[JKCalhoun]

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…)

[Lord-Jobo]

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.

[amarant]

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...

[Brian_K_White]

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.

[NekkoDroid]

> 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.

[mcphage]

> Is poverty a requirement for being a good person?

Do you suppose those are the only two options? Poverty or billionaire?

[Gormo]

In fact, there is no relationship whatsoever between these considerations.

[the_doctah]

>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.

[esseph]

> The "billionaire bad" brainwashing needs to stop.

No, not until the problem goes away.

"But it will always exist."

Noted.

[Gormo]

Until what problem goes away? What are you talking about?

[esseph]

The wealth gap; it is extremely unhealthy for a functioning society. It's kind of odd anyone has to spell it out unless your comment is (possibly) a rhetorical fishing expedition. I'm clearly not the only one that thinks this.

[Gormo]

Well, it's not so much a "rhetorical fishing expedition" as much as I just initially gave you the benefit of the doubt, and didn't assume you were aiming to divert the thread into a platform for inane propaganda. Sadly, the doubt did not resolve in your favor.

Needless to say, people who have little or nothing to do with each other having different levels of wealth as a consequence of activities entirely unrelated to one another is not a "problem" that needs to be solved. People having their rights violated or opportunities artificially limited is a problem, but attempting to attribute that sort of problem to someone else, somewhere else, not being artificially transgressed against is disingenuous and fallacious.

[ryukoposting]

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.

[JKCalhoun]

Guess I'll have to write another game… Bummer.

[jammaloo]

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.

[pjerem]

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).

[rtkwe]

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.

[rtkwe]

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.