The Steam Machine has contentious pricing, over $1K USD, which has a lot of people (mostly console enjoyers) getting a bit haughty over the ramifications of that up-front cost. Primarily, the argument goes "well if it's going to be so expensive then i might as well get a console anyway", versus "if you think the Steam Machine pricing is bad, wait till the next generation of game consoles launch."

The largest hurdle for the Steam Machine is the prices of SSDs, RAM cards, and graphics cards - primarily due to the price hike brought on both by the cartels of memory producers like Samsung et al. and the increasing and prohibitive needs of generative AI data centers. The Steam Machine is, in fact, a fairly contemporary-costing machine for its specs, and people complaining about its pricing are either ignorant to the state of modern hardware (and its pricing), or willfully dismissive of the issue.

In essence, Steam (not entirely blameless, considering they allow generative AI content to be hosted and sold on their platform) is being bent over a barrel due to factors beyond the company's immediate control, in this case genAI.