this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
429 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
85719 readers
4273 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Maybe if they gave percent-off coupons, but otherwise it's definitely not. The big console companies subsidize consoles because they know people are going to buy games for that system, probably on their digital storefront, and thus they're going to earn that subsidy back in the profits from those sales. Even if people buy physical copies, the licensing fees come back to the console manufacturers.
But with Steam credits, that'd just be loss on the other end.
No even strait credits would be fine. Let's game it out: PlayStation sells a console for x-y dollars where x real cost of console and y is subsidisation discount. Their profit from game sales is z. Therefore total profit is x-y+z. Steam sells Gabe cube for x dollars where x is real cost of console and issue y dollars of credits as subsidisation discount. Their profit from game sales is thus z-y dollars. Therefore total profit is x+z-y this is identical to that of PlayStation.
They can still do subsidisation without requiring the PlayStation/Xbox lockin as the credits limit subsidisation to steam ecosystem.
There's no z in the Valve equation, though, because they're not locking you in to their ecosystem on the device.
You're right about Sony: They sell a console for x (cost of console) - y (subsidy) + z (profit from Playstation games). They've calculated that z is going to be significantly more than y over the life of the console, on average. Nearly every game anyone ever plays on a Playstation will involve some amount of money going to Sony. You can't really do anything else with it.
But with Valve, if they sell a console for x (cost of console) - y (game voucher), there's no guarantee of any z (profit from Steam games). A ton of people could (and probably will) buy games from third-party stores, or only use the Steam Machine for retro gaming, or pirated games, or as a media console, or have already-existing Steam libraries. A lot of people would use that voucher and never buy anything else on Steam, or only buy a few games on Steam sales. Only a fraction of games ever bought will go to Valve because it's not a locked-down console.