Its actually not that expensive, for what it can do, and that's from the Steve directly, in that video.

He does a price comparison to nearest equivalent parts you can actually currently buy for a DIY PC.

He ends up with $979 for the DIY vs $1050 for the 512gb Steam Machine, a 7% difference.

There are currently, right now, many, many prebuilt PCs that cost this amount or more, with worse hardware.

... and also, this video here, from ETA Prime,.that I linked, that is this post, that apparently no one is actually watching, is also full of game test benchmarks, though not as much crazy specific technical.shit as Steve gets into.

It outperforms a PS5 Pro on say, RDR2.

1440p, high/ultra settings, no fsr upscaling, gets ~75 fps in complex/open areas, significantly better inside of rooms/houses/buildings.

And, as stated in the main post body... the Steam Machine is going to support FSR4 upscaling either on launch or very soon afterward, so you could use that, not lose much graphical fidelity, and get more frames.

A PS5 Pro cannot run RDR2 at a stable 60 fps, at 1440p.

It has to be locked to 30 fps to run 4K, which it does via upscaling, and a checkerboard rendering technique, which makes it not actually the same 4K as a PC would render, but w/e.

To get 60fps, it has to be locked at basically 1080p, though I think technically it is doing dynamic resolution scaling, so maybe effectively a slightly higher average resolution than that, maybe 1/4 or 1/2 way to 1440p.

A PS5 Pro costs $900.

If you think a PS6 is going to cost less than a PS5 Pro, you are wrong.

EDIT:

Now you can argue that a PS5 Pro, part of why it costs so much, is the 2TB SSD, vs the 512GB Steam Machine.

But, the PS5 Pro is the only PS5 variant with an RDNA 3 GPU, so its going to perform substantially better than the other PS5 variants with RDNA 2.

Right now, a 512 GB nvme ssd goes for about $200, a 2TB goes for about $300.

So basically you could say that a more fair price/performance comparison would be to knock $100 off of the PS5 Pro's price, to $800, presuming a hypothetical PS5 Pro Lite variant, or something like that.

In that case, you're paying $250 more for... what, something like 35% higher framerates, if you just resolution locked this hypothetical PS5 Pro Lite to a consistent 1440p, and had it use its already existing upscaling on basically auto mode?