I wonder if these RAM shortages are going to cause the Steam Machine to be dead on arrival. Valve is probably not a big enough player to have secured production guarantees like Sony or Nintendo would have. If they try to launch with a price tag over $750, they're probably not going sell a lot.
Yeah, I think (sadly) this kills the Steam Machine in the short term if the competition is current consoles.
At least until the supply contracts Sony & Microsoft have signed come up for renewal, at which point they’re going to be getting the short end of the RAM stick too.
In the short term the RAM shortage is going to kill homebrew PC building & small PC builders stone dead - prebuilts from the larger suppliers will be able to outcompete them on price so much that it simply won’t make any sense to buy from anyone except HP, Dell etc etc. Again, this applies only until the supply contracts those big PC firms have signed run out, or possibly only until their suppliers find they can’t source DDR5 ram chips for love nor money, because the fabs are only making HBM chips & so they have to break the contracts themselves.
> At least until the supply contracts Sony & Microsoft have signed come up for renewal, at which point they’re going to be getting the short end of the RAM stick too.
The fight over RAM supply is going to upend a lot of product markets. Just random happenstance over whether a company decided to lock in supply for a couple of years is going to make or break individual products.
Valve has already commented informally that Steam Machines will be priced on par with gaming PCs of similar hardware specs.
They won't be able to defeat console makers on the short term, but PC gamers will be paying the same price, so for those the value proposition remains unchanged.
Sure, but valuation should always exceed cash reserves. It's very odd when it does not. I think I recall that that SUNW (by then JAVA probably) was at one point valued below cash, prior to ORCL acquisition.
If Valve's secrecy is so good that they have (substantially more than) 30-500x cash stashed away in excess of their public valuation estimates, then perhaps I underestimate Valve's secrecy!
More likely, it was an obviously-humorous exaggeration, but I wasn't sure -- I am quite ignorant of the games industry. :)
