

Once the US economy craters into the recession it should by all rights currently be working through… Oh I am sure at that point there will be all sorts of companies dumping all sorts of things into every market they can to try to survive.
The AI bubble bursting will fuck the world in ways that will take decades to unfuck. If sanity was even slightly fashionable right now governments around the world, especially the US would be using every power they had to put some limits on this whole mess. Regulation, taxation, environmental controls everything would be on the table.
Instead we seem to be racing at the wall as fast as we can with NVidia and co in the driving seat, and governments around the world in the passenger seat screaming “Go! Go! Go!”
That’s OK though, economic turmoil is felt by the individual based on their starting wealth. The rich often manage to become wealthier, it’s the poor who get buried. Yay capitalism.








Its worse than that, if they were to do a Microsoft or Sony and sell it at a loss to try and make money back on the games, then what would happen when they sell through the batch they currently have of presumably pre “BiBi and Donnys special visit to Iran” costed units, then what?
Suddenly all the other components are spiking in price, the pcbs and the plastic cost more, the packaging is more expensive, and they are forced to raise their prices. The sound of screeching from the terminally online intensifies as a bunch of “experts” declare that Valve can afford to lose money because Gabe isn’t walking around in a barrel Diogenes style.
As a software company in the hardware industry Valve are a lot further down the chain than the bigger names, they aren’t securing super long term contracts with anyone. They don’t dictate terms. I doubt they are making a ton of money on any of their hardware, they are just trying to nudge the market in the right direction. We are going to see so many knock off steam machines in the next few years, Microsoft will keep releasing targetted versions of Windows to try to smother SteamOS, its a great time for the rest of the gaming ecosystem while AI fucks the hardware side.