The topic Despite its price, Valve reportedly sells up to 15,000 Steam Machines a week is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
When the Steam Machine’s price was announced, the gaming scene had a collective groan as everyone’s fears that it’d breach the four-figure mark came true. However, that seemingly didn’t stop people buying one, as Boiling Steam has estimated that around 12,000 to 15,000 units are selling per week.
Boiling Steam posted an article estimating how many Steam Machines Valve has sold. Valve has never officially confirmed how many units it’s shifted, but Boiling Steam used some measurable metrics to calculate a rough estimate. It did this by looking at where the Steam Machine sat at the Top Sellers spot and calculated a bounding box based on how the games above and below it were performing.
After doing some napkin math, Boiling Steam deduced that Valve is selling between 12,000 and 15,000 Steam Machines a week. Boiling Steam notes that the Steam Machine won’t be taking down the big names like Nintendo or PlayStation, but as a hobbyist device, it seems to be fitting the bill very well:
Right now, it’s not shaping to be a market failure, but rather a niche device. Realistically speaking, the demand is probably going to slow down naturally – it would not be surprising to see 20% or 30% less volume shipped per week after the initial launch period.
Fortunately, even if the Steam Machine doesn’t prove to be a huge hit, it shouldn’t be all bad news. The software that keeps the console running, SteamOS, has a very good chance of outlasting the hardware to become a revolutionary gaming PC operating system. In fact, people are already selling PCs pre-loaded with SteamOS.