So, Steam is planning to sell these at a loss, but isn’t planning to lock out third party OS?

What’s to stop people buying them to use for completely unrelated use cases?

I guess it depends on how big the loss is… if it is small, it might not be really worth it for most people; but any larger, I wonder how sustainable this will be.

I think the explanation is that people love Valve beyond reason, so a vast majority will just use Steam on it.

Plus, Steam is bordering on a monopoly for PC gaming anyway, so, even if they install another OS, a user is probably going to end up on Steam.

What non-gaming use cases do you imagine people might use these for?

For normal computer use (reading email, watching videos, doing spreadsheets), there are much cheaper and better options available. If somebody wanted a Steam Machine specifically, it'd be for the GPU.

If you needed a lot of GPU compute (for AI or blockchain or whatever), it'd be cheaper to buy or rent a dedicated server with Nvidia H100s rather than buying dozens of Steam Machines.

So the only potential use cases are those that have a significant but not too significant GPU requirement. The only ones I can think of are gaming (which is the intended use case), video editing, and 3D rendering.

Video editing is less of a concern because neither Adobe Premier nor Final Cut Pro will run on Linux (to my knowledge), so you might as well buy a Mac that runs both of those very efficiently and has decent hardware.

So we're left with 3D rendering. If people want to use Steam Machines to render things in Blender, I say "let them", and I assume that Valve does too.

> Steam is planning to sell these at a loss

Just a random blog's guess.

> What’s to stop people buying them to use for completely unrelated use cases?

Nothing. But it doesn't mean that Valve doesn't benefit from it. Valve wants the whole gaming scheme to shift toward SteamOS. Like Google wants the whole web browsing to shift to Chrome, even you can use Chrome for stuff unrelated to Google.

What's stopping someone from using a steam deck for running emulators, SuperTuxKart, and pirated games? This isn't their first rodeo

If that's what happens, then I'm buying one of these right away for sure. I mean, I use steam a lot, but I certainly won't be locked in their "SteamOS". Maybe they are betting that most users will be too lazy to change the defaults and stick to SteamOS (which might very well be the case, and they have a hint of this thanks to the data they have on the Steam Deck)

You can install Windows (or Bazzite, or whatever else) on a Steam Deck as well.

Did they say they are selling at a loss?

no modern console is sold at a loss this is silly speculation