this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2025
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Valve's new hardware will NOT be loss leaders (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works to c/games@lemmy.world
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Can everyone please stop claiming and speculating that Valve's new hardware will be loss leaders? If you watch LTT and Gamers Nexus's first videos on the announcement, they actually spoke with Valve's engineers. And the Valve representatives already said that the new hardware WILL NOT BE LOSS LEADERS.

There isn't even evidence that the Steam Deck was a loss leader. All GabeN said was that the lowest cost launch model was priced "painfully", which doesn't necessarily mean it was sold at a loss, it could easily have been sold at a very tight margin.

And no, low margins does not meet the definition of a loss leader. A loss leader is a product sold below cost, in that every unit sold actually costs the seller money.

I get the desire to speculate on new hardware. It's fun and it helps pass the time until we hear more info from Valve. But there's limits to what is reasonable. Valve has already stated that the new hardware won't be loss leaders, so hoping and/or claiming they are isn't reasonable.

Sorry for the rant, but all of the comments that seem to have only skimmed headlines are quickly getting to me

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[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think that was overstated. Sure there were some "fun" projects for fun or publicity.

However supercomputer clusters require higher performance interconnect than PS3 could do. At that time it would have been DDR infiniband (about 20 Gbps) or 10 g myrinet.

Sure gigabit was prevalent, but generally at places that would also have little tolerance for something as "weird" as the cell processor.

OtherOS was squashed out of fear of the larger jailbreak surface.

[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The US Air Force built the Condor Cluster out of 1,760 PS3s in 2010 which I believe saw some actual use. So more than just publicity stunting.

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago

I think that one was also significantly a publicity thing, they made videos and announced it as a neat story about the air force doing something "neat" and connecting relatable gaming platform to supercomputing. I'm sure some work was actually done, but I think they wouldn't have bothered if the same sort of device was not so "cool"

There were a handful of such efforts that pushed a few thousand units. Given PS3 volumes were over 80 million, I doubt Sony lost any sleep over those. I recall if anything Sony using those as marketing collateral to say how awesome their platform was. The losses from those efforts being well with the marketing collateral.