Little late reply here… It just occured to me, that there could be a solution to this voucher selling problem. If you purchase the Steam Machine on the Steam page with your Steam account, then you could get the money onto your account. So selling it wouldn’t be possible. However, they could buy and sell items from the Steam item shop…
The problem with that solution, from Valve’s perspective, is both the cost of providing the voucher (they would have to pay developers at least 70% of the voucher value) and the risk that an end-consumer that doesn’t intend to use Steam simply converts it to money by selling Steam gifts, replacing a sale they would have otherwise had while not generating additional sales from the Steam Machine user.
The ideal means of doing it to diminish that risk would be to make the voucher not usable for gifts, though Valve would still need to price the system to account for the cost of providing the voucher.
But that is still preferable over no vouchers. The point is, that the machine gets more expensive because of the vouchers, so that Valve does not pay from their own pocket. This way the system gets more expensive for those who don’t want to use it for gaming and have less incentive of buying it. And for the gamer, they would buy games anyway, so its not a big deal.
The only problem with that is, that the system gets more expensive and that is bad.
Little late reply here… It just occured to me, that there could be a solution to this voucher selling problem. If you purchase the Steam Machine on the Steam page with your Steam account, then you could get the money onto your account. So selling it wouldn’t be possible. However, they could buy and sell items from the Steam item shop…
The problem with that solution, from Valve’s perspective, is both the cost of providing the voucher (they would have to pay developers at least 70% of the voucher value) and the risk that an end-consumer that doesn’t intend to use Steam simply converts it to money by selling Steam gifts, replacing a sale they would have otherwise had while not generating additional sales from the Steam Machine user.
The ideal means of doing it to diminish that risk would be to make the voucher not usable for gifts, though Valve would still need to price the system to account for the cost of providing the voucher.
But that is still preferable over no vouchers. The point is, that the machine gets more expensive because of the vouchers, so that Valve does not pay from their own pocket. This way the system gets more expensive for those who don’t want to use it for gaming and have less incentive of buying it. And for the gamer, they would buy games anyway, so its not a big deal.
The only problem with that is, that the system gets more expensive and that is bad.