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?
And do they eat the loss on this quasi-monopoly, or do they make a healthy profit?
It means that they can spend money on “hobby projects” like employing gamedev teams that don’t actually ship anything and prototype until everybody leaves with boreout or their other hardware endeavours, the Deck itself isn’t even that profitable. Throw it on the wall and see what sticks is a luxurious innovation strategy that can only be employed if you make that much money.
You’re so close. And if the deck is already unprofitable, then might they be unwilling to incur further losses on it if significant fundamentals changed?
Also lol are you an employee of Valve or Tim Sweeney or something? Because why would anyone be upset at this, it benefits the consumer in almost every way one can think of. I’m no fan of corporations and Steam has some enshittification in it like forced updates, but come on.
I’m not upset. I was answering that Valve hasn’t huge capital because they hoard the money.
What is Capitol if it isn’t money? You are literally saying they don’t have money because they are hoarding money.
Sorry not my native language, I mean hoarding money is not the reason why they have huge amounts of capital.
Ok. So explain where the investment is. What does “eating the loss” do for them in the long term? How do they recoup that loss? Loss leaders (the Costco hotdog, PlayStation consoles etc) are used by businesses as a way to get people to buy into their other products that do make healthy profits. Costco’s hotdog gets people in the door, and those people buy other stuff because “while we’re here”. There’s a psychology to that strategy.
Sony uses sales of the PlayStation consoles to get people locked into their platform where they spend money on games, and skins, and micro transactions etc. People used the PlayStation to play Blu-ray (also a Sony property), and DVDs, and stream content like movies, and music. This nets them healthy profits while selling the hardware at or below cost.
Nintendo is said to do the same thing with the Switch/Switch 2. So there’s a cost to benefit ratio equation going on in each case.
What is the cost to benefit equation for Valve selling the Steam Deck at a loss? Their e-shop doesn’t depend on the hardware to sell games. They aren’t locking people into Steam in a way that’s meaningful because other hardware exists with the same or better ability to play all the same games. The Steam e-shop doesn’t require you to only play games on the Steam Deck.
So that’s where you lose me.