Valve’s boss said it was painful for the company to make decisions about Steam Deck pricing.

Yesterday, we talked about the Steam Deck in detail, and its pre-orders have started (with a 5 USD/EUR entry fee), and in short, it seems like a portable PC that could bring the fight to the Nintendo Switch (the reason why we used the word „seems” is because we haven’t had the chance to experience it). Regarding the machine, Gabe Newell (who we often call Gaben) talked to IGN, emphasising that there were painful moments in the pricing.

Newell said Valve is being „very aggressive” on the pricing: finding the right balance between price and performance „is going to be one of the critical factors in the mobile space.” „I want to pick this up and say, ‘Oh, it all works, it’s all fast’, and then price point was secondary and painful. But that was pretty clearly a critical aspect to it. The first thing was the performance and the experience, [that] was the biggest and most fundamental constraint that was driving us.

Our view is, if we’re doing this right, we’re going to be selling these in millions of units, and it’s going to be establishing a product category that ourselves and other PC manufacturers are going to be able to participate in, and that’s going to have long-term benefits for us. So that’s sort of the frame in which we’re thinking about this.

We don’t have some tie-in ratio—we don’t say, ‘Oh, and then we have to sell eight games for each one of these, otherwise it doesn’t make sense.’ Our calculus is more, ‘Is this the right product, and is it a great way to test out the assumption that there’s a huge amount of value, both to game players and game developers, to extending the PC ecosystem in this direction. That’s the real test, more than anything else,” Newell said.

Steam Deck, which was praised even by Tim Sweeney, the head of Epic Games, is expected to start shipping in December. Its dock will be sold separately, and we’re waiting for more details about it.

Source: PCGamer