> They've implied that they're not going to sell the Steam Machine at a low margin because they're worried about people buying the Steam Machine for general purpose computer use without buying games. I'm not sure that's a rational fear.

I can understand that, OTOH I have a $1500 gaming PC (probably worth far less now--I built it over a year ago) for explicitly that purpose. What I don't have is a modern, low-power living room HTPC with native/first-class Linux support on which to run Kodi (I have a custom one that's quite long in the tooth). If I could dock a steam deck in my living room and use it for Kodi 80% of the time with games for the remaining 20%, why should Valve care? I have already given Valve hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in game sales.

▲

bryanlarsen 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I assume Value is happy if you buy just 1 or 2 games for your Steam Deck or Steam Machine. It's the people that buy exactly 0 games that they claim to be worried about. IOW, not consumers, but companies buying work PC's.

	▲	pwdisswordfishs 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Valve–Roku merger. Someone buys a Steam Machine that they keep in the living room for both general purpose computering and as an HTPC that never, ever runs a game purchased from the Steam store, but they still make money. Easy peasy.

▲

crooked-v 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Anybody who has a gaming PC isn't the target market for the Steam Machine. They're going after the console market with the value add of "also it's a real computer that can do real computer stuff".