The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blackeco.com/post/2330473
It failed for multiple reasons, but a big reason was that they tried to outsource the hardware and basically just got reskins of existing gaming-PC prebuilds, which didn’t actually make PCs any less confusing. And they didn’t actually save money (and some were overpriced scams) so buyers were basically forced to do as much research as buying an actual gaming PC.
All of that will be solved, and the software/UX/other stuff you mentioned are far more mature, like you say.