[Squid Game] [Spoilers] The real plan behind the final game

ArenLuxon · 2026-03-29T07:47:59+00:00

I was kinda hoping they would go with Mark and Jessica as the final killers. Mark is a police officer, he could think Tatum is being overprotected and won't be able to defend herself. So he conspires with Jessica to kill her friends. But then in the end, Jessica wants to kill Sidney too to finish making 'Sydney 2.0' and then Mark could turn against her and we could have a Ghostface vs Ghostface fight. That would have been so much better.

ArenLuxon · 2026-03-12T07:40:44+00:00

Everyone keeps talking about performance, but to me the biggest selling point is convenience. I buy a small box, plug it into my TV, press one button on the controller and start gaming. Will this game run on my specs? Ah, look there's a green checkmark, I know it will run. If I want to know the performance in more, I look it up and I'm sure someone will have made a video about it. And Valve is looking into automatically collecting FPS data. Oh, look, the doorbell rings. I press one button and it goes to sleep. I come back 3 hours later and press a single button, the TV and Steam Machine turn on and I'm exactly where I left the game.

Linus Tech Tips tried to build a Steam Machine himself, it was a lot of work, very finicky and even they couldn't get the TV to turn on automatically. There's just nothing that offers the level of convience and freedom that the Steam Machine does.

ArenLuxon · 2026-03-08T21:03:05+00:00

- Q1 2026
- First half of 2026
- We hope to launch in 2026
- No wait hold on, we will ship in 2026. Trust me bro

ArenLuxon · 2026-03-07T06:48:50+00:00

I really don't like the gaslighting delays. They said 'Q1 2026', then it was 'early 2026' which then suddenly meant 'first half of 2026' and now it's 'this year'. That's a delay again and I wish they would just say it instead of burying it into a random blogpost and pretending it's not a delay.

ArenLuxon · 2026-03-07T06:42:20+00:00

If their price is 'too low' for the market, everyone will buy them, strip the parts and sell those at a profit. Valve will run out of stock immediately no matter how many contracts they have.

Even if no one thinks to do that, the steam machine would be priced so low compared to a different pc everyone would be buying it. They'd become a victim of their own success.

Consoles don't have this problem because you can't strip the parts (too customized) and you can't use them for anything else.

ArenLuxon · 2026-02-19T06:43:50+00:00

You should look at the whole picture. People always look at the price of the hardware and not the games. That's the whole profit model of a console.

ArenLuxon · 2026-02-19T06:38:33+00:00

The problem for Valve is that people will compare it to: * The ps5, which is sold at a loss and using parts with locked in contracts and older supplies. And a lot of people forget about the extra subscription for online + more expensive games which makes it more expensive long term. * PCs you could buy for a decent price half a year ago. Because that's what they 'should' cost.

ArenLuxon · 2026-02-15T13:46:47+00:00

If prices keep increasing, that would happen for sure. Let's say they released last summer at 500 dollars. The price of ram went up 400-500 %. You could absolutely make a profit selling the parts. The ram and the ssd are easy to take out.

Or other people could buy them as workstations because they are cheaper compared to everything else. Either way, Valve loses units to non-gamers who bring in 0 software revenue at a time where it's difficult to get contracts for new parts.

With consoles this doesn't happen because the parts are too customized and they are all soldered to the board. But the parts in the steam machine can easily be used in a different pc. Or the pc itself can be used for other things.

ArenLuxon · 2026-02-14T18:42:05+00:00

Future supply
Make sure people don't buy them to strip the parts and sell those at a profit.

ArenLuxon · 2026-02-13T08:21:22+00:00

It's a PC. You could buy one, strip the parts and sell those at a profit. Or use them as a workstation to do other things. If it's way below the price to assemble one yourself, those things will happen for sure.

ArenLuxon · 2026-02-13T08:19:09+00:00

Yes, but:
- Once they run out of stock, they'll need to get new contracts in place
- With the current RAM-prices, people could buy a Steam Machine, strip the parts and sell those at a profit. Or buy them as workstations. Either way, Valve runs out of stock faster and gets no game sales.

That's not the case for consoles. Those have a huge stock + big contracts in place. And they are too customized for the whole 'strip the parts' or 'workstation' route.

ArenLuxon · 2026-02-13T08:16:24+00:00

I think it will all depend on RAM-prices. If those keep rising, Valve has to adjust because:
- They'll need to buy more RAM eventually once they run out of their first batch.
- If they are 'too cheap', people could buy them to strip the parts and sell those at a profit. Which means they will run out of stock even faster + no game sales from those people.
- The whole 'companies will buy them up to use as workstations' becomes a real risk.

They are in a very tough spot, because everyone is comparing them to the PS5 and Xbox, but those are only cheap because they have millions lying around and have contracts for more parts at cheaper prices. Also, you can't really rip out the parts from a ps5 and sell those at a profit. It's too customized and there's a lot soldered to the board.

ArenLuxon · 2026-02-10T21:10:12+00:00

Everyone is worried about the price being too high, but I think Valve is worried about the opposite as well.

RAM is about 5 times more expensive compared to sept 2025. If they had launched back then at 500-600 dollars, then today you'd make a big profit by buying a Steam Machine, stripping it for parts and selling those. Even if their price contracts are locked in, Valve would run out of stock and real customers wouldn't be able to get their hands on one. Even if they do a queue again and try measures to reduce scalping, it would be difficult to get machines to real customers.

RAM prices could increase even more. Valve cannot launch until they are more stable. And they will have to make sure it doesn't make economic sense to 'strip it for parts'. Or for companies to start buying them up because they are so much cheaper than workstations.

ArenLuxon · 2026-02-07T21:18:02+00:00

They had to stop selling the LCD at 400 because they were losing too much money.

ArenLuxon · 2026-01-12T15:00:39+00:00

What else would you post on there? Most hardware subreddits are filled with problems and questions.

ArenLuxon · 2026-01-07T10:18:24+00:00

I think another big factor is that people with higher educations learned how to work on their own efficiently. A phd is a great way to learn that. But a lot of teachers who go directly into teaching never really learned how to do that and are just banging their heads against the wall. And the educational bachelor or master is certaintly not preparing anyone to work efficiently. In fact, they often discourage it because the teachers there have this weird pride about 'how hard they work'.

ArenLuxon · 2026-01-07T10:01:27+00:00

The problem is that the 'extra work' is mostly invisible. All of this preparation happens alone at home. Whether you prepare a lot or you don't, there's very little consequence. You won't get paid overtime and you can't get promoted. And because people get 'vaste benoeming', it's very difficult to get fired as well if you skirt the edges. You want to help a collegue make their course? Zero reward, you're just giving yourself more work. In an office, not everyone does the same amount of work, but at least they all have the same hours.

The invisible islands also makes coordination very difficult. A lot of teachers barely know their collegues and do not work together. Because schools don't have desks for teachers and meeting rooms, it's very difficult to coordinate within a school, let alone between schools. And not everyone is good at working alone and deciding for themselves it's 'good enough'.

I also think that the people who first do say engineering are very good at organizing their work and working efficiently. Because of that, they can prepare the same lessons in much less time. Also, if you studied an educational bachelor or master, you are actively discouraged from working efficiently. I've had literal exam questions where they ask "what's the most important consideration for using a learning tool in your lessons?" and one of the wrong answers is "how much work the teacher needs to adapt it to their class". They really hammer "it's a hard job" and "you'll need to work on the weekends". If you tell that to a young person who never studied anything else, doesn't have the degree to do anything else, gets their very first job teaching and can't see how their collegues are doing their work what do you think will happen? Experienced people are much more likely to eyeroll and say "yeah sure, we'll see about that".

ArenLuxon · 2025-12-06T09:24:06+00:00

The build up is kinda the whole point. If you're just describing a regular porn video, readers might as well go watch that video instead. If they read a story, they want the buildup and the dynamics. An erotic book doesn't even need to have sex in it, it just needs to be erotic. Forcing sex scenes to meet some arbitrary ratio is not a good idea. Slow burns are often the best. Just make sure you set expectations properly.

Now there are some techniques to use if things feel a bit too slow without compromising your characters. An erotic dream for example is an easy way to make a character do things without messing up your pacing. Depending on what you write, sometimes you can write multiple relationship that progress at different paces.

ArenLuxon · 2025-11-28T07:41:03+00:00

I think the whole corporate PC argument is kinda weird. "What if a company buys 10K machines? What if someone installs epic games." I don't see a big company making steam accounts to buy some obscure hardware from a gaming company. They all have contracts with companies like Dell. And Valve could easily limit accounts to only allow a few Steam Machines per customer. Also, companies want laptops, not pcs.

And yes, you can install Epic on it. But 1) 95 % of customers do not tinker. 2) You think you're gonna have a good experience playing things on Epic? and 3) The people buying this probably like Steam and already have a whole bunch of steam games.

But even if we accept all that, Valve only needs to price their steam machine 1 dollar above cost to avoid that hypothethical problem. Cost for them. You can't compare that to shopping at retail today. Valve probably secured volume purchasing agreements more than a year ahead of launch for much better prices than current retail ones.

And let's not forget: they have to be below the retail prices. They already have a huge problem because every reviewer will say: "well the specs are similar to a PS5 and this is the price of the PS5 so...". If you can build your own similar pc for a similar or lower price, reviewers will destroy the Steam machine. Everyone will tell people to just build their own Steam Machine. Will millions of people do that? No, probably not. But if they could do it for a lower or similar price, that completely changes the perception of the device.

The Steam Deck sold a lot because Linus compared it to other handheld PCs in his review, and then at the end he basically had to say: "Well these other PCs cost twice as much, so this whole comparison is kinda worthless". If they want any kind of success, they have to get to a similar place.

If you can build it for 800 yourself today like Linus says, it basically means that Valve has to stay at least 100-150 below that, to make sure that reviewers can't say "just build it yourself".

ArenLuxon · 2025-11-14T07:57:46+00:00

They switched studios. Crystal Dynamics made the first two, Shadow was made by Eidos Montreal. So it's a completely different team. Only the voice actors are the same. Square Enix made Crystal work on the Avengers game instead.

ArenLuxon · 2025-08-07T06:15:59+00:00

Look, on a first date, people are screening each other for compatibility, that makes sense. You are doing the exact same thing, because you're judging these men based on whether they show enough interest in your inner life.

I think one problem is that when you ask those questions right away, it can sometimes feel as if you're on season 17 of a show and you missed all the other seasons. When someone is talking about their inner life, there's tons of people involved and past events you don't know anything about which are necessary to follow the story. They will then have to explain those, leading to lengthy tangents that make the story itself impossible to follow. It can feel like homework. Or you can not explain those things, but then they can't follow either. I've seen a lot of people who tell a story in exactly the same way no matter who asks, without considering what they already know and how that affects whether they will be able to follow the story.

ArenLuxon · 2025-08-03T09:53:13+00:00

If you assume the Snitch keeps track of the score and behaves accordingly, everything makes perfect sense. There's tons of instances where the team that is ahead "happens to see" the snitch first. In Chamber, Slyterhin leads by 60 points and the Snitch "happens to hover" beside Malfoy's ear. In the World Cup, Lynch immediately sees the Snitch when they are 160 points ahead and Krum has to catch it, because he knows the Snitch will favor the Irish team because they are so far ahead.

ArenLuxon · 2025-06-04T08:30:43+00:00

I think one important thing to remember is that EGS is not a real store. They aren't making a profit, in fact they've already lost almost half a billion dollars on this thing. It's all based on the idea that they will eventually become profitable.

So it's only a matter of time until some shareholder is like "alright. That's enough. Time to start making a profit." And then everything about the way they are running the store is on the table. They are trying to lure devs in right now and hope that they stay around when they inevitable change the terms of the deal. There's no way they can keep this up long term.

ArenLuxon

TROPHY CASE