I mean, selling codes in a box is such a silly concept to me to begin with. I want to know it’s marked up a bit to deal with the cost of keeping employees, be unable to trade it in or give it to a friend after I’m done playing it and have to wait to download it, but I’d also like to drive and wait in line to get it.
Most of the business models that enable subsidized pricing for consumer products, on the other hand rely on artificially restricting how people can use those products, which is shitty and abusive.
Which they agree with, that’s kind of the point though, unfortunately the customer see’s the PS5 for 600, and the steam machine for 1000+, and assume steam is the one doing something unethical, when the reality is valve is literally selling a PC. that you are allowed to install windows or a different linux distro on… play games from GOG or whatever on etc… which means valve has to make a bit of profit or at least break even in order not to be bankrupted by people buying a bunch of steam machines and no games.
I mean I love that idea, but doesn’t sound like it’s a solution to this problem. Hardware costs are the issue, and unfortunately even with the source code and plans, we cant compile our own GPUs and Ram
*doesn’t charge you an extra subscription to be able to play games online. obviously games themselves may make their own choice on whether to charge you to play them online.
Exactly that’s how it was before the begining of this year, now everything new is being produced exclusively for data centers… so now it’s just us trying to outbid eachother for years old hardware.
I mean that’s largely true, but it’s not like PC hardware isn’t currently relevant to the current system as well. About 2-3 years ago I went all out and built my son a 3 grand gaming PC (divorced dad energy), about a month ago I looked up the parts. The exact same build that’s now 2-3 years more outdated components, would run about 5 grand now.
So yeah… while I’ve been largely out of consoles for a while now. gaming hardware in general is pricing everyone out right now as data centers are bidding everyone up…
Can’t say I’ve seen much discussion on steam boxes, but generally speaking when hearing non techie people talk about phones etc… when people see a less expensive option with marginally comparable features, they tend to conclude the expensive one is just charging more to squeeze the most out of them… unless it’s apple.