A product sold at a loss/very attractive price to attract customers. The idea is that they customers will come due to the cheap price of a desirable product and buy additional other stuff at the store, which should hopefully make up for the loss.
E.g. a restaurant advertise cheap burgers to attract customers, and then make the profit on alcoholic beverages that customers buy alongside the cheap burger.
They can’t sell them at a loss without a locked-down ecosystem. Sony learned that the hard way with the OtherOS support for the PS3 that lead to a ton of them being purchased to build cheap supercomputer ls and never spending a dime on games or software to cover the loss.
I think that was overstated. Sure there were some “fun” projects for fun or publicity.
However supercomputer clusters require higher performance interconnect than PS3 could do. At that time it would have been DDR infiniband (about 20 Gbps) or 10 g myrinet.
Sure gigabit was prevalent, but generally at places that would also have little tolerance for something as “weird” as the cell processor.
OtherOS was squashed out of fear of the larger jailbreak surface.
I think that one was also significantly a publicity thing, they made videos and announced it as a neat story about the air force doing something “neat” and connecting relatable gaming platform to supercomputing. I’m sure some work was actually done, but I think they wouldn’t have bothered if the same sort of device was not so “cool”
There were a handful of such efforts that pushed a few thousand units. Given PS3 volumes were over 80 million, I doubt Sony lost any sleep over those. I recall if anything Sony using those as marketing collateral to say how awesome their platform was. The losses from those efforts being well with the marketing collateral.
IIRC, the Deck, at launch, had a limit per Steam account, and it had certain requirements. There’s no reason they couldn’t do something like that here. Sure, it makes it harder to convert console players if they do the same technique, but it could be restricted sales based on something.
Isn’t quest 3 sold at a loss? Selling similar hardware at no loss will present a challenge.
Though, at the same time, there’s not much wrong with making low quantities of something and selling them at a profit, slowly.
I’m aware of Valve being very generous with warranty/replacements of controller hardware for the Index. Even years after the warranty is up. But I think this is because of the major durability issues and known defects that the Index Controllers have.
In any case, Valve seemingly has lost money on a certain percentage of Valve Index kits/controller hardware. Based on how many people I know, including myself, who have gotten replacement hardware from Valve. Sometimes many times for recurring issues.
But I’m not aware of Valve doing the same for the Deck.
Edit: and you can tell they focused really hard on making the new controllers more durable:
No charging port to melt
durable sticks that won’t start drifting
No special finish on the controller that can be worn/scratched away
No internal battery to go bad
seemingly far fewer delicate parts
Funny point on the melting charging port. 2 years or so after the Index came out, SteamVR started warning using with a status dialog that told users to stop charging their controllers while they use them. They never accounted for long play sessions and people who would want to charge while playing.
The steam frame controllers use AA batteries, the steam controller has a lithium ion internal battery.
Also it does have a USB port but the primary charging method is via the pogo pins. But obviously you might want to recharge from a wall outlet so they also include a USB port. But that’s obviously going to get used far less often than it would otherwise.
An item that is sold to you at a loss in hopes that you buy more profitable stuff from them to make up for said loss. Game consoles are usually sold at a loss in order to get people into their ecosystems, so they can buy things like games and subscription services, which are more profitable.
It’s a Ubisoft game so if you don’t have a copy anymore you can at least rest assured it will be dirt cheap during the next sale (or of course there’s always other options).
It always struck me as odd that they did that with their games. They’d go from a 60$ release to “here’s a 5$ price tag for a month” almost instantly.
I guess I’m not complaining as it lets me enjoy my guilty pleasure games affordably. But still. Doesn’t strike me as a smart business decision
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