They would already have contracts in place.
Companies had supply agreements in place but they will find essentially any excuse to "delay" delivery. You might eventually get your product but fat lot of good it does for you while you're mired in court and not getting anything anyway.
The particularly amusing example is a project continuously selling spot LNG while saying it's not yet operational, stiffing the companies with which they'd signed long term contracts with on a technicality.
Even Samsung is running into this issue now: their own internal foundry is refusing to give them a long term contract now so the S26 series will become more expensive.
If this happens to Samsung, what leverage will a player like Valve have?
These large corpos are so greedy to the point they harm themselves. I remember something similar with Amazon, where the Amazon shop had to redo the whole architecture from some microservice setup back to a monolithic approach because they used AWS and paid these weirdly structured prices like everyone else. Which made running a monolithic architecture under such constraints inherently cheaper. Not sure what the resulting compounded business cost for this "endeavor" was, but more often that not such things are never accounted for, so they don't show up as an issue.
Their interest isn't necessarily in squeezing out the most margin on each unit. If unexpected market conditions let them more or less hit their original margin targets but get far more units installed in homes, that could be much better for them in the long term.
There's a lot we can't know as outsiders, at the moment.
i agree. Valve's money machine is with the steam platform, rather than any hardware sales - breaking even on hardware is sufficient imho.
Valve's existential threat is from microsoft closing off windows somehow (or extracting rent...like a store!). Therefore, pushing steam machines which can be run without windows, is both business expansion as well as an insurance policy.
Wasn't that true with the previous incarnation of the steam machine, the valve index, steam controller, etc.? IIRC their VR gear was some of the most expensive consumer level gear on the market.
The steam deck, and now the (newer) steam machine is looking to push into the mass market of consoles, and i reckon it would be more successful. Not to mention the more mature steamOS and compatibility layer now (compared to before).
I have high hopes for it. I want PC gaming to break free of microsoft windows.
Being pragmatic, I wonder if Valve benefit from the health of the PC market, whether they'll also put efforts into helping people get more life out of their existing machines, or individuals/businesses refurbishing to sell on the used market with more confidence. There's already an angle for reducing e-waste with the win10 end of life if it can be tied into installing linux.