Their goal with the first iteration of Steam Machines (RIP) was explicitly to provide an alternative to Windows and to reduce dependency on Microsoft. I’m pretty sure that’s why they priced the deck so competitively, to make a dent in the market as a loss leader.

To that end, I would expect them to be taking a large hit on these in order to get them into people’s hands. It’s not even about steam sales per se, it’s about platform commoditisation.

You walked so our games would run 🫡

Yep, if you want a reason why Valve are “less evil” than other companies, one big thing to point to is the huge investment they’ve made into the Linux ecosystem. Even though it’s in their own interests (Microsoft locking out steam would cripple their income), we can see with Epic suing Google/Apple that there are other, shittier ways that they could have attempted the same thing. The investment they’ve made into Linux, Proton, KDE etc benefit everyone and can’t be taken away on a whim.