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[Debunked] Valve Is Building a 'Steam Console' To Rival PS5 and Xbox, Rumour Claims
(insider-gaming.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
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Why is everyone assuming that you can only make a profit if you are the market leader? Even if you have a percent of Sony and Microsofts market share in the console market, you can still make a shit load of money of it.
Their original steam machine failed because Steam OS didn’t have Proton yet back then, so devs had to create dedicated linux versions of their games, drastically reducing steams catalogue. Now that they have perfected proton, they beat PlayStation and Xbox with their massive amount of games across way more niche genres.
It could easily target people that don’t want to tinker with hardware or settings on PC but still want to have all of the games that steam offers.
Late stage Capitalism burnt their brains
What a lot of people don't realize though, is those consoles actually sell for a loss. 2025 is going to bring some crazy shit with it in regards to hardware pricing. Like in one aspect, ok if this thing is a decent price, and has decent performance, then yeah. But that is going to be really really hard to pull off right now. Meaning the thing is either going to be pretty crazy priced or it's going to have lacklustre performance. In order to have good volumes of sales, you've got a very well established dominant two, that's going to be hard to unseat. I dunno, I've been wrong before, and I'm sure I'll be wrong again, maybe even here. But to me, that's going to be hard to pull off.
But they don’t have to unseat them. Even if they sell their hardware with a profit for a higher price than the PS5, there are still plenty of people that have a large catalogue of games or people that aren’t willing to pay 60-80€ for two year old games. As long as they don’t sell at a loss, they just have to get back their R&D cost, which are significantly lower than with the steam deck, since they can just scale up their existing mainboard with a better processor and more ram.
I’m sure a stationary console targeting high settings 1080p for current gen games with 4k through FSR could very easily be made for 300-400€ and would fit right in their lineup.
Sure, but then why didn't the first iteration of these succeed?
I explained this in my first comment above. It failed because it didn’t have any games.
Proton wasn’t a thing back then, so only games that supported Linux worked, which were basically none, especially no AAA games. So having a console with a tiny game catalogue of indie games is bound to fail.
It’s a total different situation to today. Now the vast majority of windows games is supported out of the box and without tinkering. I have a steam deck and apart from two games every game in my library works perfectly fine.
Also, Steam Machines were basically just rebranded mini PCs by different manufacturers.
With the know how and the better hardware they have today, they can make everything inhouse, streamlining optimization of their hardware and software.