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Valve says it isn't subsidizing the Steam Machine's $1050 price because of its "religious" refusal to "build a more closed system" (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 31 points 4 months ago (16 children)

Duh - people are shitty and would abuse it.

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  • [–] 29 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    Buying things at their retail price and using them in a way the manufacturer didn't intend is not shitty, nor abuse.

    Most of the business models that enable subsidized pricing for consumer products, on the other hand rely on artificially restricting how people can use those products, which is shitty and abusive.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Most of the business models that enable subsidized pricing for consumer products, on the other hand rely on artificially restricting how people can use those products, which is shitty and abusive.

    Which they agree with, that's kind of the point though, unfortunately the customer see's the PS5 for 600, and the steam machine for 1000+, and assume steam is the one doing something unethical, when the reality is valve is literally selling a PC. that you are allowed to install windows or a different linux distro on... play games from GOG or whatever on etc... which means valve has to make a bit of profit or at least break even in order not to be bankrupted by people buying a bunch of steam machines and no games.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    the customer see’s the PS5 for 600, and the steam machine for 1000+, and assume steam is the one doing something unethical

    Do they? I don't automatically assume there's anything unethical about the more expensive option in any other product category. The PS5 itself costs more than an XBox Series S, probably not because Microsoft is morally superior to Sony.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Can't say I've seen much discussion on steam boxes, but generally speaking when hearing non techie people talk about phones etc... when people see a less expensive option with marginally comparable features, they tend to conclude the expensive one is just charging more to squeeze the most out of them... unless it's apple.

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  • [–] -3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Huh – what do you think I said or why I said it?

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I think you said that people who do things like build a cluster of PS3s because they're a lot of compute for the money are shitty, and that they're abusing the fact that Sony priced them low in the hope that people who bought them would also buy games. I disagree with that position.

    If you meant something else, perhaps we don't disagree.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    My first thought was scalpers. But other than that, I agree with you. I think it would be good to limit sales to 1 or 2 units to prevent that and to give people that want to pay games a chance to buy one, then the people that want to cluster them or whatever can get their fix later. If someone wants to buy just one and modify it to do damn near anything, more power to them.

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    Not much to abuse. The same way that the subsidizing of consoles doesn't open it up for abuse per se

    Valve would just lose money on a lot of sales, as they can't get a guaranteed recoup of the subsidy in the same way that Sony or Nintendo do

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Consoles make an attempt to be a locked ecosystem - which is why they can subsidize it - because they know if you buy it your buying their games for it.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Yes, that's what I'm saying

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    not much to abuse

    Then I’m misunderstanding this part. The PS3 compute cluster incident commented below is what came to mind.

    But in the current climate I image that if the Steam machine was heavily subsidized that there would be a subset of people abusing that by doing something like purchasing, harvesting, and immediately reselling its parts.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Duh - people are shitty and would abuse it.

    One order per valid account (the same restrictions they applied to Steam Deck purchases years ago, account at least a year old and previous game purchases from that account). There can't be large scale abuse.

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