i moved recently and don't have a TV anymore so my excitement for this kinda dwindled. the 2TB price seems like a bit of a hard sell, but honestly i expected them to be even wilder given the circumstances. personally much more excited for the Steam Frame
i never could've bought this anyway but it's too expensive even for my imagination. the price seems reasonable from valve's perspective though, they didn't want to sell at cost but also they are a nobody in the hardware business so they probably have to source the parts on a monthly basis and paying the inflated prices. compared to consoles though this is just not worth it.
the cool thing would be to sell it as a loss leader they could circumvent scalpers/corpo buyers to some degree by offering cash back in steam bucks
valve has active monopoly lawsuits going on, selling a loss leader will be seen as anti competitive, plus that's not a loss leader, that's a console with a $300 dollar mandatory bundle of store credit. it's not even good for not incentivizing scalpers, they can just sell the entire account with the steam bucks on it. they chose a complicated queue system to combat scalpers.
makes sense i guess. i am just wishcasting that it was cheaper lol