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- 6 days
I’m sure it’s a great controller, but for me personally it’s just way too expensive. Also, I’m never gonna use the trackpads outside of a Steam Deck.
I’d consider my current controller (GameSir Supernova) to be the best one I’ve ever used. For the price of one Steam Controller I could get 2.5 of those. It also comes with a very convenient charging station, which you can plug the receiver into, and then it’s a 2-in-1.
I rarely criticize Valve, but their recent pricing is out of this world. I have no idea what their profit margins are on these devices, but I just cannot imagine them being competitive.
As much as I love my og LCD Deck, I’d never buy it at the current price. Same for the controller.
6 daysThe current Deck pricing is probably out of their hands, memory prices are crazy. It’s not just Valve, the Lenovo legion go handhelds went up by about $400 for the 16GB models and $600-700 for the 32GB models. The Asus ROG/Xbox handhelds haven’t increased in price yet, but I suspect that probably means they either overestimated demand or were able to negotiate a fixed price contract before prices got crazy. Either way they’ll probably shoot up soon as well.
The controller has less reason to be expensive, although it does have several premium features beyond your normal controller. They priced it between something like an standard xbox controller ($65) and an xbox elite controller ($150-200), so in that context it doesn’t seem that bad.
Well, on the one hand… having more demand than you can actually fulfill is the kind of problem most busineses would like to have…
I mean… even if they’re not moving a lot of units, its still broadly a good problem to have -> considerably more people than you thought, want to buy the thing you sell.
So at bare minimum you’ve over delivered in terms of product design.
The extremely obvious capitalist response to that would be to raise prices on that thing. Win win, right? The extra profits go toward more capex to make more future production.
… But they haven’t done that.
They haven’t done that because they care about their image more than their profit margins on this particular product.
And/or because in the current environment… basically, the cost/reward on spending more capex isn’t worth the reputation hit.
The capex spending to meaningfully ramp up production would be so expensive, that it’d end up being a net loss, in terms of reputation damage.
… At least this is my semi-informed guess.
