED's internals were overhauled, too. The entire board is different, up to and including a die shrink, and rotating the SOC. I wouldn't bet on any of the internal ZIF connectors being in the same place.
Loss leaders only work if they can make the customer spend money to make up for that loss. Commodity hardware can't be sold as a loss leader, because companies will just buy it up at the discount, and then not use it for gaming.
An example of this was the PS3, being able to run linux. The US Air Force bought ~1700 PS3s, and built a supercomputer. At launch, the PS3 reportedly lost Sony about $300 per console sold, so that one example alone could have cost a half million dollars.
I mean, the thing is literally tied (by default but few people are changing that) to the biggest video game selling platform of the planet. Actually given how Valve prints money without doing anything, I'm impressed they don't sell it for 99.99, they would immediately kill Nintendo and Sony (Xbox doesn't need that).
The big question becomes, does a Steam Deck owner buy enough more to make up the subsidy or do they buy about the same as they would have without buying the Deck? For consoles there's little question because the console maker gets a cut of every single sale and it would be REALLY weird to only play previous generation games on a console so that math is easier but for Steam they're looking at people buying it as a secondary device (mostly) as an augment to their existing PC(s).
I also think Valve has/had enough demand at the non fully subsidized price there wasn't much point in selling it for less. They could already sell as many as they wanted to make at the $600+ price point so why subsidize if farther and leave money on the table? That has changed now that they're having to jack the prices up but I think they also just don't want to get into that model and would rather have an ecosystem of healthy competitors they sell games onto.
A lot of the competitors have had to raise prices too, Legion Go 2 is now nearly 2 grand for the Z2 Extreme version. It's hard to do a loss leader model in the PC space because they're not guaranteed money on the backend from game purchases. Even Steam can't really count on it because even though they're the main vendor people will use their existing Steam library in a lot of cases.
Valve just chose the worse time to make a big hardware push. Sad because the hardware is genuinely good, but there's no way any company new to the space is going to be able to compete in today's reality.
72% revenue decline from a 54% price increase, but how did profitability change? Some of the features of the Deck are still differentiating like the OLED screen and touch pads, and maybe some of the price increase is meant to keep it profitable at a low volume.
I personally think a controller and a VR headset that isn't standalone would be fine products for Valve to sell. Maybe they can't justify working on Steam OS without the Deck, Steam Machine or Frame. If they can still sell low volume differentiated products, good for them.
There's plenty of value to be generated with all of these other applications of computer hardware, value that could be generated much sooner than the horizon over which GenAI expects to see its first dollar of profit.
I've been curious to see what happens with all of this. I think a lot of people have been caught in a perpetual upgrade cycle they probably didn't need to be in but were out of decades old habits. The lack of hardware may start to change habits and behaviors to where the masses begin to ignore upgrade cycles. I'm already doing this myself.
Same here. I've been playing Fallout: New Vegas on a Lenovo T570 running Bazzite Linux.
It's playable. Framerates are good unless you dump a bunch of bullets at something while in VATS. No more buggy than it was on Windows when I was playing it back in university, which is saying something for a Bethesda engine game.
I paid for the game and hardware years ago. It's not streamer slop or what all of the hip young people are into, but the story's good and I like unwinding with it.
Honestly, it would have been one of the titles I would have played on a Steam Deck.
Hopefully more people look into the classics. We've hit a point of diminishing returns with things like framerate and resolution at living room/computer desk distances. VR, while cool, is expensive and often requires a dedicated area.
I wonder if certain checks should be put in place to prevent a few companies from hoarding a valuable and limited resource many other industries rely on.
I think people really underestimate the brand loyalty that valve has. They have consistently shown for 25+ years to strive for quality and I know I’m unlikely to get a headache if I purchase from them.
Their hardware is really top notch, I have used a steam deck LCD for years and it was not until very recently that I had a single issue with a button that was easily fixable.
Probably the purchases went down due to some people buying the steam machine. I’m surprised the article doesn’t mention that.
Also, consumers are increasingly being tapped out for literally anything and everything. The demand for the things they want still exists, but they cannot readily afford it like the could in the past. Its not like all the Steam Deck customers are buying some budget friendly alternative instead. They're simply just not spending money period.
The cost of computer components going up 4X could naively be believed to eliminate 80% of demand.
And most potential buyers would likely prioritize buying a PC before they consider getting a Steam Deck so it’s likely even more sensitive to price increases.
Also, the market eventually gets saturated when all the gamers willing to pay 400-650 dollars for a Steam Deck already have one. That's when a company usually launches the next generation of the hardware, or reduces the prices for the current generation to widen its appeal, or both. Of course, increasing the prices while not changing the hardware (and eliminating the most affordable version) is the complete opposite of this, so it will obviously lead to a sharp decrease in sales.
I generally find Valve's software quality subpar but their ethics to be vastly superior to anyone else's. For that reason they are the only place I'll even look for games anymore. They aren't perfect but they at least don't hate me like Epic does.
Didn't it take for Valve to lose a court case in order to offer refunds? https://web.archive.org/web/20180427063845/https://store.ste...
Also, Valve could decide at any moment what happens with your game library. Unlike GOG, where you can download and save the .exe or .dmg file, Steam can just pull the plug and make you lose all your games and money.
I don't really care why the experience is the best in the industry, only that it is.
But the comment explicitly says the opposite, that the experience is subpar but they value the ethics more. This comment is pointing out the ethics are not so great.
No, they said the software quality is sub par. I generally agree: Steam isn't a great piece of software, but it works tolerably well and everything surrounding it makes it a better experience than any alternative I know of.
What ethics do you see being superior in the company known for exposing underages to gambling? The anyone elses must be really bad guys. Yes I like my deck and I respect their contributions to gaming on linux, but Valve is no saint.
The gaming market is full of gambling. Steam has problems in that area but they're miles better than what Apple is doing. My impression of Steam is that it's a game delivery platform where some games sadly have gambling elements. My impression of the App Store is that it's a "gambling for kids" delivery platform.
Virtue signal received.
I always think now it’s funny that we Hated valve when steam was first introduced. Their pioneering of always online DRM and no physical media, soon to be followed by Bethesdas horse Armour micropayment dlc. The base line has shifted soo far from the days of freely auto p2p downloading of fan made skins on map load in q3arena.
Really? when you hear "steam" you think "the pioneers in exposing underage kids to gambling" ?
I can't even picture gaben with a wispy moustache to twist evilly. I think that would look ridiculous on him. :)
Your "bad guys" are my "people are apparently and inexplicably mad that steam doesn't do their parenting for them" guys.
Yes, they basically pioneered lootboxes, they shaped and scaled microtransaction economy around randomized outcome purchases under disguise of gaming and then slapped a marketplace on top of it(to take even further cut %% nonetheless).
> I can't even picture gaben with a wispy moustache to twist evilly.
Add a 500m gigayacht to the picture, maybe it will make it easier. Or a fleet.
I used to agree with this sentiment. But now I think they engage in some nasty practices, like not allowing developers to list their games on other online stores at cheaper prices. That and they take a large cut (30 percent I think) Vs epic store at 12 percent as far as I can recall.
I mostly buy from gog because they give your the download to keep for life. Also I just like them. However getting their games to work on steam deck is more time consuming than just buying from steam
I'd be happy to find out that I've been misinformed but I'm pretty certain this is all true.
Valve does allow listing on other stores at other prices. They even allow you to sell Steam keys for your game on other stores for lower prices - and they earn $0 for that while still providing the infrastructure for those players to download/play.
Edit: I think for steam key sales actually you're supposed to sell for the same price as Steam, but I can't seem to find the documentatiom stating either way
Edit 2: Ah, here is something stating it "You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers." (https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys)
However, I know many games have steam keys indeed available for cheaper on other stores. Not sure how much valve actually cares, or if they have special permission or what.
they allow selling your game on other websites, but not for substantially cheaper. Isn't this what Wolfire Games (Overgrowth, Lugaru, Receiver) sued them over?
Not trying to be an apologist for anyone, but if the epic store could charge 30%, it's hard for me to believe they wouldn't.
They charge 63% for user-created items inside Fortnite as of next year. No, you don't get to build your own store inside Fortnite, but you do get to bend over to Epic's price gouging and profiteering of its own.
The epic store is hot trash, as evidenced by the fact that they pay devs massive amounts of money for timed exclusives and people still don't use it
What Valve software have you used that is subpar? It must be a lot of it since you said you "generally" find this to be true.
Steam client is pretty bad. It's slow, full of ads, inconsistent, complex ... Its only quality is that everything else is worse and that it have an interesting ecosystem and ok tier customer policies (but that's unrelated to the software).
The thing takes several seconds to start on my brand new gaming rig. Not insufferable but given its only usefulness is to list my games and start one, that's a lot.
They have a proven unwillingness over many years to do what it takes to make Steam voice chat work reliably. It seems that their objective with Steam Chat is to do just enough to ensure that all Steam item-trading communication remains on their platform (for the worthy reason of controlling scamming).
The Steam client for starters but pretty much every game they initially released since 1997 was extremely buggy. They also struggle very hard to even release much anymore. I'll give them kudos on supporting OSS and their Proton development.
this is peak cs era opinion, valve puts out extremely high quality real software now, just none of it is games.
That’s a somewhat privileged view though? Most people are just unwilling to pay >$800 for a handheld console (or can’t actually afford it).
Presumably most potential buyers have PCs already that they use for gaming so it’s a luxury to spend that much on a Steam Deck.
The purchases went down because people can't afford a mid-tier gaming handheld priced like a high end AAA PC.
I'll be interested to see what happens as more and more gamers start getting into extreme old age. The lack of right of first sale, that your many thousands of dollar catalog of beloved games & your saves kicks the bucket with you is going to be a not great look for Steam some day.
I'm also a little nervous that maybe Valve works on getting the anti-cheat solution improved for Steam hardware, but the rest of Linux gets left behind. Steam has such a halo now, and this would but a subtle but serious tarnish that would never wash off. No massive up front damage but it would be the cusp, a point that would be hard to recover from.
Like the first point, there's also the general risk that someday Gabe isn't around to keep the ship pointed on the right direction. That they turn into a Nintendo, a company who never misses a chance to squander good will, to do the most MBA thing they can, that is as un-ppen as possible by design. See for example Nintendo's recent response to customers asking for some of the tariff refund money Nintendo is claiming.
Not really. Have their Valvr Index and rarely use it. But one base station started making loud noise after 2 weeks but still functional. I was too lazy to ask for replacement, but the other one quietly (pun intended) died and when I found out it was out of warranty. Later I learned that the basestations are infested with quality issues. Pretty bad taste for me.
> Their hardware is really top notch
Agree with the sentiment but let's not forget the awful fan noise issue impacting many users at launch.
It's a shame because the Steam Deck is the best gaming device I've used in many years. My Xbox One and Xbox Series X are both lackluster compared to my Deck IMHO. And that's without me ever "docking" it, just using it handheld.
I won't buy another Xbox, the Series X was a massive disappointment and AAA games all suck. I found I was just playing decade+ old games on my Series X and while load times might have improved on the newer hardware, it wasn't enough to justify the upgrade. I regret my Series X purchase.
I'm not a mobile gamer so I find the XBOX S pretty good for the indie game scenario. I own both the X and S in different rooms, and I realized there's hardly any game I play today that requires the X's extra horsepower.
Well, it's quite old hardware now too, I'm sure that has a big effect.
Consoles generally have older hardware. The attraction is convenience, not power.
Well in relative terms that hardly matters for consoles due to obvious reasons.
Developers of AAA games for PC can only (or are willing to) do so much to make it run acceptably on what’s a very underpowered PC compared to their target market.
Anyone remember when hardware prices used to go down?
Yeah, we drove Moore's Law into a wall about a decade ago. Getting smaller and cheaper is now exponentially more expensive and slower to achieve. Call ASML and ask when you can get an EUV machine delivered.
RAMpocalypse are making computing pricey again. This is a complete rollback. Now I am going to stick with my 3 year old a little bit longer
Kids grow up so fast. Enjoy the toddler phase.
But will Nintendo and the like be able to retain pricing for much longer? Of course they have better contracts but for how long?
Nintendo has already raised the price of the Switch and has announced plans to raise it more, but it's still cheaper because the hardware is worse.
I feel like Nintendo is actually really well positioned for these component price increases, because now they benefit from having the weakest hardware. There is only so much most consumers are willing to pay for a gaming console, and now the Switch may be the only one in that price range.
That's kind of how Nintendo worked the Wii (with "worse" hardware) against the PlayStation and XBox.
Nintendo Switch pricing increases $50 September 1. It only has 1/4 of the RAM of the Deck, so it's not hit as bad.
Nintendo is raising the price of the Switch 2 in September by $50. And that’s after the Switch 2 being priced $100 more than expectations on launch.
If competitors are not raising prices dramatically, then they're eating that loss. Steam should follow suit—at least with something like a loss-leader model.
When I rewrote/released an old shareware game to Steam some years ago I made just enough money to buy a Steam Deck. Since then OLED Decks came out and I'm jealous.
(With the prices of the new Steam Decks, I'm wondering now if there is instead a way to retrofit my old Deck with an OLED…)
Yep. I love valve but let’s not forget that they are making 17+ BILLION dollars a year, 50+ million per employee. Gabe seems like a pretty good guy but he bought a $70m mansion and builds yachts as a side business…
If they want to increase or keep market share they need to eat costs somewhere in this. Maybe they are positioned to do that soon if they anticipate another doubling of ram prices like Microsoft does, we can’t know their plans for future price increases.
Reports I’ve seen suggest that they are making a roughly 10% profit per Gabe Cube right now, which is considerable.
Valve will cite the idea that Sony/nintendo/xbox can sell at a loss because they are bundling in the profit from sold games on their digital stores, but there’s no guarantee Cubers will do the same. But that’s bullshit, we all know 99% of cube users will be buying shit through steam, it’s a weak defense.
Are we really complaining that good people make money now? Is poverty a requirement for being a good person?
Sounds like thinly veiled self-righteous jealousy to me...
They are not complaining that Gabe makes money. They are pointing out that Valve can actually afford to make the cube affordable while still making money if they wanted to. It's a choice not forced on them they way it's forced on you.
> They are pointing out that Valve can actually afford to make the cube affordable while still making money if they wanted to.
They could, but since its literally just a PC it would just be subsidising PCs for something they likely aren't gonna make their money back, unlike XBOX or PlayStation, which are locked down and you are forced to use their store where they make the money back.
Will they make some of the subsidisation back? Sure, there will be some gamers that will be able to buy it just from pure numbers, but I feel like a massive chunk would just end up as office PCs with Windows on them in some office if subsidised.
The deck might make more sense to subsidise, but to do it for the gabecube doesn't make sense in the world we live in.
> Is poverty a requirement for being a good person?
Do you suppose those are the only two options? Poverty or billionaire?
>Gabe seems like a pretty good guy but he bought a $70m mansion and builds yachts as a side business…
As if that was a counterexample to him being a good guy? Who cares what he buys. It's his money and its legal. The "billionaire bad" brainwashing needs to stop.
> The "billionaire bad" brainwashing needs to stop.
No, not until the problem goes away.
"But it will always exist."
Noted.
Prices for other handhelds have gone through the roof, too.
And no, there probably isn't a way to retrofit. Deck OLED's internals were overhauled, too. The entire board is different, up to and including a die shrink, and rotating the SOC. I wouldn't bet on any of the internal ZIF connectors being in the same place.
Guess I'll have to write another game… Bummer.
Loss leaders only work if they can make the customer spend money to make up for that loss. Commodity hardware can't be sold as a loss leader, because companies will just buy it up at the discount, and then not use it for gaming.
An example of this was the PS3, being able to run linux. The US Air Force bought ~1700 PS3s, and built a supercomputer. At launch, the PS3 reportedly lost Sony about $300 per console sold, so that one example alone could have cost a half million dollars.
I mean, the thing is literally tied (by default but few people are changing that) to the biggest video game selling platform of the planet. Actually given how Valve prints money without doing anything, I'm impressed they don't sell it for 99.99, they would immediately kill Nintendo and Sony (Xbox doesn't need that).
The big question becomes, does a Steam Deck owner buy enough more to make up the subsidy or do they buy about the same as they would have without buying the Deck? For consoles there's little question because the console maker gets a cut of every single sale and it would be REALLY weird to only play previous generation games on a console so that math is easier but for Steam they're looking at people buying it as a secondary device (mostly) as an augment to their existing PC(s).
I also think Valve has/had enough demand at the non fully subsidized price there wasn't much point in selling it for less. They could already sell as many as they wanted to make at the $600+ price point so why subsidize if farther and leave money on the table? That has changed now that they're having to jack the prices up but I think they also just don't want to get into that model and would rather have an ecosystem of healthy competitors they sell games onto.
A lot of the competitors have had to raise prices too, Legion Go 2 is now nearly 2 grand for the Z2 Extreme version. It's hard to do a loss leader model in the PC space because they're not guaranteed money on the backend from game purchases. Even Steam can't really count on it because even though they're the main vendor people will use their existing Steam library in a lot of cases.
Valve just chose the worse time to make a big hardware push. Sad because the hardware is genuinely good, but there's no way any company new to the space is going to be able to compete in today's reality.
72% revenue decline from a 54% price increase, but how did profitability change? Some of the features of the Deck are still differentiating like the OLED screen and touch pads, and maybe some of the price increase is meant to keep it profitable at a low volume.
I personally think a controller and a VR headset that isn't standalone would be fine products for Valve to sell. Maybe they can't justify working on Steam OS without the Deck, Steam Machine or Frame. If they can still sell low volume differentiated products, good for them.
I wish I had a product whose 'near-total collapse' meant I was 'only' selling two thousand of them a week
Things are relative.
Something desperately needs to pop the AI bubble.
There's plenty of value to be generated with all of these other applications of computer hardware, value that could be generated much sooner than the horizon over which GenAI expects to see its first dollar of profit.
I've been curious to see what happens with all of this. I think a lot of people have been caught in a perpetual upgrade cycle they probably didn't need to be in but were out of decades old habits. The lack of hardware may start to change habits and behaviors to where the masses begin to ignore upgrade cycles. I'm already doing this myself.
Same here. I've been playing Fallout: New Vegas on a Lenovo T570 running Bazzite Linux.
It's playable. Framerates are good unless you dump a bunch of bullets at something while in VATS. No more buggy than it was on Windows when I was playing it back in university, which is saying something for a Bethesda engine game.
I paid for the game and hardware years ago. It's not streamer slop or what all of the hip young people are into, but the story's good and I like unwinding with it.
Honestly, it would have been one of the titles I would have played on a Steam Deck.
Hopefully more people look into the classics. We've hit a point of diminishing returns with things like framerate and resolution at living room/computer desk distances. VR, while cool, is expensive and often requires a dedicated area.
I wonder if certain checks should be put in place to prevent a few companies from hoarding a valuable and limited resource many other industries rely on.
The monkey's paw curls...
[dead]