The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blackeco.com/post/2330473
No. It’s going to be sub PS5 in terms of performance and should be priced accordingly. You can make the argument that games are a bit cheaper on Steam so they can maybe charge a premium for that.
I am ostensibly the target market for this as I refuse to play games at my desk, only the couch. But I would love to get into the Steam ecosystem and play on my couch and PCVR titles. But I would only consider one if it could do the things my PS5 does at a similar price for both the system and VR headset.
Honestly, they could sell at a loss and still profit. Steam has the biggest selection of games bar none, they’ve built a culture of buying games too collect them with no intention of playing them, and they get a decent cut of every sale. If they thought of it as a 10 year plan they could sell this thing for $400, and undercut the entire rest of the condole scene, land this in the living room of every kid who wants to game world wide, and literally crush the big 3 in sales.
And then Microsoft or Sony would bulk buy 10k steam machines to use in their server rooms. They can’t sell at a loss because the hardware is not locked, otherwise people could just buy these and use them for whatever and Valve wouldn’t see a cent from those machines. At the very least they need to be sold at a neutral price point, but more than likely they’re looking to get some profit over them.
They’d need 10k steam accounts tho
Yes, it would be very difficult for the owners @outlook to create 10k accounts.
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That alone wouldn’t solve most of the problems of playing on the couch.
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You still need a controller that will go that far and an OS/frontend that works on the TV.
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I’ve tried these couch keyboard mouse setups and they always suck.
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Not an experience I would want personally. But that’s one of the differences between me and a PC gamer, PC gamers are happy to put up with a lot more crap with their gaming than I am.