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The Steam Machine is actually a great prospect — we're just looking at it wrong (www.xda-developers.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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It might not be for you and me, but it justifies its existence pretty well

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[–] [S] 9 points 8 months ago* (3 children)

And? The problem is steam not being able to sell the console at a loss. The hypothetical call centre is welcome to sell the vouchers. They've still paid full price for the machine. This makes it a much more enticing prospect for people that actually want to game on it though, and so long as the bundled voucher eventually gets used, why would it matter that it's not the person that bought the hardware?

ETA: Also, if the voucher doesn't get used at all, Valve win entirely

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 child)

    Because Valve would have to pay out 70% the value of the vouchers to developers in game redemptions; the break even point would therefore need to account for that amount being subtracted first (i.e. for $900 including a $200 voucher, $760).

    At that point, Valve would likely have higher sales if they didn't include the voucher and reduced the price by the 70% in voucher value it would have cost them otherwise.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 8 months ago

    Yes, they would.

    This is about competing in the console space though, where eating some of the cost of the hardware is a common practice on the gamble that the more consoles you sell, the more you make in game sales.

    The problem for Valve is that they're selling something that could be used as a general computing device which means that there's no guarantee that they'd recoup the cost in game sales.

    This is a sort of middle ground. I understand what I think you're saying, that if someone buys the console, and sells the voucher, Valve only stand to recoup $60 with no further game sales...

    But on the flip side, that's a lot of extra bs for a call centre IT department to have go through to list and sell a hundred plus vouchers, if they even manage to sell them. It could happen, but it's far less appealing than a nice cheap workstation for $700. Any they can't sell before the vouchers expire is a machine they've paid full price for. It makes it a much riskier and more burdensome prospect.

    On the consumer side, someone weighing up a $500 playstation and a $900 steam machine is more likely to seriously consider the steam machine if they get $200 of that back in games

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago*

    The hypothetical call center would be selling Steam Accounts, with... $100 in their Steam Wallets, or w/e.

    Which is ... well, against Steam policy, though enforcement is spotty.

    Or I guess... physical Steam Gift cards?

    But that leads into the other part of this:

    The call center would have to be making basically fake individual Steam Accounts for each purchased Steam Machine.

    And then probably routing them to different addresses. Different home addresses.

    Valve sells its hardware directly through Steam.

    They ship it to you.

    No stores.

    Sure, secondary markets always exist, but it is at least kind of hard to like, buy 100 Steam Machines or 100 Steam Decks on one legit Steam Account, they can easily just say uh no, you get a max of 5 or 2 or whatever.

    So yeah a call center could pull off buying a bunch of them, in the sense of them being a scam call center that specializes in fraud and identity theft, yeah, they'd be able to figure it out, but it would probably be decently illegal.

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