Well, and you pay 120$/year for the privilege to play games online on that PS5. That is one of the reasons SONY can subsidize the PS5 unit price and sell under cost. Valve is not in that position, because people would buy it as office PC replacement.
Also a PS5 only runs PS5 games which Sony gets a cut of whenever you purchase one.
With this thing you could buy it and then install your favorite Linux distro on it and never give Valve another dime. If they ate the cost, businesses would buy them up as the best value for the compute and they're not buying Steam games.
> That is one of the reasons SONY can subsidize the PS5 unit price and sell under cost.
PS5 hardware sales started generating profit in the first year. Only for the first few month the sales were "subsidised".
> Only for the first few month
Yes, but we are in the unique situation that we saw actually increasing prices for RAM and storage over time due to AI craze. You (or me) have no idea what Sony's markup on consoles is right now.
Valve very much is in the position to subsidize the costs; they charge 30% royalty per game sold.
Valve often boasts that they have a very high Rev / Employee number.
> Valve very much is in the position to subsidize the costs;
They're not, because they don't lock down the hardware to only Steam.
If they subsidized the cost, people could just buy them as general purpose computers and not buy steam games on them.
Valve would only be in a position to subsidize the hardware if they locked the hardware down to just the Steam store.
Yeah but then people would buy them for non-gaming use. Remember the PS2 supercomputers?
*PS3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
From that very page...
> The National Center for Supercomputing Applications had already built a cluster based on the PlayStation 2.
I haven't heard of any others, and your comment said 'supercomputers'.
Not to mention that the NSCA was just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it would prove useful when it came to the PS2,[0] and their setup never worked reliably.[1] The PS3 had several supercomputers made independently.[1][2][3]
[0] https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/2003/05/27/playing-the-superco...
[1] https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/ps3-supercompu...
[2] https://web.uri.edu/gravity/ps3/
[3] https://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/701
and the fears that Saddam Hussein was going to buy a bunch of PS2s because the cpu was SO POWERFUL they would be used for missile guidance systems or something
This more a dig at Sony than a reason Valve can’t also sell their hardware as a loss leader. They are massively profitable from their cut of Steam sales anyway. And part of PS Plus is a catalog of games and monthly games, similar to Gamepass. Valve could easily have a profitable subscription model for games or services if they wanted to.
Playstation plus essential is $80 per year