Thry could absolutely do that. Valve makes a cut off every Steam game sold. If anything, it’d be MORE viable for them than any other console maker given the wider library
You’re completely missing the point. People can buy steam machines and use them as a PC without ever opening steam, or worse, use them as servers or parts of a cluster. If Steam Machines were sold at a loss they would , by definition, be cheaper than equivalent hardware, so companies would buy 10k of them to put into a warehouse to run stuff because it would be cheaper than buying the same thing from other places. This is what happened to the PS3, non-blocked systems can’t be sold at a loss because you can’t guarantee that whoever is buying it will use them for your intended purpose.
Thry could absolutely do that. Valve makes a cut off every Steam game sold. If anything, it’d be MORE viable for them than any other console maker given the wider library
You’re completely missing the point. People can buy steam machines and use them as a PC without ever opening steam, or worse, use them as servers or parts of a cluster. If Steam Machines were sold at a loss they would , by definition, be cheaper than equivalent hardware, so companies would buy 10k of them to put into a warehouse to run stuff because it would be cheaper than buying the same thing from other places. This is what happened to the PS3, non-blocked systems can’t be sold at a loss because you can’t guarantee that whoever is buying it will use them for your intended purpose.