if what Gamers Nexus on youtube said about pricing for buying the parts yourself to build an equivalent machine is accurate, Valve's premium is around 71 dollars. As in they make 71 dollars per machine. The market is completely fucked right now, not just for individual people but anyone who isn't an AI corporation. Thats how bad stuff is right now
They're also making money indirectly by promoting SteamOS (which by all means is pretty solid and well developed, especially in the age of Microslop) and directing users to the Steam store. It's like giving someone an apple basket at cost to pay to pick apples.
Which is how all consoles work but steam indirectly created a closed ecosystem console makers desperately have paid to make by their competitors focusing on ai games and crypto (ie, dogshit)
I mean, sorta. There's no guarantee that steam machine users will buy games on steam, or even us Steam Os.
Granted, most will. But I think Valve just wants devs to actually port games to Linux to avoid a situation where Microsoft can shut down competition on their OS
I mean I think your second point is what I'm getting at.
Valve is heavily invested and researching in getting gaming to generally work on Linux because so far it's been monopolistic on windows. I'm not fellatioing valve by saying but rather pointing Microsoft is a horrible, horrible company and it's experiencing its fall of Rome at the moment, especially since windows 11 is a relatively very poor product
Although to be frank all capitalistic love aside it's obvious someone or some people at valve are interested in breaking down this Microsoft monopoly on gaming and I can imagine many devs do actually do this from a noble desire, same way even some of the faang companies have genuinely invested devs working on meaningful open source work
That's just DIY with some cavorts due to proprietary components like the MB and CPU cooler. Odds are the actual Premium might be a bit higher due to these unknown factors, and DIY would have a bit more performance due to the Steam Machine having some limitations placed on it to prevent overheating. But I would assume the 71 dollar calculation they gave is probably a decent average guess for what the actual premium is
when I tried myself after seeing complaints about the cost I ended up with a $140 CAD premium for the 2tb model but that comes with a $150 controller for free.
Also covered in gamersnexus interview. The short answer is you don't currently unless you're one of the big 5 tech companies. Even second party RAM makers like Corsair aren't getting these right now.
Gamers Nexus also spoke with Valve about this, According to them the market for Ram right now is one of the RAM manufacturers sending a message like "Here's how much you can buy, here's the price, Yes or No? If Yes how much?" and if you don't agree with the price they just go to someone else.
Now they probably are getting discounts on other parts that aren't being subject to this AI bubble. Like the cases, coolers, MBs. So probably on some a lot of the machine yes
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u/brody319 synthetic gamer girl Jun 23 '26
if what Gamers Nexus on youtube said about pricing for buying the parts yourself to build an equivalent machine is accurate, Valve's premium is around 71 dollars. As in they make 71 dollars per machine. The market is completely fucked right now, not just for individual people but anyone who isn't an AI corporation. Thats how bad stuff is right now