The company may be big, but their hardware orders are nothing compared to the orders for compute farms. They’ve gone on record recently about the Steam Machine saying there are some components they could not secure at all, for any price. Their service contacts are just not attractive when the world-ending AI farms are happy to pay more per unit and ordering more units total.
I do think they really should try their hardest to keep those replacement parts coming, but from the outside it’s impossible to know how hard they actually tried. The only question is whether you give them the benefit of the doubt. You don’t seem to, and that’s fine (honestly I’m not sure I should give it either), but what I’m saying is there is doubt, the market is so fucked right now that this is actually believable.
I can speak from actual industry experience: even major players in the hardware space have significant trouble sourcing the quantities they want if their names don’t start with “Samsu” or “App” - and sometimes, even then.
No, they can’t. And the “biggest name” in PC gaming doesn’t mean they’re the biggest actual company in PC gaming, much less the biggest company in computing as a whole. They’re not even in the same league as datacenter operators and builders anymore. Nobody is. Maybe they should be. I think they deserve to be. But they aren’t. I too, wish the entire economy still made sense. But it’s not Valve’s fault that it doesn’t. They are not the ones causing this to be a reality, but it is still the reality whether it makes sense or not and whether we agree with it or not.
Were you trying to say “woe?”
Yes, but the point is, they dont have any sway? Theres no way a multi billion dollar company can get a service contract for a decade? Sure, bud. Sure.
The company may be big, but their hardware orders are nothing compared to the orders for compute farms. They’ve gone on record recently about the Steam Machine saying there are some components they could not secure at all, for any price. Their service contacts are just not attractive when the world-ending AI farms are happy to pay more per unit and ordering more units total.
I do think they really should try their hardest to keep those replacement parts coming, but from the outside it’s impossible to know how hard they actually tried. The only question is whether you give them the benefit of the doubt. You don’t seem to, and that’s fine (honestly I’m not sure I should give it either), but what I’m saying is there is doubt, the market is so fucked right now that this is actually believable.
I can speak from actual industry experience: even major players in the hardware space have significant trouble sourcing the quantities they want if their names don’t start with “Samsu” or “App” - and sometimes, even then.
Lenovo, HP, and Dell are also pretty big players too.
But even Microsoft priced the Surface line as high as they did because they just weren’t moving much hardware in comparison.
No, they can’t. And the “biggest name” in PC gaming doesn’t mean they’re the biggest actual company in PC gaming, much less the biggest company in computing as a whole. They’re not even in the same league as datacenter operators and builders anymore. Nobody is. Maybe they should be. I think they deserve to be. But they aren’t. I too, wish the entire economy still made sense. But it’s not Valve’s fault that it doesn’t. They are not the ones causing this to be a reality, but it is still the reality whether it makes sense or not and whether we agree with it or not.
Honestly, no. Even Apple had to start making their own chips.
To clarify, I’m speaking with decades of industry experience.