[balls187]

Valve very much is in the position to subsidize the costs; they charge 30% royalty per game sold.

Valve often boasts that they have a very high Rev / Employee number.

[ncallaway]

> Valve very much is in the position to subsidize the costs;

They're not, because they don't lock down the hardware to only Steam.

If they subsidized the cost, people could just buy them as general purpose computers and not buy steam games on them.

Valve would only be in a position to subsidize the hardware if they locked the hardware down to just the Steam store.

[Forgeties79]

Let’s be real here. If you aren’t going to use it with SteamOS you’re in a very, very small group.

[ncallaway]

That’s true when they’re selling it at cost.

If they’re selling it below cost, that could very quickly stop being true.

[IshKebab]

Yeah but then people would buy them for non-gaming use. Remember the PS2 supercomputers?

[Telaneo]

*PS3.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

[IshKebab]

From that very page...

> The National Center for Supercomputing Applications had already built a cluster based on the PlayStation 2.

[Telaneo]

I haven't heard of any others, and your comment said 'supercomputers'.

Not to mention that the NSCA was just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it would prove useful when it came to the PS2,[0] and their setup never worked reliably.[1] The PS3 had several supercomputers made independently.[1][2][3]

[0] https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/2003/05/27/playing-the-superco...

[1] https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/ps3-supercompu...

[2] https://web.uri.edu/gravity/ps3/

[3] https://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/701

[s3krit]

and the fears that Saddam Hussein was going to buy a bunch of PS2s because the cpu was SO POWERFUL they would be used for missile guidance systems or something