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.
I’m usually pretty quick to criticize Gabe and Valve. People often give them a pass because their products are good, but Valve taking a 30% cut of software sales for a storefront and a game launcher is ludicrous. Tons of game devs are having to budget more to pay Valve than they are for the entirety of the staff developing the game. At least Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft make 100% of the hardware for theor console storefronts and Gamestop has actual physical retail stores for their 30% cut.
However, the cost of the Steam Frame I’ll defend, even if I absolutely won’t buy an LED headset at that price. Hardware got expensive. I can’t justify spending the money on it, but Steam can justify the cost.
What saddens me more is the Steam Machine. I thought it had real potential to be a disruptor, but it just costs too damn much to get people to replace their Xbox with it. It’s not Valve’s fault - the timing just sucks.
Ok you defend it on “Hardware got expensive”? Why is it so expensive? How much wealth do you think Jensen Huang needs? How much wealth do you think the upper Management at Samsung, TSMC or SK Hynix really needs? We don’t have to stick to hardware. Do you think the people at the top of PepsiCo need more wealth? Because food prices are really up atm… pharmaceuticals? And just think of all the shareholders who also have to profit from the sales revenue. You could lower the price of a million pairs of glasses by $100 and still have brought in only one-fifth of the cost of Gabe’s yacht less in revenue. Just think about it: the top 10% had to get their hands on 70% of the total wealth somehow. The fact that everything is just ridiculously expensive is a great mechanism for that.
Fuck all the AI bullshit and thr RAM companies. And fuck Gabe and all billionaires.
But Valve isn’t going to sell hardware at a loss, and it’s not reasonable to expect them to. You aren’t owed cheap VR.
Again, who is talking about prices below cost? Are you guys bots?
With the exploding price of RAM and storage, they were likely unable to sell the Steam Frame at its original targeted price without losing money on every unit sold. They designed the device when RAM was 1/5 of what it is now.
The price of components has made manufacturers tech very expensive. There’s a reason the base model Xbox Series X has gone from $400 to $800 in less than 3 years.
Valve is objectively better to consumers compared to the god damn console companies, it’s not even close.
Valve invented the bullshit we deal with now. Until Half-Life 2, you could just buy a game and install it.
A bunch of friends didn’t even have internet connected to their gaming PCs until Valve made it a requirement.
Steam was the beginning of so much of the problems plaguing games today. We bitch about game launchers, but are somehow fine with an always-running storefront that’s also a launcher that tracks everything we do in games and its billionaire king who individually makes more money on almost every PC game than any of the people who made the game itself.
Gabe is a parasite, and I’m sick of people sucking his dick because he used to make games. What has he done in the last 20 years but leech money from others?
Their contributions to Linux alone prove you’re full of shit on that take. Buy from GOG or Itch if you don’t like Steam though.
The aren’t contributing to Linux to be nice. The entire reason they started it was because Microsoft started selling games in the Microsoft store and they were afraid of competition from the OS vendor.
It’s why they rushed the first generation of Steam Machines to market way before they were ready.
The only thing that keeps Steam from being as awful as other services is that they’re not a public company, meaning they take a longer-term view instead of the quarterly pump and dump. But their singular goal with Steam is and always has been to make unholy amounts of money.