There’s a culture out there of people that love a piece of media so much that they will defend an unfeeling child murdering automaton called a corporation till their dying breath. In a perfect world, these people would be hanged. Thank you New York City good night!!
valve is a parasitic corporation syphoning money from game developers and only hires contractors to keep headcount low. there are cool people there (or they sometimes pay cool people as contractors) who are allowed to do cool stuff but almost on anything else they spectacularly fail because they insist on their garbage corporate governance and no communications.
that being said in order for their hardware division to stay profitable they had to raise prices. valve has absolutely no control on their supply price, i think that’s why people get angry when you say they could go lower. and they can’t make their hardware loss leaders because the platform is open.
i could never afford a steam deck or steam machine either way so the pricing really doesn’t matter to me, but they look cool especially with linux on them. it’s a shame valve is making them.