I still maintain, unless something changes quickly, the ps6 will be $800+ and Helix will be $1200. Will be sticking with my PC rig for a loooong time.

And the S2 is crazy good value, even at $500.

The Steam Deck is now horrendous value unless you buy a used/refurbished LCD model which is quite the change compared to just how good value it was back when it came out. Sales of it are gonna completely collapse but hopefully by the time they launch the Steam Deck 2 market conditions have gotten back to an ok place. This will unfortunately cripple growth of the PC handheld market for a while and this is a strong sign that the Steam Machine is gonna have far too high of a price to be even remotely successful. If I was part of the Valve hardware team I'd be so mad that the launch timing was this abysmal.

Where it feels like we're heading.

That is absolutely terrible.

Outrageous pricing, but on the other hand, it's not like they have a whole lot of choice, the supply chain is absolutely fucked and companies aren't charities, they exist to make money at the end of the day.

We live in the stupidest timeline.

Bring back this world:

Kind of a fair hypothesis.  I mean Nintendo and Sony make billions but "have" to raise prices...  how much of this is just a great excuse to start offering subscriptions and streaming?

And that's why the Steam Machine 2 still didn't get a price reveal.
I remember guessing it would cost $800 before when they revealed it.
Now it's surely a $1000 machine.
Just insane.

Can't really see it having any kind of reveal appeal at those prices.

Id only buy it if Half Life 3 launched Exclusive on it.

I bought a refurbished 512GB LCD Steam Deck two years ago during the time when Gamestop was selling them, for $350. I mainly use it to emulate very obscure systems like the TRS-80 and the TI-99/4a; even with arcade games, I prefer to play the Arcade Archives releases on Switch 2 over MAME roms when the AA option is available. I would never pay $790 for this thing.

Gabe Newell is not the Santa Claus figure he is made out to be by Reddit users.

Setting that aside, Valve is a small company compared to Microsoft, ASUS, Sony, or even Nintendo, and cannot eat the costs of hardware as they do (or did). They also don't have the resources or the interest to negotiate prices like the big three. And even Microsoft, which is over a thousand times the size of Valve, isn't eating the costs anymore.