Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
view the rest of the comments
They are definitely not selling the Gabe cube at a loss. The steam deck could be sold at a loss, because people will buy steam games for it, but the steam machine is a PC, and there would be nothing stopping, for example, corporations buying thousands as cheap workstations that will never see a single steam purchase.
There's actually a huge thing stopping corporations from buying them in bulk as workstations:
They're only sold on Steam, directly by Valve, then shipped to you.
Just like all other Valve hardware.
You... need a Steam account.
And they can very easily just say 'one per person!'
People need to stop with this 'companies will buy them in bulk and fuck everything up!' line of logic.
It makes almost 0 sense.
A company would only be able to do that by setting up a system of fraudulent accounts on Steam, which would violate the TOS individually, and potentially be quite illegal collectively.
You won't be able to buy a new Steam Machine, at Valve's MSRP, at Walmart, or Best Buy, or NewEgg, or MicroCenter.
You might be able eventually find some on Amazon, or Walmart's online stores, something like that, but those will be from resellers of dubious sourcing methods, and they will be charging more than MSRP.
The post (and replies) are about the VR headset (steam frame), not the gabecube.
good point. could they be selling the steam frame at a loss since its more game oriented?
Unless the price is ridiculously low, corporations are not buying thousands of anything without a support contract. Next day repairs/exchanges and priority support are a must when dealing with hardware at scale, and Valve is not going to offer that.
Dell/Lenovo/HP are already more expensive than consumer-grade hardware from Best Buy unless you are a very large customer. Companies pay for reliability, warranty and support.
Most corporations just buy laptops and then the world's cheapest docking stations. So would have to be cheaper than a mid-tier laptop and I can't see that being likely.
Yep and once warranty is finished they sell off the hardware allowing me to pick up solid used Thinkpads to run Linux on. Warranty service is too important to corporations.
Not to point this at you but I am getting a bit tired of hearing people parrot the point that If they're low cost then corps will buy them in droves.
Most companies will set up a deal with other companies to buy bulk at low prices, I highly doubt valve will offer that considering the restrictions they put on buying the steam deck to avoid scalpers.
I'd like to hope the Gabe cube be priced at a reasonable consumer viable price (+ ram tax) with the same 1 per account restriction that they had on the deck
Blame LTT for that. They're the ones that put out the initial idea that corporations might buy them thus valve cannot sell them at a loss.
When I first heard them say that I initially thought "yeah that makes sense". But after a while of thinking about it, no it doesn't make any sense at all, I have no idea why he said that.
Linus (LTT Linus, not Torvalds) is such a fucking idiot, around everything around linux, that he functions as an industry plant for Microsoft.
Really he's been pretty critical of Microsoft lately. I don't really have a problem with him personally, he definitely doesn't live in the real world though.
Only time I ever hear about him is some new really dumb thing he said/did.
I'm obviously not a fan and don't follow him anymore, so I am biased in that way.