this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Valve's steam machine looks like a console, but don't expect it to sell like one.
If it did, there’s absolutely no way that valve could produce that many. They don’t have a global manufacturing and distribution network. it took Microsoft and Sony literal decades to build that up. If valve sold that many consoles, there’s no way they could possibly produce them fast enough., nor get them to where they were going.
Also, they are selling exclusively through their own store rather than on Amazon or Best Buy, Target, Walmart, etc. this is an excellent way to keep the price lower, because they’re not paying affiliate fees.
But even if valve sold 8 million units as opposed to 80 million units, it would still be a runaway success
I dont think Valve wants it to. This is another in a long line of experiments to push gaming in to more user-friendly and unified ecosystem. The money will come steadily as it always has, as long as they innovate and treat their customers like people rather than metrics.
I don't think their hardware sales becoming insanely profitable is their main goal and their focus on the finance side might be to at the very worst break even.
Their main goal I believe is to try to increase Linux usage so the holdouts against it might start allowing their games to run on Linux, and devs may feel that with Stean machines out there that can run their more resource heavy games better than the Deck it is worth it to pursue proton compatibility.
They probably learned from the mistakes they made in the past when they pushed Linux adoption attempts on to third party companies. They realized they needed to provide some standardized hardware instead of leaving the work to others if they wanted Linux to start being taken more seriously among devs with how small the userbase still is even with the Deck success.
Yeah, the last batch never did either.
It's going to be priced like a PC and most PC gamers unsurprisingly already have one. You can already stream that to another room in your house with zero lag.
Steam Deck does well because it adds portability into the mix. Something PCs have always struggled with.
I mean I get where you are coming from because most people are like Steam = PC = complicated AF, but PlayStation\Xbox\Nintendo = not PC = easy and its only reinforced by "influencers" that are just pushing corporate crap to consumers for comisión \ free shit.
This. Unless you're modding, PC gaming isn't complicated. Every game nowadays automatically picks out options based on your hardware specs. While tuning options are there, they're not required
And that includes Linux gaming
Generally, games cannot tell what the performance bottleneck in your configuration is, especially taking into account things like upscaling or playing at scaled res. This is pretty significant for mid-range configurations. That people want plug and play doesn't mean they're happy for games not to take full advantage of their hardware.