t’s certainly been a journey for Valve. A week prior to the Steam Frame’s launch, we spoke with two engineers at Valve about the project: Joy Lyons, hardware engineer, and Jeremy Selan, software engineer. The memory crisis and the price were a big part of that conversation. From that chat, we can confirm that Valve had aimed for a lower price point than the one it’s launching the Frame for today.
Here’s Lyons on the memory crisis:
“We set out to design this hardware with one particular price in mind, but we’ve made choices to make sure that we’re making a product that is choiceful, that people can purchase, they can upgrade with different features later. But we wanted to make sure we had a base product with really great performance. Then that price target shifted due to the ongoing RAM crisis around the world.”
Lyons also said that forecasting for the cost of certain components used in the Steam Frame is an ongoing challenge.
Not exactly boding well of the Steam Deck 2.
It’s not that prices are too high, it’s that wages are too low.
Here’s a two things that will greatly improve this situation, unions forcing higher wages, and taxing the filthy rich till they’re no longer billionaires.
When prices go up and wages remain the same, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
I mean, it’s both, right?
We all agree wages suck shit, but my company bought 64GB of RAM for our laptops last year for about $200 each, and right now that same stuff is, what, $900?
Both things can be true at once.
I recommended a laptop to someone a few days ago only to discover its price had LITERALLY DOUBLED since last year:
I’m still haunted when RAM was at all time lows in recent history and I didn’t stock up. Figured I’d do it when I did a full upgrade a year later.
😭
Had to buy RAM for my work machine a few days ago, 600€ for 32GB. Shit hurts, man.
Ouch. I recently had a set of 64 GB sticks of RAM go bad and I went through weeks of back and forth with Patriot to get it RMA’ed under their lifetime warranty.
Worth every bit of hassle but yeah, I shudder to think if anything else dies at this point.
Have you not been paying attention to the semi-conductor and memory market? Prices are absolutely too high due to AI at this point and is part of the issue of why this and every other thing that uses a electronics is expensive as all heck. There’s a reason why my 64 GB of ram I bought for 110 dollars is now 500 bucks.
Wages and taxes are a whole other topic that while also true, is a whole other discussion outside of the release price of a VR headset.
Just to play devil’s advocate, everything is politics. If wages were higher, if multi-millionaires didn’t exist, if you owned your home and had a larger say in your communities laws and regulations, if your anti-trust agency was doing their job, if you owned a part of your work the AI bubble would look wildly different if not be impossible in its current form. We’re seeing the effects of wild wealth concentration and financial markets detached from their underlying financial output.