Before you go in on a Steam Deck I want to give a head's up:

While I like my Steam Deck, it does have limits. If you primarily want to play 2D indie games, it's absolutely perfect. You get great framerate, and the battery lasts 3-4 hours or sometimes even more.

But if you want to play 3D games from the last 10-15 years, you're going to need to compromise. Much of the time you won't be able to get 60fps, and the battery life drops off quick. And if you want to dock it and run it on your TV you're still going to have some performance tradeoffs due to the Steam Deck being built for 800p gaming

If you still have a powerful tower PC but want to play newer 3D games from your living room on a TV, you could run an application called Sunshine on it, allowing you to stream to a Steam Deck via Moonlight at high bitrate (4k 60fps with relatively low latency) and the Steam Deck is good for that because it has more power to encode/decode the stream than most alternatives.

Or you could wait for the Steam Machine to release. It won't be as powerful as a PS5, but I'm expecting it to be a good value compared to most PC's

Lol this reminds me of that time the US Air Force built a giant compute cluster using PlayStation 3s. Idk if Sony sold those at a loss, but they certainly didn't see any game purchases coming from the US Department of Defense

I was thinking that they might require a Steam account to order, the same way they stopped scalpers for Steam Deck, but there'd be ways around that.

It'd be hilarious if you needed something like "profile level 10" to order though.

that will cost more than a console

Is that part of the quote? Because I just saw "priced like an entry level PC, not like a console", which was more ambiguous than saying "priced like a console". One man's entry level PC is $300, and another's is $1000. I have a mini PC with the power of a PS4 Pro, which I'd easily consider entry level, and it cost me $530 about a year and a half ago.

Console manufacturers haven't sold at a loss in a long time.

I agree, it won't be huge gains directly for them, but even moving people off of Windows benefits them by removing control a competitor (Microsoft) has. I somewhat agree that it won't be sold at (much of) a loss, but maybe at cost. I'm sure they expect manufacturing prices to go down over time, and engineering was a one-time investment, so sold just below cost doesn't seem unreasonable to me at launch, which then becomes at cost or above in the future.

This all depends on if their goals for it are short-term or long. Historically, they seem to target long-term. That's why I think it'll be as low as they can make it, which they also said they're doing by only having 8GB VRAM as cost savings. They want to drop the price as low as they can to compete. They won't compete at $1k. I doubt they'd compete at $600-700. I suspect they're targeting $400-500, which seems like a reasonable cost for the hardware too.

Probably true, but there is a chance they might convert some console gamers...

But not enough to bet on it with a loss leader probably.

Doesn't the new controller have internal batteries?

It's a small computer, it isnt going after the Xbox or PS5 customers. It's going for the people who want a computer in their living room.

I'm not sure cost can be set aside from a price discussion when they've explicitly stated it won't be a Costco rotisserie chicken.

With the number of consoles sold this generation, I'm not sure where the limit is for what people will spend to play the games they want. With console pricing has trailing budget gaming PC's, I could see a number of people getting a Steam Machine in lieu of the next Playstation or Xbox.

What would be interesting to see in the future is the split between units sold to lifelong console players making a change, and pre existing Steam users with stuffed libraries buying one for the couch. If the latter make up the majority of sales, but they priced it like a chicken, that'll be a problem pretty quick.

Hopefully it shakes out well and indie game developers reap some well deserved rewards.

For Valve it would ideally lead to a new Steam account being created. Which would make sense if someone got one as a gift or something, naturally they would set up a Steam Account if they didnt already have one.

Some of the third party steam machines from 2015 actually had some distribution to Walmart stores. I saw it in the flesh!

Just playing devil's advocate here. I don't necessarily disagree with you, but there are some interesting factors at play.

1. The Steam Machine won't need a screen or battery, two of the most expensive components on the Deck. So that can go into better CPU/GPU/RAM instead.
2. Valve proved they can make a successful physical hardware product with the deck. That gives them a lot of negotiating power with AMD to get the best deal they can.
3. Unlike with the Deck, they're releasing three new gadgets in almost all major countries simultaneously. That means they may have already started manufacturing months ago, and are benefiting from economy of scale at an entirely new level.

I’m fully expecting an 800+ USD price tag. And I’ve made my peace with that.