They may be trying to muscle in on traditional console territory.

Steam has a well tenured reputation for having inexpensive games. They may be leveraging this to appeal to the console players turned off by the all recent price hikes.

I suspect the gabecube may be close to if not, at cost. I don’t think it’ll be at a loss.

Gabe has previously claimed that they developed the index because they didn’t want VR to die and even gave grants the game developers who made VR titles.

So it’s established that Steam is big enough and secure enough to risk cultivating new or disrupting old markets.

Operationally steam has low overhead and insane profit margin. Unless they fuck up the steam store they’re guaranteed massive profit.

If the new hardware flops and they lose a bit of money; Gabe just buys one less yacht and steam ticks on as normal.