this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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They shouldn't subsidize it but they should at least sell it without profit.
The increase in price from 512GB to 2TB is more than what consumers would pay which shows they are profiting. It's even cheaper to get the 512GB version and buy a 2TB SSD yourself, plus you'd still have the 512GB drive for other things.
This thing’s a luxury good… You don’t NEED it.
That's true, but I'm also hoping for them to destroy the current console monopolies.
Valve can make a profit from their products just as you can make a profit from your labor. They aren’t a charity.
But market right now can only support so much. If it goes up much more I doubt it will sell well
Employee need to be paid to build it, ship it. You are asking them to sell at loss. But okey.
You misunderstood. No profit does not equal loss.
The employee builds a Steam Machine with either a €100 or €250 drive. All costs are the same except for that drive. However, the difference in price the end consumer pays is not a €150 difference but a €320 one.
This implies Valve takes their costs and just adds a percentage margin over it for profit. And I'm saying they shouldn't do that. Pay what must be paid and let us pay the same.
Margin helps account for support, returns, and short term cost increases. You think anything beyond zero is unfair?
But more than 200%, though?
All of that is called cost, not profit.
Can't be the exact cost of a drive, you have to market research to buy the best for the system. Then marketing etc. Cost are never just hardware for a corpo, but yeah in a dream world corpo should not be evil. If it is the same producer of disk I may be wrong, though one the part you pay for research of the best sdd.
Surely you can't be serious.
I am, because I think every body have to get paid. And if you are considering corpo should give us money you don't understand corpo well enough, even the nicest corpo is still a corpo. Can't trust any company which isn't a cooperative, I seen corpo change leader and destroy their strong points often enough . And another guy made a good argument that it would be considering building a monopoly. Game seller which build a machine cheaper than any conccurence which can easily run it's store.
"Sell it without profit" does not imply a loss, selling the product at the same cost of production does not provide any return of investment nor any losses.
"Does not provide a return of investment" for capitalism corpo that a loss.
Well Sony sold the PS5 at a loss, so maybe we should stop their bullshit first. I just think Steam should play the game but draw the line at the cost instead of a loss.
https://cyberpost.co/which-consoles-were-loss-leaders/ Not only Sony that a common occurrence in the console world. I am not aware of it happening before on PC Without monopoly lawsuits. (To be precise I mean that a game/software front selling hardware at loss to trap users)
What even is their profit margin after all of the software work they've done for it?
You can easily separate Proton development costs from the Steam Machine.
I have been buying Proton supported games on Steam and they know it.
What's the profit margin on that do you think?
I have no idea, but Valve does because they have the analytics for it. They can see what games are bought, played and ran on Proton.
And it seems profitable.
It could be a loss leader or just a hedge at the moment 🤷
They could have been loosing money on it until they started selling hardware. Though they could still be losing money on hardware even. No idea rbh
Valve probably wants consumers to have a machine in their home that is dedicated to running their marketplace. They don't care if it's hardware they sold. They want the same accessiblity to their store front that consoles have.
I mean for sure. They have a solid revenue stream in a world with an open platform they can sell on. Hence the Linux development to hedge where windows is going.
I'm not seeing a 2TB M.2 SSD for less than $250. Depending on the speed they put in it, it could easily be market price. The current Amazon best seller is $350 and is over 2x the read speed of the cheaper one.
Market price for a 512GB is $100.
1050 - 100 + 250 = 1200.
You're comparing high end 512gb prices with low end 2tb prices. I somehow doubt Valve is selling this with a no-DRAM-cache SSD. It's only a $50 different if you compare fairly, and I doubt you'll find anyone willing to buy the old 512gb for full price either.
Valve's pricing is incredibly normal here. Yes the price is high, but they're not straight up ripping you off like Apple's RAM and SSD upgrades.
Inventory management, shipping..