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.
Name and shame:
What a stupid idea. These forced comparisons to consoles lead people way astray.
Obviously the strategy of a closed ecosystem vendor who can expect to sell new software for each generation of hardware wont at all work for the vendor of a device in an open ecosystem who must expect people to play their pre-existing libraries, and who must expect that people could buy their hardware for literally any other computer use than the software they sell.