That's the beauty of the "There are a variety of reasons" part, whatever you believe to be the reason, Valve seems to agree with you, biases or not.

The "rage" is largely surrounding the price, not the Machine hardware itself. The Deck sold like hotcakes at $400.

We'll see actual outrage when the masses defer new smartphone upgrades due to price bumps.

Don't forget Trump and Hormuz!

The original price should have been in $700-800 range, pre-RAM and storage pricing escalation, which would have changed the equation drastically. I even considered getting it as a mostly streaming box for a living room, intending to play only the lighter games on device. But for the announced price and after delays, it just doesn't make sense financially. As is, you're grossly overpaying for the level of GPU performance Steam Machine offers.

I’ve seen from a couple of places that a valver has commented that they can’t say exactly what the original price goal was, but that you can get an idea from the price increase of the steamdeck (~$200 usd)

That wouldve put the steam machine somewhere around the $800 mark for the base edition, which would’ve been so, so much sweeter of a value proposition.

there's probably ~$150 in the ram and ~$100 in the SSD alone, not to mention everything else. we gotta have data-centers though because, uh.. well, we gotta have em.

Apple is also an absolutely enormous company. Even if Valve wanted to lock in prices, they're simply too small for RAM manufacturers to notice on their radar, unfortunately.

Computer hardware prices tend to go down over time so in general this is a pretty bad strategy. Of course in rare times like these it can pay off.

That would only works until it doesn't. The suppliers got supplier too and those in turn have their own supplier. I don't know about any specific contract but I bet there's a force majeure or price excluding input cost somewhere.

They know it's a tough sell. Fortunately for everyone in the market, you can still find used CPUs/GPUs/RAM pretty easily and save a decent amount if you're ok with building your own.

Valve doesn't need this to do well to survive. And you don't need a steam machine (or any >$1000 machine) to play PC games. Just wait it out or buy used hardware. Hell, even an rog ally x plays just about anything (and also supports steamOS), and you can still get that at reasonable prices.

Given the price of components right now, I don’t know. 1k for that small of a form factor seems acceptable. It’s a nice addition to the living room, could likely play a role in cancelling expensive video streaming subscriptions. Might also run some local LLMs. Seems decent.

The PS5 can only play games that you pay Sony a tax to play. The steam machine can play any game, including those bought outside Steam and thus without paying valve a tax.

This means the PS5 is subsidised, whereas Valve hardware does not tend to be. They have confirmed that internally all divisions must be roughly profitable/break-even.

Why can’t you imagine it? The console makers have been selling at a loss for 3 maybe 4/5 decades.

Edit: looks like it took 10 million PS5s to break even. The article is 5 years old I wonder if it’s true in 2026.[2]

> The existing industrial arrangement at the time was that of a bundled console-plus-cartridge business model, where the console manufacturer (say, Atari with its VCS/2600) sold the console at a loss and cross-subsidized it with the money made on cartridges sold with a huge profit margin.[1]

[1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-nintendo-bled-atari-g...

[2] It took Sony years to stop losing money on PS3 sales, but the company stopped selling the PS4 at a loss around six months after its debut in 2013. The PS5 has taken ever so slightly longer, but it’s clearly not repeating the costly exercise of the PS3 despite early reports suggesting Sony was struggling with PS5 pricing due to expensive parts.

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/4/22609150/sony-playstation-...

The base PS5 does not have better hardware. Though the PS5 Pro outperforms the Steam Machine and is still cheaper than it..

They were originally sold at a loss, then became per-unit profitable at some point, and now they might be eating a loss on them again. But they lock in hardware prices years in advance.

PS5 has a lot parts in high volumes negotiated years in advance so they can leverage lower prices than valve. Valve ships like 10% max of the volumes that Sony sells.