So I read this article and a lot of people are saying it’s likely to be priced out of competitiveness in the console space due to the parts shortages.

I understand why they couldn’t sell it at a loss. It’s a general purpose computing device, and it would be too easy for a call centre somewhere to buy 100 of them, which would lead to 0 game sales for Valve…

But why couldn’t they release it at the stupid $900 price point, but then offer a $100 - $200 Steam voucher along with it? It sidesteps the call centre issue because the hardware is still full price, but they recoup (some) of their costs for those that ACTUALLY want is as a games console

but then offer a $100 - $200 Steam voucher along with it?

Then the same thing could occur—users would sell the vouchers or the accounts those vouchers are tied to.

Little late reply here… It just occured to me, that there could be a solution to this voucher selling problem. If you purchase the Steam Machine on the Steam page with your Steam account, then you could get the money onto your account. So selling it wouldn’t be possible. However, they could buy and sell items from the Steam item shop…

The problem with that solution, from Valve’s perspective, is both the cost of providing the voucher (they would have to pay developers at least 70% of the voucher value) and the risk that an end-consumer that doesn’t intend to use Steam simply converts it to money by selling Steam gifts, replacing a sale they would have otherwise had while not generating additional sales from the Steam Machine user.

The ideal means of doing it to diminish that risk would be to make the voucher not usable for gifts, though Valve would still need to price the system to account for the cost of providing the voucher.