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How Valve Made $600,000,000 in a Year | Steam Deck Success Story
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this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Steam Deck
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Yeah, title is clickbait. In reality it would be nigh-inpossible to calculate how much money it has made them.
Not only because Valve is a private company but because they mostly make money on games and it's impossible to say which games were sold because Steam Deck exists, though you could probably get a pretty close estimate based on playtime % on Steam Deck vs. other hardware, users who ONLY register a Steam Deck, and other such data. But again, because they're a private company we don't have access to most of that data.
Likely they are breaking even or even taking a small loss on the actual hardware, but I'm sure they have achieved the intended goal of increased game sales well into the millions.
I would bet they're basically losing money on the $399 model, but making money on the higher spec models. No other manufacturer has been able to offer similar performance at that low price point (yet).
Cost analysis estimates I've seen have them also taking a small loss on 256GB units, only making a profit on 512GB units.
They didn't have official data though, they were mostly working backwards from taking the ifixit part costs and assuming ifixit used their standard markup.
Makes sense, Gabe said in an interview that making that $399 price point was "painful". But I guess the point is that the Deck sales drive Steam game sales.
I mean that's pure BoM and doesn't include costs of development or assembly.
I would bet that they aren’t losing as much money as other companies would. Valve made their own OS for the Steam Deck. Asus and Lenovo made similar devices, but they both run Windows and have to pay Microsoft licensing fees.
It’ll be really interesting if Valve opens up a partner program with other OEMs to allow things like firmware updates through SteamOS on more devices than just the Deck. I think then, we’d see $500 or less competing consoles to the Deck.
Windows licenses cost dick to Asus and Lenovo, they're already OEMs.
One could make the case that SteamOS is actually a massive cost because they had to mostly develop it themselves. Not to mention Proton.
But then those other OEMs make their own GUIs also.
Not sure which one cost more...
I'd say that's probably a fair assessment