“I can’t tell you what the price will be, because I literally don’t know,” he said on the November 15 episode of the WAN show.
“When I said I’m disappointed it isn’t going to follow a console pricing model, where its subsided by the fact that manufacturer is going to be taking 30% of every game sold on it over the lifespan of this thing, because I feel that would be a more meaningful product, they asked what I meant by console price and I said $500. Nobody said anything, but the energy in the room wasn’t great.”
The full LTT video outside of the WAN show is a lot better. In it he said that a company can just buy a lot of Steam Machines as their office computers giving no Steam sales to Valve and making them take the hit. He also gave a few more justifications as well as tariffs and others I think.