Valve very much is in the position to subsidize the costs; they charge 30% royalty per game sold.

Valve often boasts that they have a very high Rev / Employee number.

> Valve very much is in the position to subsidize the costs;

They're not, because they don't lock down the hardware to only Steam.

If they subsidized the cost, people could just buy them as general purpose computers and not buy steam games on them.

Valve would only be in a position to subsidize the hardware if they locked the hardware down to just the Steam store.

Yeah but then people would buy them for non-gaming use. Remember the PS2 supercomputers?