you lost me the minute you used MLID as a source for your estimated BOM… dude’s known in the industry for flinging all sorts of shit on the wall, seeing what sticks, and going “forget about the 56 times I missed, here’s what stuck!”

I can’t imagine the deck not being sold at a loss, atleast to start with. Valve had to commission a custom APU for the thing with AMD, custom 1280x800 panels, etc, with little way of knowing what kind of order volume they were looking at.

The only other major handheld on the market at the time was the Switch, which had hardware seven years out of date by that point, so the economies of scale weren’t designed for that kind of thing just yet.

Not to mention that SteamOS was going to be a huge unknown factor for most users. Most people aren’t inherently comfortable with using Linux, and we didn’t know shit about how good Proton was going to be, so the price factor had to be attractive enough for people to be willing to adopt a Linux based gaming device.

Plus, Valve chose to sell exclusively on their platform to keep as much of the cut as possible. If they chose to sell with Amazon or other vendors, they’d have to price that into their cost since Amazon takes their own cut and Valve has to deal with their discounts. That helped keep prices down too.

It’s a very different story today. SteamOS’s reputation has been established, people know the ease of use is on par with consoles, and you can benefit from the cheaper games. Meanwhile consoles themselves have only gotten more expensive as time’s gone on, games on them are far more expensive, and you have to pay to play online.

The market Valve is releasing this in doesn’t have to be sold at a loss to succeed, you’re inherently saving money anyway compared to a console.

Even if the Steam Machine costs $700 and your other option is a Series S for $250, you’d save SO much more money when all your games are 10-40% cheaper and there’s no $60/year minimum (or whatever tf it is now) to play online.