Seven months later, Valve’s Steam Machines look dead in the water | Hacker News Reader

Seven months later, Valve’s Steam Machines look dead in the water

arstechnica.com

8 pointswalterbell3 comments

Well, those machines are basically insurance against MS locking out third-party stores. They don't need to turn a huge profit; they need to recoup costs and be ready to scale up if shit hits the fan.

So really the question is, are Valve making their money back? If yes, cool, they have free insurance. If not, that insurance is being paid for and obviously there's a cost/benefit analysis to be done. I don't think this piece answers that. It suggests they might have got something south of $750m, which seems high enough to be quite profitable. A better article would have cross-referenced this with any financial data on Valve that they could find, to see if they're actually losing money on these machines.

Valve doesn't manufacture Steam Machines, OEMs do. Are the OEMs making their money back? Well, Valve has disclosed that 500k Steam Controllers have been sold (as the article notes) which is a hard upper bound on the possible number of Steam Machines sold since each Steam Machine comes with one Steam Controller. Practically speaking, probably less than a third of them actually sold with Steam Machines and that third is spread across all the OEMs making Steam Machines. So, no, probably not enough to make it worthwhile for any of them.

Valve isn't a public company so they're not obligated to provide any financial data, meaning that there's none available for deeper analysis.

It's... nice? to have the option of purchasing a Steambox with SteamOS pre-installed, if you're unable (or unwilling) to build your own PC and install SteamOS or other Linux flavor. The problem I see, apart from having an underpowered PC or over-priced gaming rig, is the fact many popular games are not available on SteamOS. Also, there is the problem that games are optimized for D3D, which puts you in the Windows camp. Yes, you can get better performance out of OpenGL, but if 90% of your market is Windows, why bother? Ported games generally have poorer performance.

I am hoping that the Vulkan API will be adopted by the games industry to act as a bridge between the two (Windows/Mac and Linux) performance-wise. Microsoft's plans to turn the PC into a glorified tablet or console walled garden is annoying enough. Now they're playing the same trick they pulled on XP users to "upgrade" to Vista, by releasing games that are "exclusive" to Windows 10 on their UWP (Universal Windows Platform). So far, it doesn't seem very consumer-friendly[1].

[1] http://www.pcgamer.com/why-pc-games-should-never-become-univ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com