After Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine living room box earlier this month, some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales. In a new interview with YouTube channel Skill Up, though, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais ruled out that kind of console-style pricing model, saying that the Steam Machine will be “more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market.”
Griffais said the AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 GPU in the Steam Machine were designed to outperform the bottom 70 percent of machines that opt-in to Valve’s regular hardware survey. And Steam Machine owners should expect to pay roughly what they would for desktop hardware with similar specs, he added.
“If you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at,” Griffais said.
Valve’s steam machine looks like a console, but don’t expect it to sell like one.
I dont think Valve wants it to. This is another in a long line of experiments to push gaming in to more user-friendly and unified ecosystem. The money will come steadily as it always has, as long as they innovate and treat their customers like people rather than metrics.
If it did, there’s absolutely no way that valve could produce that many. They don’t have a global manufacturing and distribution network. it took Microsoft and Sony literal decades to build that up. If valve sold that many consoles, there’s no way they could possibly produce them fast enough., nor get them to where they were going.
Also, they are selling exclusively through their own store rather than on Amazon or Best Buy, Target, Walmart, etc. this is an excellent way to keep the price lower, because they’re not paying affiliate fees.
But even if valve sold 8 million units as opposed to 80 million units, it would still be a runaway success
I mean I get where you are coming from because most people are like Steam = PC = complicated AF, but PlayStation\Xbox\Nintendo = not PC = easy and its only reinforced by “influencers” that are just pushing corporate crap to consumers for comisión \ free shit.