Eurogamer: When does a game belong to its fans rather than its creators?
Last week, 10,000 people took to Steam to play Half-Life 2 as part of a gentle protest against Valve's silence on the development of the series' next instalment. It's part of an ongoing campaign that rose from the background noise of forum discontent to deliver an open letter to Valve.
Video game developer and distributor Valve must face a 656 million-pound ($897.7 million) lawsuit in Britain, which alleges it charged publishers excessive commissions for its Steam online store, after a tribunal ruled on Monday the case could continue.
The price of Valve Corporation's recently announced Steam Machine will not be subsidized, the company has clarified.
Probably $500 to $600. So, pretty standard console pricing nowadays. And I think a lot of the costs will come from increased prices of chips and materials as it is and why they are not trying to make it compete with the PS5 Pro or the like. AI is really ruining the pricing of a lot of industries out there.
It'll likely be more than $600 if it isn't subsidized at all. Valve won't be producing a high volume of these things unless the demand is there.
Get ready for a 1k plus... what are you dreaming about. RAM prices doubled and tripled in some cases.
Demand for this is huge.
Valve can't ship 3 mill launch so ... increase price less demand.
You are dreaming for a $500.
And taxes also... and shipping... fragile.
Of course they would not sell it at a loss. That would be a very bad idea, because unlike consoles, this is not a closed system. People can buy the device and never spend a single dollar on Steam games. So Valve cannot count on making money later like console companies do.
The real question is if Valve is willing to make only a tiny profit, so the final price can stay low for buyers. But even that has limits. Estimatives on the parts inside it, make the device cost around 430 dollars. If we pretend those prices will not change soon, even though we already know memory is getting more expensive, and then add average shipping and handling, which is usually around 20 percent, we end up at about 520 dollars.
Now it all comes down to how much profit Valve wants to make. Currently, most estimates put that consoles hardware operate with around 20 percent profit. If Valve does the same, the price would be about 630 dollars. But if they follow the normal PC profit margins, which is around 35 percent, then we are looking at around 700 dollars.
At 630 dollars, it already becomes too expensive for people who might buy it just on impulse. At that point, it is more for fans who really want it. At 700 dollars, it would probably only appeal to the most dedicated fans.
In my opinion, the best price for something like this, if they want strong adoption, would be around 550 dollars at most. And obviously, the lower the better.
This is not an of course at all. The Steam Deck was sold at a loss, so of course it is logical to speculate that valve would do so again. If the price is reasonable I'll still buy one most likely, might do the unthinkable and dual boot it with windows and linux even though I prefer steam os.
Valve never claimed that they sold the Steam Deck at a loss. That was just speculation from people on the internet, and it honestly doesn’t hold up under scrutiny if you actually analyze the hardware itself. The much more likely situation is that Valve operated with razor-thin margins, particulary with the 64GB model, not that they subsidized the hardware.
And again, as I said, they could very well do something similar with the Steam Machines to bring the price down to the $500–$600 range. But subsidizing it? That makes no sense for a company like Valve to do.
Regardless of the price, it would be nice to have some standardized hardware for PC gaming that people can get, which will guarantee that games can run on it without players having to constantly worry about whether their setup meets the minimum spec requirements.
Yes, the issue is that you can't always trust the minimum requirements to give good performance, even though it should if using low settings or whatever those requirements are based on.
If playing a game, you usually want to be at least between minimum and recommend or above IMO, for the ideal experience anyway.
At the budget end of the scale the console is usually going to win, and in these days where hardware is more expensive especially so.
I think most modern hardware can hand most games on the market nowadays , I can't think of any modern game that would truly struggle . You might not get the full performance or graphics but same could be said about the base ps5 or S2 and they can play em just fine and especially since I believe modern hardware only renders what's on the screen with games built around ssd . Tech is just more efficient and less load baring then previous generations , it is almost to the point of plateauing and will just come down to gaming preference
huh thats not any different than how it now is. It will be that until games come out that exceed the specs. Devs arent gonna halt development on graphical improvements cause that thing is out and wait until the next "gen", you just want it to be a console basically.
So less powerful than base ps5 at maybe almost twice the price. Does Valve want this thing to sell or what?🫨?
I think the free online gaming, cheaper games via better steam sales, and access to a much bigger library of games definitely bring a lot of value, but only if it's $100-$200 more. Also important consider that there might be new consoles released in the next couple of years. This thing will have to drop in price significantly to be considered.
I say it'll be $600 bucks. I could be wrong, but I think that'll be the price.
The Steam Machine is equal to or better than around 70% of "what people have at home", according to Valve engineer, Yazan Aldehayyat.
It looks like the child of the Xbox Duke and the Atari Jaguar controller.
But as long as it’s as comfortable as the Steam Deck and the tech works as advertised (again, like the Steam Deck), it’ll probably end up being my main controller.
I hope they offer one without the controller so not everyone is forced to pay for one indirectly.
It still looks like it will be amazing to use despite not being pretty.
The track pads will be particularly useful.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of it either, take away the track pads and I'd like it, not a fan of them
We all have access to the Steam Hardware Survey, so we know it’s true. My only complaint is that the data is heavily tilted toward regions where PC gaming is strong but purchasing power isn’t, like South America, China, Russia and South Asia, where the Steam Deck (and any Valve hardware, for that matter) isn’t officially sold.
As long as Valve don't gimp their newer games because of this fairly low end steam machine I'm fine with it. People can hold onto 5-6+ year old hardware if they want but they shouldn't expect to run newer demanding games well or at all at that point if it's mid class hardware.
Don't forget Steam probably got a ton of survey results from some countries running some basic office PC and running some esports games or something.
screw TF2 and screw anyone who wants to bring that mediocre franchise back. Waste of everyones time
There only 1 thing I ask for off devs (make that demand) is that the game f***ing works. All too often nowadays, we get hurried games that run like s*** and barely work, and the only way to actually play them is wait for 6 months and numerous patches >:(
I would love Sony/MS/Nintendo to fine companies for shoddy work, but that will never happen :(
Thing with Half life is that Valve has brought it on themselfs, they've consentely trolled and teased us over and over since the cliffhanger in HL2E2, where it's went beyond a joke now...plus it dosen't help when they put other games before HL3, I mean if they announce a new game at E3 this year then HL fans will be ticked off
We at least deserve a screenshot or some infomation on the game. I think this year could be the last chance they have to show something HL related off or the fanbase is really going to get ticked off
supply and deman
NUFF SAID
Why they do-
I pay your bills.