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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

The steam deck, especially the low-spec variant, was sold at very low, likely negative margins. They make huge profit on their games, but if you don't buy the games...

They've implied that they're not going to sell the Steam Machine at a low margin because they're worried about people buying the Steam Machine for general purpose computer use without buying games. I'm not sure that's a rational fear. If you subtract the GPU, you can get an comparable Beelink for ~$350. ~$500 would be the zero-margin price for a Steam Machine. It seems to me that the only people willing to pay an extra $150 for a mid-range GPU that's not good for AI would be gamers.

Not to mention that the Beelink comes with a Windows license, and the Steam Machine doesn't.

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> Not to mention that the Beelink comes with a Windows license, and the Steam Machine doesn't.

That's a mark against the Beelink for many :)

I was looking at buying a Beelink NAS and paying for a Windows license when I'm just going to install proxmox on it (I think) definitely counts against it.

I wouldn't worry about it. The cost OEMs pay for those Windows licenses is negligible for a "low-end" device like a simple NAS box.

How much do you think Beelink pay?

I'm expecting say ~£20, which is significant.

The price for Win 11 home on https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/d/windows-11-home/dg7gmgf0kr... is £120.

> They've implied that they're not going to sell the Steam Machine at a low margin because they're worried about people buying the Steam Machine for general purpose computer use without buying games. I'm not sure that's a rational fear.

I can understand that, OTOH I have a $1500 gaming PC (probably worth far less now--I built it over a year ago) for explicitly that purpose. What I don't have is a modern, low-power living room HTPC with native/first-class Linux support on which to run Kodi (I have a custom one that's quite long in the tooth). If I could dock a steam deck in my living room and use it for Kodi 80% of the time with games for the remaining 20%, why should Valve care? I have already given Valve hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in game sales.

Anybody who has a gaming PC isn't the target market for the Steam Machine. They're going after the console market with the value add of "also it's a real computer that can do real computer stuff".

I assume Value is happy if you buy just 1 or 2 games for your Steam Deck or Steam Machine. It's the people that buy exactly 0 games that they claim to be worried about. IOW, not consumers, but companies buying work PC's.

Valve–Roku merger. Someone buys a Steam Machine that they keep in the living room for both general purpose computering and as an HTPC that never, ever runs a game purchased from the Steam store, but they still make money. Easy peasy.

They could offer a $X steam credits with their steam hardware for a win win.

they're already effectively doing this by selling the deck at a loss

I do buy quite a few games, which usually end up unplayed. A few times I do binge one, so it's generally worth it for me. I'd like the Steam Machine for playing games in my living room with friends etc, even though it might end up unused, but the OSS support really swings the scale towards "take my money".

It's a somewhat justified fear - the box screams 'home server' to me. Then again a Mac Mini is just $600

The steam machine is a $350 server + a $300 GPU + a $200 controller. A good deal for $500-$700, but only if you want the GPU and controller.

The Steam Machine doesn't come with the Steam controller, though, as far as I know.

Two options with controller and without. Two options for memory 512gb and 2tb. 4 skews.

Ahh OK, thanks.

Something else worth considering in comparison to consoles is that the games you buy on the Steam machine can be played on other devices and they'll be available long after the games you bought on console this generation EOL.

I've wasted $1000+ on console games over the years that I don't have access to anymore, yet I can still install the first Steam game I bought decades ago.

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