With that Valve deep throating word salad out of the way, let's look at what happened after. Investors at all the big companies got a gigantic erection after they saw the success of Valve's very unique offering and decided that the companies they have stakes in need to make a competitor because it's an untapped goldmine, Valve is reaping all the rewards of it and they want a piece of it NOW. And they're only willing to take the risk now, because Valve took it first. Without a private company taking risks to innovate, those publicly traded conglomerates would never do shit.
You're forgetting one thing. In the case of almost every console/handheld ever,
money is made through selling software. It's a well-known fact that some consoles (Xbox 360, etc.) lose money on every box, they recoup it through software and try to increase the attach rate. This is why new consoles and handhelds don't push backwards compatibility as a marketing point (if they have it all) because if you're running older software you're not buying the new stuff. You've probably seen
this commercial before and rolled your eyes with what Atari Corp. execs were thinking. It's not just the fact that the Atari XEGS lacks Zelda, Metroid, and Mario, or that Atari's
Bug Hunt looks like outdated shit compared to Nintendo's
Duck Hunt, it's that they basically relied on stuff that the consumer already had (namely basically the Atari computer line), not creating new games, which Atari wasn't and barely anyone else was either. As a result Atari XEGS was dead on arrival.
The only two other consoles to ever attempt something similar were the Amiga CD32 and Bandai @World (Apple Pippin), both of which were failures for other reasons before it even came to software attach rate...and I'm sure that when it came to planning out the Xbox they made the decision that it was a completely separate console and wasn't compatible with Windows/DOS applications.
While there is a certain technical aspect of making a PC handheld that hasn't really been achievable for years (back in the 1990s there was the DOS-compatible HP Palmtop line, but it was meant for the business crowd, not for games), Valve was also able to take advantage of one unique thing that its competitors don't have...it sells games through its storefront. This not only allows them to make a profit on every game "sold" for the Steam Deck, it provides an easy interface to do so. None of the "portable PC" systems really provided an easy way to add new games to it, basically using a second computer and a cable to add stuff onto it.
All these other competitors have to make money through hardware, which is difficult to do and drives up the cost.
