
Seven months later, Valve’s Steam Machines look dead in the water - walterbell
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/its-time-to-declare-valves-steam-machines-doa/
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toyg
Well, those machines are basically insurance against MS locking out third-
party stores. They don't need to turn a huge profit; they need to recoup costs
and be ready to scale up if shit hits the fan.

So really the question is, are Valve making their money back? If yes, cool,
they have free insurance. If not, that insurance is being paid for and
obviously there's a cost/benefit analysis to be done. I don't think this piece
answers that. It suggests they might have got something south of $750m, which
seems high enough to be quite profitable. A better article would have cross-
referenced this with any financial data on Valve that they could find, to see
if they're actually losing money on these machines.

~~~
GrumpyYoungMan
Valve doesn't manufacture Steam Machines, OEMs do. Are the OEMs making their
money back? Well, Valve has disclosed that 500k Steam Controllers have been
sold (as the article notes) which is a hard upper bound on the possible number
of Steam Machines sold since each Steam Machine comes with one Steam
Controller. Practically speaking, probably less than a third of them actually
sold with Steam Machines and that third is spread across all the OEMs making
Steam Machines. So, no, probably not enough to make it worthwhile for any of
them.

Valve isn't a public company so they're not obligated to provide any financial
data, meaning that there's none available for deeper analysis.

------
jean_claude
It's... nice? to have the option of purchasing a Steambox with SteamOS pre-
installed, if you're unable (or unwilling) to build your own PC and install
SteamOS or other Linux flavor. The problem I see, apart from having an
underpowered PC or over-priced gaming rig, is the fact many popular games are
not available on SteamOS. Also, there is the problem that games are optimized
for D3D, which puts you in the Windows camp. Yes, you can get better
performance out of OpenGL, but if 90% of your market is Windows, why bother?
Ported games generally have poorer performance.

I am hoping that the Vulkan API will be adopted by the games industry to act
as a bridge between the two (Windows/Mac and Linux) performance-wise.
Microsoft's plans to turn the PC into a glorified tablet or console walled
garden is annoying enough. Now they're playing the same trick they pulled on
XP users to "upgrade" to Vista, by releasing games that are "exclusive" to
Windows 10 on their UWP (Universal Windows Platform). So far, it doesn't seem
very consumer-friendly[1].

[1] [http://www.pcgamer.com/why-pc-games-should-never-become-
univ...](http://www.pcgamer.com/why-pc-games-should-never-become-universal-
apps/)

