[bryanlarsen]

In 2025 none of Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo sell their consoles at a loss. They're sold for very slim margins, which is what I assume Valve will do with the Steam machine. I expect the Steam Machine to be price competitive.

ish. Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo likely have contracts locking down RAM prices whereas Valve will have to negotiate theirs based on current prices.

[vablings]

If that's the case, then why are console games so damn expensive? I was shocked to see how much the latest AAA title costs on disk/store

Console users now

- Don't get a price subsidized console

- Have to pay an online membership

- Pay the premium for any games released on the platform

How could anyone ever justify getting triple taxed!

[bryanlarsen]

It's not price subsidized, but the margins are very thin on the hardware. So maybe it's not a triple tax. But it's still a massive tax.

Valve is insanely profitable with only a single tax on generally much lower base prices. Nintendo is in a whole different league.

[ThrowawayR2]

If Valve sold the Steam Machine for any significant cost less than the Dell / HP / Lenovo equivalent, HNers would snap them up by the truckload to repurpose as home or work machines with guaranteed Linux compatibility.

[bryanlarsen]

I'm sure Valve would be ecstatic if they were snapped up by the truckload for home use, because home use and gaming use overlap significantly even if not perfectly.

For business use, the Beelink equivalent is about $350, because the GPU in the Steam Machine is useless for business or AI use. The Steam Machine is going to be more than $350.

[dpoloncsak]

The comment you're replying to is in a discussion about the possibility that the Steam Machine will be sold at a loss, as they would be able to re-coup the funds in sales on Steam.

In this example, no, Valve would not be ecstatic if they were snapped up for things other than Steam use. Sony tried this with the playstation, and the military bought them out as cheap linux compute, costing Sony thousands

> relevant article about Sony https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomput...

[bryanlarsen]

The comment says "any significant cost less than the "

It's not talking about selling at a loss.

And that was a reply to my comment saying that nobody sells their consoles at a loss in 2025.

[dpoloncsak]

Oh...I must have misread something somewhere along the thread. My apologies

[pjmlp]

This is why Sony killed the PS2Linux effort, and the PS3 Linux no longer offered graphics acceleration.

They had hoped for a second wave of Yaroze like indie developers, instead the large majority were repurposing their PS2 as MAME like emulators or Linux computers.