KraidenThe Steam Machine is actually a great prospect — we're just looking at it wrong
So I read this article and a lot of people are saying it’s likely to be priced out of competitiveness in the console space due to the parts shortages.
I understand why they couldn’t sell it at a loss. It’s a general purpose computing device, and it would be too easy for a call centre somewhere to buy 100 of them, which would lead to 0 game sales for Valve…
But why couldn’t they release it at the stupid $900 price point, but then offer a $100 - $200 Steam voucher along with it? It sidesteps the call centre issue because the hardware is still full price, but they recoup (some) of their costs for those that ACTUALLY want is as a games console
Zedstrianbut then offer a $100 - $200 Steam voucher along with it?
Then the same thing could occur—users would sell the vouchers or the accounts those vouchers are tied to.
And? The problem is steam not being able to sell the console at a loss. The hypothetical call centre is welcome to sell the vouchers. They’ve still paid full price for the machine. This makes it a much more enticing prospect for people that actually want to game on it though, and so long as the bundled voucher eventually gets used, why would it matter that it’s not the person that bought the hardware?
sp3ctr4lThe hypothetical call center would be selling Steam Accounts, with… $100 in their Steam Wallets, or w/e.
Which is … well, against Steam policy, though enforcement is spotty.
But that leads into the other part of this:
The call center would have to be making basically fake individual Steam Accounts for each purchased Steam Machine.
And then probably routing them to different addresses. Different home addresses.
Valve sells its hardware directly through Steam.
They ship it to you.
No stores.
Sure, secondary markets always exist, but it is at least kind of hard to like, buy 100 Steam Machines or 100 Steam Decks on one legit Steam Account, they can easily just say uh no, you get a max of 5 or 2 or whatever.
So yeah a call center could pull off buying a bunch of them, in the sense of them being a scam call center that specializes in fraud and identity theft, yeah, they’d be able to figure it out, but it would probably be decently illegal.