this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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Vendor lock-in. Nothing preventing you getting games for your Steam machine off GOG etc or simply pirating them.
That's the whole basis for subsidising consoles... Which is also a thing of the past. Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo are not less greedy than Valve in any way.
Sure, but the vast majority of people aren't going to do that. I don't think it makes sense to say they can't do it because 5% of buyers may act in a certain way.
I agree that all these companies are super greedy, the point was that even though they're greedy they still sell at a loss on the hardware as it ends up making them even more money.
I thought so too, but the most likely scenarios is this: It's not that people who wants Steam machine will do it. It's that people who want PC's will buy out super cheap subsidized PCs. Gamer's won't benefit from this.
I do it now with the PC I paid market price for, if you subsidise the hardware that's just more money left in my pocket. If you're a manufacturer fixing to take a loss on upfront cost, I bet you'd want to have some kind of assurance about the expected later dividend. It's to Valve's credit that they won't lock the device into a particular ecosystem in that way, though I agree the device won't make a big splash as a result of that higher cost. Overall seems like a weird thing to move forward with given the original steam machines from a decade ago failed for the same reason.
Even Xbox's failures in the console hardware market stem from the bundling of Kinect with XBone, which meant it cost more than PS4. Not that a laggy camera feature is comparable to steam machine's advantages over PS5/XSX, but the console with the laggy camera was only $100 more