They could totally make money selling it at a loss. The reason so many people care is that there’s an opening in the console market for an affordable option
No, they couldn’t, have you read about the PS3? They were a lot cheaper than building a similar system so several companies bought thousands to build clusters, I personally worked at a relatively small university that had a cluster made of dozens of PS3s, since each Playstation costed Sony around $200 my university on its own costed thousands to Sony, and I imagine every other university and some private companies did the same.
Only after they closed their system, which they did because they were losing money to every single enterprise in the world who wanted a cluster and PS3 were the cheapest option.
The PS3 was using a rare CPU that you could only get from it or from some enterprise dealer at a much higher price. The Steam Machine is a standard x86 computer that can’t match the ubiquitous ThinkCentres in price/performance.
If it’s sold at a loss like a console it would beat the price/performance of any other x86 chip on the market, which is why they can’t sell it at a loss, ergo my point.
Thry could absolutely do that. Valve makes a cut off every Steam game sold. If anything, it’d be MORE viable for them than any other console maker given the wider library
You’re completely missing the point. People can buy steam machines and use them as a PC without ever opening steam, or worse, use them as servers or parts of a cluster. If Steam Machines were sold at a loss they would , by definition, be cheaper than equivalent hardware, so companies would buy 10k of them to put into a warehouse to run stuff because it would be cheaper than buying the same thing from other places. This is what happened to the PS3, non-blocked systems can’t be sold at a loss because you can’t guarantee that whoever is buying it will use them for your intended purpose.
They could totally make money selling it at a loss. The reason so many people care is that there’s an opening in the console market for an affordable option
No, they couldn’t, have you read about the PS3? They were a lot cheaper than building a similar system so several companies bought thousands to build clusters, I personally worked at a relatively small university that had a cluster made of dozens of PS3s, since each Playstation costed Sony around $200 my university on its own costed thousands to Sony, and I imagine every other university and some private companies did the same.
You mean the same PS3 that still was profitable?
Only after they closed their system, which they did because they were losing money to every single enterprise in the world who wanted a cluster and PS3 were the cheapest option.
The PS3 was using a rare CPU that you could only get from it or from some enterprise dealer at a much higher price. The Steam Machine is a standard x86 computer that can’t match the ubiquitous ThinkCentres in price/performance.
If it’s sold at a loss like a console it would beat the price/performance of any other x86 chip on the market, which is why they can’t sell it at a loss, ergo my point.
Thry could absolutely do that. Valve makes a cut off every Steam game sold. If anything, it’d be MORE viable for them than any other console maker given the wider library
You’re completely missing the point. People can buy steam machines and use them as a PC without ever opening steam, or worse, use them as servers or parts of a cluster. If Steam Machines were sold at a loss they would , by definition, be cheaper than equivalent hardware, so companies would buy 10k of them to put into a warehouse to run stuff because it would be cheaper than buying the same thing from other places. This is what happened to the PS3, non-blocked systems can’t be sold at a loss because you can’t guarantee that whoever is buying it will use them for your intended purpose.
You seem to think the Steam Machine will be much faster than the specs imply.
If they’re sold at a loss, by definition they have to be cheaper than anything sold at a gain with the same performance.
And if my grandma had wheels she’d be a bicycle.
The consoles are the affordable option.
I fully understand that it sucks that this is the reality, but sucking doesn’t make something less true.