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Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

So, Steam is planning to sell these at a loss, but isn’t planning to lock out third party OS?

What’s to stop people buying them to use for completely unrelated use cases?

I guess it depends on how big the loss is… if it is small, it might not be really worth it for most people; but any larger, I wonder how sustainable this will be.

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What non-gaming use cases do you imagine people might use these for?

For normal computer use (reading email, watching videos, doing spreadsheets), there are much cheaper and better options available. If somebody wanted a Steam Machine specifically, it'd be for the GPU.

If you needed a lot of GPU compute (for AI or blockchain or whatever), it'd be cheaper to buy or rent a dedicated server with Nvidia H100s rather than buying dozens of Steam Machines.

So the only potential use cases are those that have a significant but not too significant GPU requirement. The only ones I can think of are gaming (which is the intended use case), video editing, and 3D rendering.

Video editing is less of a concern because neither Adobe Premier nor Final Cut Pro will run on Linux (to my knowledge), so you might as well buy a Mac that runs both of those very efficiently and has decent hardware.

So we're left with 3D rendering. If people want to use Steam Machines to render things in Blender, I say "let them", and I assume that Valve does too.

> What non-gaming use cases do you imagine people might use these for?

Media box under your TV? Right now I don't have a lot of options that also don't inundate me with ads.

Sure, I can build one, but if Valve can put this out at a price that makes me go "Nah. Not worth building it myself." that's a win.

Couldn't you use a Raspberry Pi or a mini PC for this?

Sure? But RPi's are anemic and not cheap while refurb mini PC's are $400.

So, there's quite a bit of pricing room.

I think the mini PCs they're talking about are more likely to be N100 systems or similar that are sub 100 dollars new. Significantly less anemic, and their hardware media decode (which is well supported by software) is more than sufficient for realtime 4k playback.

You can get 100-200€ Chinese mini (or micro?) PCs with an Intel N97/N100 CPU that can do this perfectly.

No need to buy an almost 1000€ massively overpowered custom gaming machine for that.

You can run media from a potato. This will be at least 5x the cost of a cheap mini-PC. And you can't forget power draw. The Steam Machine has a 30W CPU, and I'd guess about 60W RAM which would add up to something like $120+ annually where a mini PC would cost closer to $7. 5 years later and the Steam Machine has eaten it's cost in power. Assuming it costs $500 like most consoles, you are looking at a total 5-year cost of $1100 where a mini-PC would be $100–200.

> Steam is planning to sell these at a loss

Just a random blog's guess.

> What’s to stop people buying them to use for completely unrelated use cases?

Nothing. But it doesn't mean that Valve doesn't benefit from it. Valve wants the whole gaming scheme to shift toward SteamOS. Like Google wants the whole web browsing to shift to Chrome, even you can use Chrome for stuff unrelated to Google.

I think the explanation is that people love Valve beyond reason, so a vast majority will just use Steam on it.

Plus, Steam is bordering on a monopoly for PC gaming anyway, so, even if they install another OS, a user is probably going to end up on Steam.

If that's what happens, then I'm buying one of these right away for sure. I mean, I use steam a lot, but I certainly won't be locked in their "SteamOS". Maybe they are betting that most users will be too lazy to change the defaults and stick to SteamOS (which might very well be the case, and they have a hint of this thanks to the data they have on the Steam Deck)

What's stopping someone from using a steam deck for running emulators, SuperTuxKart, and pirated games? This isn't their first rodeo

I doubt the steam deck is sold at a loss.

You can install Windows (or Bazzite, or whatever else) on a Steam Deck as well.

Did they say they are selling at a loss?

I don't think they have, but it's the business model of most consoles, to be able to be very affordable. So since the headline is implying it'll do better than consoles, it's implying it'll be sold at a loss too. But honestly, I find that article BS.

Valve haven't said that, but the article randomly claims it.

no modern console is sold at a loss this is silly speculation

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