They need to do that because, in some sense, they're competing with Gaming PCs, not really with Gaming consoles. Gaming consoles sell their consoles at a discounted price because they can recoup a lot of it when selling games. Steam can't have a markup on games because they share their marketplace with other PCs.
Can you point me to any statement that any current console is being sold at a loss?
All I've seen is that everyone is doing at cost nowadays. The PS4 Pro was the last subsidized console.
Sony have admitted to selling the PS5 at a loss during the first 8 months of sales. Even when they announced the $499 disc drive SKU was no longer selling at a loss, they admitted the $399 SKU still cost more to make than it sold for. Things are no doubt different today, but Sony absolutely subsidized the PS5 at launch.
> https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...
Discounted doesn't necessarily mean at a loss. It could just mean a smaller profit margin than normal.
Steam has a very high markup compared to its competitors like Epic Games Store.
But if they subsidize the hardware, non game users will purchase the hardware and use it for non game use-cases, where valve cannot recoupe the costs.
A interesting scenario would be to sell the hardware at cost, but include a 30% off ticket to the steam store (up to a few hundred dollars, in savings).
Instead they made the right choice and subsidise the software. Valve has been sending patches for Linux for over the last 10 years as well as giving SteamOS out for free for other hardware now.
If you don't want to play games, why would you buy a steam machine? Even with a subsidized price, you could get a mini PC with no GPU for half that or less.
Steam take 30% of the purchases made via the Steam Store. If you sell a game on Steam, you can redeem as many Steam Keys for your game as you wish. Those keys are sold at 100% profit to you, Steam dont take any.
Interesting. So you can freely sell keys outside of Steam and they don’t mind?
You have to sell it for the same price, but yes. Most games on the Humble Store give you Steam keys, where Humble takes 25% and Steam gets nothing.
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You could still offer this, similar to the ad tier and ad free tier of a kindle, or a carrier locked phone.
$799 for a locked down version, $1049 for an unlocked version. Opportunity to pay $300 to unlock it later at any time. 5% discount on purchases on a locked device.
Fun fact about the kindle ad thing: I don’t know if they still do this but when I got mine, you could just write to the support and let them know you found the ads inappropriate (extra points for mentioning a child in the household) and they would just remove the ads for free.
Some people then had to re-enable ads manually to use AdBreak, the Kindle jailbreak that abused ad delivery :)
they’re gonna struggle to meet demand at $1000 already, i don’t think they need a shitty ad version to support also.
(then again i always buy the most expensive SKU they offer so im very outside the target buyer profile for such)
I would assume it also has to do with if not fundamentally manifesting from Steam being an organisation of technologists. They don't want to put out a project which has a worse operating system than their workstations.