I’ve also read speculation that selling it at a loss could contribute to antitrust lawsuits against them. Basically if they sell gaming PCs below cost, and the gaming PCs incentivize Steam use over other platforms, there would be an argument that Valve was using their 30% sales cut to sell hardware others can’t compete against, to further cement their monopoly. This would be partially countered by the open nature of the device, but not fully since it would still “steer” common users towards steam over other platforms.
This isn’t an issue for console makers because there are multiple competing consoles with valid market share.
I bet they would be (against Valve) if a competitor donated to Republicans. I mean, they’re keeping a finished bridge they paid $0 for closed because the owner of a competing, tolled bridge donated to them. Of course they’ll open an investigation into a smallish leftish leaning company if a large donor asked them to.
Line Khan made incredible headway in actually enforcing the (actually pretty good) antitrust legislation that already exists, but alas, she’s not in the role anymore (since Trump entered office, I think)
Despite this, I have no doubt that we’d see some pretty efficient antitrust stuff against Steam if they did subsidise the Steam machine, due to the efforts of the competitors to Steam.
The thing is, I do think that Steam has a monopoly, in that if they suddenly turned evil, it would have a disproportionately large impact on the overall gaming ecosystem. However, they only got to this position because they understood that piracy was a service issue, and did legitimately better than most of their competitors
Yeah, I don’t disagree with anything said here. Steam has an effective monopoly, but not because of mergers or violating antitrust laws. They’ve mostly focused on being a good value for consumers and have invested more heavily in their platform compared to competitors.
While Gabe is not perfect, I do worry when someone finally takes his place. If it’s someone with a sole profit motive…we’re fucked.
Personally, I think one of the major reasons to also not subsidize the steam machine is that it would then be an incredibly attractive choice as a simple workstation pc for businesses. It would be the cheapest choice in comparison to standard dell, ibm, hp, etc workstations and could simply be flashed with whatever workstation OS they wanted to put on it. This would drive a lot of buyers out of the steam ecosystem, defeating the purpose of subsidizing. This is one reason for consoles locking down their, essentially nowadays, pc hardware ecosystems.
Though, groups did recently unlock the ps5 bootloader and put Linux on it. Dunno how the performance lines up yet though
I mostly believe this, but I also believe it isn’t a negative for Valve.
The hate towards Valve right now is so fucking weird. Is it perfect? No. Are they actively contributing to projects which can break the M$ coalition? Yes.
Don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress, and accept the wins. When Valve actually becomes anticompetitive (big when), then speak up. Otherwise you have bigger fish to fry.
Here’s one: Microsoft itself. So tired of hearing shit about Valve from people still booting Windows every day.
Its because most people have a childish understanding of complex issues that basically boils down to ‘thing either bad or good’, ‘thing either perfect or evil’.
Fanboy/girlism applies to sociopolitical idologies too.
Its easier to perform purity testing to establish yourself as a morally/logically consistent person, its easier to criticize flaws…
… than it is to realize the fundamental strategy that has to be involved in achieving any kind of change from the world as it is, to the world as you’d prefer it to be… than it is to think about broad patterns underlying decision making, as well as what those broad patterns could lead to, in a complex world with other actors who have other ideologies/behavior patterns.
You can argue that this kind of fast-food opinion/judgement formation is itself a personality aspect caused or exacerbated by the instant gratification of modern digital hypercapitalism.
Like, I don’t think Valve or Gabe are perfect moral actors, I don’t agree with literally everything they do or espouse.
An example of this:
Lootbox gambling is in fact bad, and that system needs to be at bare minimum, seriously reformed or reimagined. IMO, any game that a kid is capable of playing should not directly resemble the inconsistent reward structure of a slot machine, when real money can exist as either an input or output.
Of course … if you applied that principle consistently, all gacha games should either be destroyed or massively reworked, which is literally half of the video game industry’s revenue. I hold that position… if you criticize Valve on these lines, as I do… you should also hold the position that your gacha waifu pull is a moral abomination.
But… on net? In the big picture? Nearly every other major or even notable actor in the space is morally atrocious in comparison to them, and many things that Valve does are effective counter pressures to those much more atrocious things.
I’m certain a lot of bot farms by competitors are involved in spreading Valve hate. And this is happening to other companies, as well. Obviously, this is hard to prove so it’s just speculation, but if I were a competitor (and an asshole) I would certainly try to manipulate public opinion using the tools at my disposal. LLMs make this kind of stuff easy enough. And we know that many many bots lurk around everywhere.
Especially since Valve is a major promoter of Linux with Proton, I could see Microsoft not being to happy with them.
I see it more as warriness than hatred. Whether or not they act “good” now, they have a near monopoly. It has a lot of potential to go bad for us consumers, even if the probability might be low. Murphy’s law apply: if it can go wrong it will, someday.
Imagine the possibilities of actual changes to the world if aggressively undercutting prices to force newer, less profitable and therefore less rich companies into the ground was actually illegal
I don’t think it has much merit unless there is a gaming storefront that actively cares about linux though.
Like if I go down to the bottom of my hill and set up a lemonade stand, do I suddenly have a monopoly/anti-trust on lemonade as im the only one selling on the hill?
It’s a weird excuse to use. and if a court actually allowed steam machine as evidence for anti-trust. it would open both Xbox and Playstation to the same rulings as they are even more closed off gardens.
Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo don’t have monopolies within the console space.
Also (and this seems stupid to me), having a more open platform can open you up to antitrust lawsuits. In the Epic vs Google and Epic vs Apple lawsuits, apple was ruled to be fine to have a closed app store, but Google was rules to have an illegal monopoly on Android, despite it being the more open platform.
Basically Valve having the Steam Machine be an open platform (or being sold as a PC which is expected to be open) while steering Steam use could be considered more of a monopoly issue, than if they released a stripped down Steam only “console” and advertised it as such.
However, if I remember the Google case right, it wasn’t as much as it was because they allowed people onto the market, it was because they allowed people onto the market, and then participated in underhanded tactics in order to basically guarantee that third-party stores weren’t going to strive, some of these practices, including vendor contracts, that state that if they want to ship Google Play Services with their phone, they can’t have specific applications installed by default. In some cases, straight out, refusing to even allow that vendor to have a first party store.
I don’t think steam meets that metric, There is currently no major storefront except for Steam that is willing to touch Linux with a 10-foot pole. Every major storefront that’s on Linux is via a third-party application. Gog doesn’t even offer a native Linux version anymore. They’ve offloaded it onto the heroic team. None of those choices are a result of steam creating a steam machine and none of those choices will change if they had subsidized the machine to be significantly less in the market.
It’s not as if Steam intentionally modified SteamOS to disallow competitor apps or to make it harder for competitor apps to enter that market.
I struggle to see how anything can be a monopoly(by ftc definition not literal definition) if nobody else is trying to enter that market. There’s no restrictions in place being set by steam to prevent large companies such as Epic or EA from making a native Linux platform where with Android there were restrictions in place to prevent other people from making their own.
them charging less for the steam machine to get more people into the Linux market doesn’t undercut other companies because they’re not restricting or disincentivizing other companies from existing in that market, its companies willfully ignoring the Linux existence, as the userbase is insignficant most of the time and alternative methods of accessing Windows programs on Linux have been created.
The only argument they could give for subsidizing the steam machine being anti-competitive or antitrust would be that they were intentionally trying to pull people into a market that doesn’t have any other competition. But that’s a fairly weak argument if you ask me because gaming on Linux is more or less a Windows predominant market anyway. It’s just running Windows games over Proton instead of Windows games on Windows.
Heck, I’m not even sure if the current license of Proton even prohibits another company taking the transition layer and using it for commercial means. The proton repository is labeled as is and out of the components I checked in it its mostly MIT or Apache, Wine is GPL, so that’s free commercial use. I just don’t see the anti-competitive concern with it. Any Joe Smo with money could go out and make a competitor that’s native to Linux. That would be more or less the same as Steam. That doesn’t mean it will succeed, but Valve is not actively preventing anyone from doing that.
my personal opinion on their public relations in regards to it, regarding the text above.
being said, my annoyance at this is less the price; and more every response that they’ve used trying to explain why the pricing is so high. Each has been them shifting the buck onto another entity instead of taking accountability. They have blamed that the RAM companies would walk if they tried to negotiate a deal. They have blamed the current hardware market. They have blamed not wanting to be an antitrust case. They were not forced to signed the hardware contracts for the pricing that they’re currently at. They were not forced to release the steam machine this year. It’s not like the hardware market changed overnight the market’s condition was obvious as well, experts have been saying for at least a year and a half, two years now, that they don’t expect this market is going to stabilize until sometime in 2028. Honestly, they weren’t even forced to release it at a $1,000 price point, I understand why they did, but I really don’t like how they’re making excuses regarding it. At some point, they need to just be blunt about it and say: Valve is a company, we’re here for the money, and we’re having to sacrifice a little bit of customer relation in order to have that. Instead of blaming everyone else for the company price choices.
And, perhaps ironically… that’s kinda part of the point.
Valve literally presents the Steam Machine as a possible gaming device for the open ecosystem they ‘religiously’ believe in.
But not the only possible gaming device.
The original idea of the Steam Machine, over a decade ago, wss that it would basically be a performance and component spec standard, basically just a known quantity of kinds of hardware that they could say ‘Steam and most games on it will run on something that meets these standards!’
There actually were a number of pc builders that did their own attempt at making their own version of a ‘Steam Machine’.
Valve is here, now, doing basically the same thing, they just… literally built their own benchmark as an exemplar device, and also now have an operating system to actually center the entire concept around.
I think they’d be greatly pleased if this new Steam Machine, version 2, actually spurred on other manufacturers to make their own… just like how Valve keeps working to make SteamOS work well on other handheld PCs, made by other manufacturers.
What you read may well be correct, but I wonder how that legal battle would play out. There are other PC manufacturers that can definitely build a competing product. Also, what sets this apart from being another console? It’s a custom built machine designed to play games, specifically from Steam. I’m not sure how that’s different from an Xbox that has access to GamePass being the only console that can do that. If Steam sold this as the Steam Machine Console, would that change things?
Presumably PC games are considered their own market, separate enough from console games. It honestly seems murky reasoning to me, but I would imagine valve would be cautious about it since they’re currently facing monopoly lawsuits.
Completely fair. Some fights aren’t worth fighting, especially since there’s no guarantee they’ll recoup the losses. I buy a few games a year on Steam, almost never at full price. It would take me a very long time to cover any subsidized machine, and I’m surely not the only one.
Honestly, a steam machine was on my radar because for about 10 years now, me and some friends have traveled to Dreamhack Dallas, and packing 5 men and our computer equipment in a big van and driving 13+ hours isn’t ideal. Something a bit smaller would be amazing. The price is a bit too rich for me since I do still have a functional computer.
I’ve also read speculation that selling it at a loss could contribute to antitrust lawsuits against them. Basically if they sell gaming PCs below cost, and the gaming PCs incentivize Steam use over other platforms, there would be an argument that Valve was using their 30% sales cut to sell hardware others can’t compete against, to further cement their monopoly. This would be partially countered by the open nature of the device, but not fully since it would still “steer” common users towards steam over other platforms.
This isn’t an issue for console makers because there are multiple competing consoles with valid market share.
Are antitrust laws enforced anymore? (At least in the US)
I know some massive merged conglomerates who would be prime targets if so.
I bet they would be (against Valve) if a competitor donated to Republicans. I mean, they’re keeping a finished bridge they paid $0 for closed because the owner of a competing, tolled bridge donated to them. Of course they’ll open an investigation into a smallish leftish leaning company if a large donor asked them to.
Line Khan made incredible headway in actually enforcing the (actually pretty good) antitrust legislation that already exists, but alas, she’s not in the role anymore (since Trump entered office, I think)
Despite this, I have no doubt that we’d see some pretty efficient antitrust stuff against Steam if they did subsidise the Steam machine, due to the efforts of the competitors to Steam.
The thing is, I do think that Steam has a monopoly, in that if they suddenly turned evil, it would have a disproportionately large impact on the overall gaming ecosystem. However, they only got to this position because they understood that piracy was a service issue, and did legitimately better than most of their competitors
Yeah, I don’t disagree with anything said here. Steam has an effective monopoly, but not because of mergers or violating antitrust laws. They’ve mostly focused on being a good value for consumers and have invested more heavily in their platform compared to competitors.
While Gabe is not perfect, I do worry when someone finally takes his place. If it’s someone with a sole profit motive…we’re fucked.
Personally, I think one of the major reasons to also not subsidize the steam machine is that it would then be an incredibly attractive choice as a simple workstation pc for businesses. It would be the cheapest choice in comparison to standard dell, ibm, hp, etc workstations and could simply be flashed with whatever workstation OS they wanted to put on it. This would drive a lot of buyers out of the steam ecosystem, defeating the purpose of subsidizing. This is one reason for consoles locking down their, essentially nowadays, pc hardware ecosystems.
Though, groups did recently unlock the ps5 bootloader and put Linux on it. Dunno how the performance lines up yet though
I mostly believe this, but I also believe it isn’t a negative for Valve.
The hate towards Valve right now is so fucking weird. Is it perfect? No. Are they actively contributing to projects which can break the M$ coalition? Yes.
Don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress, and accept the wins. When Valve actually becomes anticompetitive (big when), then speak up. Otherwise you have bigger fish to fry.
Here’s one: Microsoft itself. So tired of hearing shit about Valve from people still booting Windows every day.
Its because most people have a childish understanding of complex issues that basically boils down to ‘thing either bad or good’, ‘thing either perfect or evil’.
Fanboy/girlism applies to sociopolitical idologies too.
Its easier to perform purity testing to establish yourself as a morally/logically consistent person, its easier to criticize flaws…
… than it is to realize the fundamental strategy that has to be involved in achieving any kind of change from the world as it is, to the world as you’d prefer it to be… than it is to think about broad patterns underlying decision making, as well as what those broad patterns could lead to, in a complex world with other actors who have other ideologies/behavior patterns.
You can argue that this kind of fast-food opinion/judgement formation is itself a personality aspect caused or exacerbated by the instant gratification of modern digital hypercapitalism.
Like, I don’t think Valve or Gabe are perfect moral actors, I don’t agree with literally everything they do or espouse.
An example of this:
Lootbox gambling is in fact bad, and that system needs to be at bare minimum, seriously reformed or reimagined. IMO, any game that a kid is capable of playing should not directly resemble the inconsistent reward structure of a slot machine, when real money can exist as either an input or output.
Of course … if you applied that principle consistently, all gacha games should either be destroyed or massively reworked, which is literally half of the video game industry’s revenue. I hold that position… if you criticize Valve on these lines, as I do… you should also hold the position that your gacha waifu pull is a moral abomination.
But… on net? In the big picture? Nearly every other major or even notable actor in the space is morally atrocious in comparison to them, and many things that Valve does are effective counter pressures to those much more atrocious things.
I’m certain a lot of bot farms by competitors are involved in spreading Valve hate. And this is happening to other companies, as well. Obviously, this is hard to prove so it’s just speculation, but if I were a competitor (and an asshole) I would certainly try to manipulate public opinion using the tools at my disposal. LLMs make this kind of stuff easy enough. And we know that many many bots lurk around everywhere.
Especially since Valve is a major promoter of Linux with Proton, I could see Microsoft not being to happy with them.
I see it more as warriness than hatred. Whether or not they act “good” now, they have a near monopoly. It has a lot of potential to go bad for us consumers, even if the probability might be low. Murphy’s law apply: if it can go wrong it will, someday.
Imagine the possibilities of actual changes to the world if aggressively undercutting prices to force newer, less profitable and therefore less rich companies into the ground was actually illegal
I don’t think it has much merit unless there is a gaming storefront that actively cares about linux though.
Like if I go down to the bottom of my hill and set up a lemonade stand, do I suddenly have a monopoly/anti-trust on lemonade as im the only one selling on the hill?
It’s a weird excuse to use. and if a court actually allowed steam machine as evidence for anti-trust. it would open both Xbox and Playstation to the same rulings as they are even more closed off gardens.
Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo don’t have monopolies within the console space.
Also (and this seems stupid to me), having a more open platform can open you up to antitrust lawsuits. In the Epic vs Google and Epic vs Apple lawsuits, apple was ruled to be fine to have a closed app store, but Google was rules to have an illegal monopoly on Android, despite it being the more open platform.
Basically Valve having the Steam Machine be an open platform (or being sold as a PC which is expected to be open) while steering Steam use could be considered more of a monopoly issue, than if they released a stripped down Steam only “console” and advertised it as such.
I agree with you.
However, if I remember the Google case right, it wasn’t as much as it was because they allowed people onto the market, it was because they allowed people onto the market, and then participated in underhanded tactics in order to basically guarantee that third-party stores weren’t going to strive, some of these practices, including vendor contracts, that state that if they want to ship Google Play Services with their phone, they can’t have specific applications installed by default. In some cases, straight out, refusing to even allow that vendor to have a first party store.
I don’t think steam meets that metric, There is currently no major storefront except for Steam that is willing to touch Linux with a 10-foot pole. Every major storefront that’s on Linux is via a third-party application. Gog doesn’t even offer a native Linux version anymore. They’ve offloaded it onto the heroic team. None of those choices are a result of steam creating a steam machine and none of those choices will change if they had subsidized the machine to be significantly less in the market.
It’s not as if Steam intentionally modified SteamOS to disallow competitor apps or to make it harder for competitor apps to enter that market.
I struggle to see how anything can be a monopoly(by ftc definition not literal definition) if nobody else is trying to enter that market. There’s no restrictions in place being set by steam to prevent large companies such as Epic or EA from making a native Linux platform where with Android there were restrictions in place to prevent other people from making their own.
them charging less for the steam machine to get more people into the Linux market doesn’t undercut other companies because they’re not restricting or disincentivizing other companies from existing in that market, its companies willfully ignoring the Linux existence, as the userbase is insignficant most of the time and alternative methods of accessing Windows programs on Linux have been created.
The only argument they could give for subsidizing the steam machine being anti-competitive or antitrust would be that they were intentionally trying to pull people into a market that doesn’t have any other competition. But that’s a fairly weak argument if you ask me because gaming on Linux is more or less a Windows predominant market anyway. It’s just running Windows games over Proton instead of Windows games on Windows.
Heck, I’m not even sure if the current license of Proton even prohibits another company taking the transition layer and using it for commercial means. The proton repository is labeled as is and out of the components I checked in it its mostly MIT or Apache, Wine is GPL, so that’s free commercial use. I just don’t see the anti-competitive concern with it. Any Joe Smo with money could go out and make a competitor that’s native to Linux. That would be more or less the same as Steam. That doesn’t mean it will succeed, but Valve is not actively preventing anyone from doing that.
my personal opinion on their public relations in regards to it, regarding the text above.
being said, my annoyance at this is less the price; and more every response that they’ve used trying to explain why the pricing is so high. Each has been them shifting the buck onto another entity instead of taking accountability. They have blamed that the RAM companies would walk if they tried to negotiate a deal. They have blamed the current hardware market. They have blamed not wanting to be an antitrust case. They were not forced to signed the hardware contracts for the pricing that they’re currently at. They were not forced to release the steam machine this year. It’s not like the hardware market changed overnight the market’s condition was obvious as well, experts have been saying for at least a year and a half, two years now, that they don’t expect this market is going to stabilize until sometime in 2028. Honestly, they weren’t even forced to release it at a $1,000 price point, I understand why they did, but I really don’t like how they’re making excuses regarding it. At some point, they need to just be blunt about it and say: Valve is a company, we’re here for the money, and we’re having to sacrifice a little bit of customer relation in order to have that. Instead of blaming everyone else for the company price choices.
There are plenty of PC manufacturers with plenty of market share and they could absolutely build a similar PC for a similar price.
And, perhaps ironically… that’s kinda part of the point.
Valve literally presents the Steam Machine as a possible gaming device for the open ecosystem they ‘religiously’ believe in.
But not the only possible gaming device.
The original idea of the Steam Machine, over a decade ago, wss that it would basically be a performance and component spec standard, basically just a known quantity of kinds of hardware that they could say ‘Steam and most games on it will run on something that meets these standards!’
There actually were a number of pc builders that did their own attempt at making their own version of a ‘Steam Machine’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine?wprov=rarw1
Valve is here, now, doing basically the same thing, they just… literally built their own benchmark as an exemplar device, and also now have an operating system to actually center the entire concept around.
I think they’d be greatly pleased if this new Steam Machine, version 2, actually spurred on other manufacturers to make their own… just like how Valve keeps working to make SteamOS work well on other handheld PCs, made by other manufacturers.
What you read may well be correct, but I wonder how that legal battle would play out. There are other PC manufacturers that can definitely build a competing product. Also, what sets this apart from being another console? It’s a custom built machine designed to play games, specifically from Steam. I’m not sure how that’s different from an Xbox that has access to GamePass being the only console that can do that. If Steam sold this as the Steam Machine Console, would that change things?
Presumably PC games are considered their own market, separate enough from console games. It honestly seems murky reasoning to me, but I would imagine valve would be cautious about it since they’re currently facing monopoly lawsuits.
Completely fair. Some fights aren’t worth fighting, especially since there’s no guarantee they’ll recoup the losses. I buy a few games a year on Steam, almost never at full price. It would take me a very long time to cover any subsidized machine, and I’m surely not the only one.
Honestly, a steam machine was on my radar because for about 10 years now, me and some friends have traveled to Dreamhack Dallas, and packing 5 men and our computer equipment in a big van and driving 13+ hours isn’t ideal. Something a bit smaller would be amazing. The price is a bit too rich for me since I do still have a functional computer.