Console manufacturers sell at a loss because they need to sell the console first before they can sell anything else. They can expect to make that money back on software the user could not have bought without the console.
Valve doesn't need people to buy Steam Machines to get them to start using Steam. In fact, I suspect most units sold will be to users who are already invested in the ecosystem. Selling at a loss would just be a straight loss to them.
They may be trying to muscle in on traditional console territory.
Steam has a well tenured reputation for having inexpensive games. They may be leveraging this to appeal to the console players turned off by the all recent price hikes.
I suspect the gabecube may be close to if not, at cost. I don’t think it’ll be at a loss.
Gabe has previously claimed that they developed the index because they didn’t want VR to die and even gave grants the game developers who made VR titles.
So it’s established that Steam is big enough and secure enough to risk cultivating new or disrupting old markets.
Operationally steam has low overhead and insane profit margin. Unless they fuck up the steam store they’re guaranteed massive profit.
If the new hardware flops and they lose a bit of money; Gabe just buys one less yacht and steam ticks on as normal.
As you say valve are incentivised to do this because it will move more people over to Linux. I suspect that they want that more than they’re really bothered about hardware sales so while I don’t think it’ll be sold at a loss, because frankly that would be stupid even if they could afford to do it, but I don’t think it’ll be anywhere near as expensive as some people seem to be claiming.
Console manufacturers haven’t sold at a loss in a long time.
I agree, it won’t be huge gains directly for them, but even moving people off of Windows benefits them by removing control a competitor (Microsoft) has. I somewhat agree that it won’t be sold at (much of) a loss, but maybe at cost. I’m sure they expect manufacturing prices to go down over time, and engineering was a one-time investment, so sold just below cost doesn’t seem unreasonable to me at launch, which then becomes at cost or above in the future.
This all depends on if their goals for it are short-term or long. Historically, they seem to target long-term. That’s why I think it’ll be as low as they can make it, which they also said they’re doing by only having 8GB VRAM as cost savings. They want to drop the price as low as they can to compete. They won’t compete at $1k. I doubt they’d compete at $600-700. I suspect they’re targeting $400-500, which seems like a reasonable cost for the hardware too.
There’s a Comcast store near me that still has a window ad for Superman Returns in the window. It’s still there because they moved out and no one else moved in since, but I like to think it’s because someone really loved the movie.
There was a Party City that closed around here, and they left the window display, a Halloween store moved in for October. They reused the signage, just painting fangs and Frankenstein bolts onto the kids in the pictures. Of course, as soon as October was over, they disappeared, so now there are just evil kids in the abandoned windows.
people really need to stop giving shitty twitter trolls the time of day. they now get to cheerfully read an article that mentions their behavior.
should have just cut that part out and focus on how kickass this romhack is. don’t even give them a second of time in anyone’s mind. let them rot in their little cesspools.
while we have a kickass time playing a cool pokemon hack =D
I don’t think I focused on Twitter’s behavior. I didn’t share any screenshots of tweets, nor did I quote any. There’s not much I can see I wrote here that can be glorified by the losers.
Should I…not write about how shitty the situation is for the developer (and so many others in this space) because a handful of idiots might think they’re being mentioned? I’m struggling to find what I should cut out of my article there!
Im not gonna make any statements but I think this video might have some credibility. It comes from the person who gave the early heads up for the steam hardware launch :3
Ghost of Tsushima (PS5), still taking it slowly! Cleared out the act 1 side content, took a break before the final quest. Loving the moment-to-moment gameplay, very satisfying and with some skill upgrades they make you feel super powerful!
God of War: Chains of Olympus (PSP), more of the same as GoW 1 and 2 which is a good thing. Those gaze enemies though, annoying as ever. In Hades now.
No one has paid to replace it or has the money to do so. I faced this challenge in bike shops with advertising media. It is risky to accept large stuff like this from brand reps. It comes down to a plan and the level of investment in the product. Looks like someone bought in and had no long term plan for the space. Looks like a business on the threshold of black to red finances.
I felt like the game had enough puzzles running simultaneously that I wasn’t waiting for a particular day to work on one particular puzzle. Once everything started coming together and it was down to the final run, there was a little bit more reliance on RNG, but that’s rogue-likes. Any day that didn’t pay off in puzzles usually paid off in rolled over resources (freezer, moon pendant, trove, coat check).
I have seen a lot of complaints about the RNG in this game, but I never felt it, even on bad days.
True, but I feel like Blue Prince gets a lot of flack for its RNG, despite being part of the genre. I think it’s the lack of tangible upgrades between runs. Games like Binding of Isaac, Hades, or Balatro expand your arsenal between games with actual upgrades or perks. Blue Prince’s upgrades are pretty sparse, because what changes between runs is your knowledge of the house and the larger mysteries.
my take on that is that it’s bullshit. when your metaprogression is based on knowledge, it’s dependent on letting players access that knowledge to begin with. personally it took me until day 40 to roll credits because i simply was not given the rooms i needed to understand the puzzles. i showed my gallery to a friend who got there much quicker and they noted that i was still missing some of the more basic rooms.
the risk in rng-based games is always that someone gets shafted, and when the game is also story based, those people effectively get locked out of the story. the people thinking it did not deserve the reaction simply did not get the worst rolls.
The RNG finally started to loosen its grip around day 60 because it started giving me items and rooms I had never seen before that, as it turns out, were pretty essential.
The RNG beat me up too. I will say that there’s a handful of permanent upgrades that either allow you to mitigate some RNG or give you buffs so you’re not as reliant on it.
I think their goal was to make it so you’re not hardlocked on a single puzzle so that you kind of wander into the manor without a specific puzzle to solve and see what you can solve/find as your tools for that run expand.
This kind of makes hours 0-10 kind of miserable because you don’t know what puzzles there are and you don’t have much you can do to avoid RNG so you’re just wandering and hoping for the best, but it does get better after that point.
I feel like it got worse. I hit room 46, and was trying to clean up some of the remaining stuff. Had a run with 130 coins, but the gift shop and luxury shop would not appear. When they do appear I have very few coins. I know there are ways to increase my allowance but its a slow grind. Similarly, crafting all the workshop items is pure luck. Filling in all rooms on the board isnt too hard, but still mostly a luck thing. I like the puzzle elements but the rng really killed my motivation to do the extra stuff
On the one hand, i get it. It will be for enthusiasts only if that’s the case. On the other hand, I feel like for the amount of profit this company brings in, I am a little shocked that they don’t even try to cut the price back a bit to sell more. I guess whats the point when you don’t even have to do this at all and it sounds like the entire project is just a fun way to spend some time seeing what you can come up with and sharing that with the people that can afford to buy cool things.
On the one hand, i get it. It will be for enthusiasts only if that’s the case.
Note that I haven’t said anything about what the price will be, just that Valve has stated that it won’t be a loss leader.
I’ve seen rumors that the Bill Of Materials plus Valve’s usual overhead would still result in a system valued at $500, though I haven’t seen the source and am very skeptical of it.
On the other side, XBox is allegedly targeting $1200 on their standardized custom gaming PC, which I doubt would be worth the price, especially with it running Windows.
Oh, I agree. My price is just speculation. Also, Xbox is done. They had a handful of exclusives this year that, as far as I saw, were nothing to sell systems over, and from the looks of it, only Fable is set for next year. As soon as I saw them jump ship with a console and finally share their best games like gears of war, I knew it would only be a matter of time.
That handheld is also windows only and to late to the party, and your right they just went full pc only at a price nobody will pay when you can probably get your own pc that will have little difference. They will be with Sega soon enough and probably use the companies they purchased to continue creating games for everyone else and maybe just focus on the windows store for semi exclusivity after the pc thing fizzles out.
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Aktywne