Funnily Valve doesn’t need it either to some extent. It’s almost like a pet project. They won’t sell it retail, no ads, so certainly won’t even hurt the sales of Switch 2 and PS5. Mind you the former just sold more than 10m units in less than 6 months.
Secondly Valve makes disgusting amount of money from the lootboxes and the unregulated underage gambling market (estimated billions) which are almost a 0 effort system. Running an API and releasing a new lootbox every 2nd month or so are peanuts compared to the development, manifacturing, and distribution of the Steam Machine
Tail risk for valve is they get locked out of the windows ecosystem via the App Store or some other trusted computing shenanigans. Steam hardware running windows games on an open OS mitigates this.
Secondly Valve makes disgusting amount of money from the lootboxes and the unregulated underage gambling market (estimated billions) which are almost a 0 effort system. Running an API and releasing a new lootbox every 2nd month or so are peanuts compared to the development, manifacturing, and distribution of the Steam Machine