Tariffs, component volatility, and Valve’s tolerance for losses all lead to uncertainty.

The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    7 hours ago

    Valve sells direct to consumer, not via retail.

    They’re not gonna knowingly do a B2B sale.

    A business that wanted to swipe them all would have to create or hire a scalper network of seemingly unafilliated buyers, and I am guessing this would be outside of the capability/risk tolerance level of … basically everyone right now, as the economy is imploding Hard.

    • festus@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      You’d be surprised what a small team at a large corporation will do if it lets them complete a project within budget. The PlayStation 3 originally allowed users to install custom operating systems. A lot of groups, even the US military, bought thousands of them because they were inexpensive computers (sold at a loss) and used them for compute projects. Sony eventually stripped out the functionality in an update, presumably because they wanted to cut out this type of buyer.