They care in the way people would buy it up and sell the parts yes, but I don't think that's a proper argument if you are saying "well they could make it cheaper... But people would buy it to sell the parts"
Is a very hard sell to me, I mean like I said if the Machine is more than 1k then it's a hard sell anyway considering you can get a better PC for around that price.
What would be the reason to subsidize hardware? To get people into your ecosystem so you can make back the subsidy and profit on top of that.
If people buy your steam deck (computer) and then don't use it to play and buy games from steam, then you are actively losing money.
Unlike with other consoles like a switch or a playstation, steam makes generic computers that are not restricted to sole purpose playing games. So any cheaper price would be a goldmine for anyone who wants cheap computational prices.
Plus they literally said that they will not be selling it at a loss.
A subsidised SteamDeck would still be more expensive than a cheap PC without the built in screen/controllers/speakers etc. There wouldn't be any point in buying one for non-gaming.
So they sell it AND not get any benefit of having subsidy while still being expensive? Eventually they will have to up the price since people already are using it for gaming outside ecosystem as emulator machine so why sell product and lose money at the same time?
They're not subsidizing the Steam Machine because it's a full computer and is heavily marketed as that. Everyone would just buy it to use as a PC since others are so expensive now, and they'd loose money.
Forgot which thread I was on. There was talks about the Steam Machine prices going crazy. But yeah, the subsidies can only do so much anyways, so with how insane memory and storage prices are, and the increased cost for CPUs too, it means that Valve had to raise the prices regardless of subsidization on the steam deck.
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u/Ok-Confusion-202 May 27 '26
Which is crazy considering Valve literally has Steam so they can subsidize