Word

Devil’s advocate: they created a new studio with all the lessons and right core employees who understand the space the best.

It ain’t powerful enough for modern titles sadly. I’m trying to say that there’s a space where Valve made steam machine with niceties of SteamOS and power of say PS5 can really thrive.

There’s some nuance.

• One of the bigger issues about PC gaming these days is the shader compilation stutter. Valve is able to precompile and upload these for SteamDeck, so a fixed hardware “console” from them will solve this problem too.
• SteamDeck is pretty weak but games are still sort of optimised for it. Same would be true for such a console, making devs focus on a target platform directly.
• Assembling PC yourself can have its own issues. You may not get all the ROPs, or a new Windows update may break your games, or you may occasionally update drivers to make a game more playable without black screens, or wouldn’t turn on with a controller when set up as a “console”. I’m not saying it isn’t doable, but there is an audience for consoles who would love whatever SteamDeck has done for handheld but in console form, and may not want to bother with setting everything up. Valve can disrupt that

Steam can’t release a “console” soon enough.

“Fortunately we have a product for people who aren’t able to get some cash for our console, it’s called xCloud”