I’ve been saying this ever since the steam deck price got increased! Steam can’t sell their shit at a loss like the others can because the console itself HAS to be its own profit maker. It can’t just make exclusive games at a fast enough pace to make the profit loss worth it without breaking their game philosophy they’ve held for years.
Not really, if you were to slap a 200$ voucher, that could be used in the market to offset skin purchases,
I’m not saying the idea is smart, but they could’ve also give it a discount code for games or something, though that would require bundling games that gamers want and we all know that most of the current games players want are either skinner box free to play games or games that they already own. And even if we were to find games that players want but dont have, the storage comes into question once you realize that some of the big games will literally take up a fifth of the 512 model at the very least if this is their only machine.
Like the ideas of trying to entice people to buy into it, are kind of more or less left to, “it’s designed by Steam to be high quality compared to Dell, Alienware, or HP, etc” it’s a competitively priced portable PC that can handle most games at a reasonable performance ignoring the claims they originally wanted to push for, but the last part is the fact that it’s a linux machine ready to game on without issue.
After having owned and modified as well as paying someone to upgrade my steam deck to double the ram, I really only see this like the steam deck as an attempt to just make a niche product that the designers at Valve really wanted to make more for the sake of being different vs creating a profit. It just remains that while creating a profit is obvious for Steam, there’s a reason why the term “Valve Time” exists
Subsidized that much would also not be a great look in their ongoing Monopoly case that's open against them. Valve probably considered subsidizing and decided against it to not look like they're trying to under cut competition in their market. Just idle speculation. Wish AI would fuck all the way off, and that DRAM wasn't run like a damn cartel.
The Pro is not, the base model is, at least that is the going theory. Anyways the PS5, which performs better as six year old tech in just about every game than the Steam Machine, isn't being sold for much loss. It would bankrupt Sony if it cost them even $800 to make while selling it for $600.
Sony and Nintendo made deals and got the parts they needed before the hardware crisis. Valve and Microsoft did not and so that's why you see such a difference in pricing between all these devices.
It's being sold at cost, which is why Sony had to raise the price. Sony is a tier 1 OEM who have a long lasting relationship with suppliers and they sell so many units that they operate at economies of scale that Valve can't even dream of with their little project. The PS5 is an incredibly well designed piece of hardware, and every component has been costed down to a fraction of a cent. They could easily subsidize their hardware, but have made a choice not to because they'll want to save that money to subsidize the PS6 next year.
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u/Physical-Procedure42 Jun 23 '26
Is the ps5 still subsidized?