Steam Hardware

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.

EDIT:

Also, by your own logic, Valve could sell the Steam Machine at a loss, and make it up on increased game sales... if they could do that with the Steam Deck.

To what precise extent, who knows... but ... that is your own logic there, and it still works for the Steam Machine too.

Or, they could kind of do the inverse and give you I dunno, $50 or $100 steam bucks for buying steam games, alongside buying a frame.

Basically just your Machine comes with a Steam Gift Card.

To totally clarify: I have not heard anyone official say they are or could do that... but... they could, its hardly impossible.

The post (and replies) are about the VR headset (steam frame), not the gabecube.

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.

One of the lesser known applications for VR is for seated simulation type games. I personally have spent hundreds of hours playing games like Elite Dangerous, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and a few racing titles in VR. The sense of presence from VR makes them far more immersive and actually improves situational awareness.

Probably Pavlov it's basically just CoD multiplayer, plus a less janky Gary's Mod, in VR. I've just check my stats and I have months worth of play time. It's also a hell of a workout.

The trailers on the steam page don't really do it justice. It's mostly about the community.

If you're into racing there's also Gran Turismo, I'm pretty sure Euro truck / American truck simulator also supports VR, as of course does Elite Dangerous and if you're prepared to buy into it Star Citizen.

There's also loads and loads of indie games but I don't really know about those because my VR experience has been exclusively PlayStation limited, where those titles are not available. But I do know that ultra wings is extremely good because I've played it on a friend's headset.

I normally wouldn't say I was particularly interested in the VR chat style community playroom thing either but I had a lot of fun with Rec Room which is essentially the same thing but is available on PlayStation. The problem with those games is they tend to have a lot of kids in them who shouldn't really be in there since most of those games are 18 plus. But I take the view that if they're in there, then they're fair play, and you can just shoot them if they're being annoying.

Oh and there's a dungeons and dragons simulator which is very good. If you're into dungeons and dragons. Oh and loads of poker games.

Sorry this is a bit rambly, I just keep thinking of titles I've played over the years.

The thing about VR games is they don't tend to get huge advertising budgets because it's still quite a niche market so it looks like there isn't really a lot of options. But if you actually have a look on the VR page there's loads. There's even quite a good VR MMO who's name I can't quite remember, but that's quite good, if kind of dated looking.