Just noticed all models of the steam deck are marked as OOS now.
I know the LCD models were going but the other oled models were still good.
Did I miss any news about there being a freeze on the sales from Valve or any info about this?
Just noticed all models of the steam deck are marked as OOS now.
I know the LCD models were going but the other oled models were still good.
Did I miss any news about there being a freeze on the sales from Valve or any info about this?
The goal of any business is not to eat the loss, if its not important for survival. The Steam Deck is not crucial for operation of their business. Compared to consoles where its their only income (usually) and they depend on the number of sold units. Also compared to consoles, Valve is not in a position where they heavily compete on price and need to bring it down to price of competition.
In short, there is no need for Valve to eat the cost. It’s already a good price too.
Valve can take the risk on doing actual innovation because they functionally have a large pool of ‘fun money’, that does not come with a board of shareholders attached to it demanding that it constantly be put to use making next quater profits be as high as possible.
You save up that fun money fund, and when an actual good idea gets committed to, you can now actually just fund at least a moderately sized go at it.
… and, because its … you know, their money, with no shareholder or lender strings attached to it… they could fail completely, and then just eat the loss.
As opposed to now having to reorient other segments of the company to make more money to make up the difference to the board or lenders.
Sure, but we don’t know the limit of those budgets. And its not like Valve wouldn’t do innovation or try things out; otherwise there would be no improvemetns to the Steam store, no Steam Deck, no Steam Frame, no SteamOS, the controller, and they would not fund Linux projects and the FEX project, no Proton and so on. So I think its fair to say that Valve does all of that. Then to expect on top of that to lose money on selling hardware… when the hardware is already cheap and there is no need to.
Valve build products they want to use, they just happen to sell them to the rest of us aswell.