The steam machine looks awesome but I’m really excited for their controller.

The steam deck feels great to game on.

some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales

Name and shame:

• Superdata Research founder and SuperJoost newsletter author Joost Van Dreunen
• Pitchbook‘s Eric Bellomo

What a stupid idea. These forced comparisons to consoles lead people way astray.

Obviously the strategy of a closed ecosystem vendor who can expect to sell new software for each generation of hardware wont at all work for the vendor of a device in an open ecosystem who must expect people to play their pre-existing libraries, and who must expect that people could buy their hardware for literally any other computer use than the software they sell.

I mean, I feel like that's fine - you're likely saving a tremendous amount in sales from Steam anyway compared to traditional consoles.

Now I'm more curious to see if they cut the price of the Frame much more dramatically...

Disappointing article, ars is using desktop-vlass hardware to calculate the pricing, butthe steam machine is using laptop parts (CPU, GPU, and RAM).

This is an entry-level level PC, 700 is way too much, other entry-level miniPCs, which are between 500 and 600.

The linked reddit post (why couldn't he just link yo the original video content? ) does a much better job reasoning about the bill of materials and comparing it against other products

Because they can't sell it at a loss and extort it back by charging to play online or taking a cut of literally anything you can buy and use on it.

I'm betting 650 (PS5 Pro price), with a controller.

Any higher, and the market vanishes.

PC gamers with that much extra money can just build their own, and probably with better specs.

Console gamers will skip a v1 offering that costs more than what they're used to, especially if their game catalog doesn't carry over.