While Valve has revealed quite a few details about its recently-unveiled Steam Machine, the company has been rather cagey when it comes to discussing the upcoming pre-built PC’s price. However, Linus Media Group’s Linus Sebastian suggests that Valve isn’t looking to compete with consoles when it comes to pricing. In a recent episode of WAN Show, Sebastian spoke about a conversation he had with Valve’s engineers about the Steam Machine and its pricing.
In this conversation, Sebastian noted that the $500 price tag that he had pitched to the company wasn’t quite seen as a welcome suggestion. While he confirmed that he doesn’t know what the price itself will be, he did mention that his suggestion of a $500 price tag had changed the energy in the room, and that it “wasn’t great.”
“I can’t tell you what the price will be, because I literally don’t know,” said Sebastian on WAN Show. “When I said I’m disappointed it isn’t going to follow a console pricing model, where its subsided by the fact that manufacturer is going to be taking 30 percent of every game sold on it over the lifespan of this thing, because I feel that would be a more meaningful product, they asked what I meant by console price and I said $500. Nobody said anything, but the energy in the room wasn’t great.”
It is worth noting that, while the Steam Machine will run on the Arch Linux-based SteamOS, the system itself will be completely open; unlike a gaming console, it can also be used for other PC-related tasks. While Valve might have been willing to take a much smaller profit margin on the Steam Deck in order to ensure the device performs well in the market, a Steam Machine having a similarly-low price would likely present a major issue for the company.
While the Steam Deck easily recoups its costs for Valve since it is primarily used for handheld gaming, a low price tag on the Steam Machine could potentially lead to it being bought en masse by companies to simply be used as workstations. This would mean that Valve would see no additional Steam revenue coming from these systems as they would not be used for gaming.
Hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat had recently spoken about how Valve decided on the hardware powering the Steam Machine, and how the company had to strike a fine balance between offering a compelling package while also making sure that it would remain affordable. A major tool at the company’s disposal for this was the Steam Hardware Survey, which gave it an idea of the kind of middle ground between price and performance that it could aim for with the Steam Machine.
“Another thing that we actually looked at is […] the Steam Hardware Survey,” he explained. “So basically, just to give us a good benchmark of where people’s home devices are at in terms of performance. And the Steam Machine is equal or better than 70 percent of what people have at home. So that’s also another way to kind of think about where we can arrive at that performance level.”
For more details about the Steam Machine, as well as the Steam Controller and Steam Frame that were unveiled alongside it, here is everything you need to know.
