Because Valve would have to pay out 70% the value of the vouchers to developers in game redemptions; the break even point would therefore need to account for that amount being subtracted first (i.e. for $900 including a $200 voucher, $760).

At that point, Valve would likely have higher sales if they didn't include the voucher and reduced the price by the 70% in voucher value it would have cost them otherwise.

The hypothetical call center would be selling Steam Accounts, with... $100 in their Steam Wallets, or w/e.

Which is ... well, against Steam policy, though enforcement is spotty.

Or I guess... physical Steam Gift cards?

But that leads into the other part of this:

The call center would have to be making basically fake individual Steam Accounts for each purchased Steam Machine.

And then probably routing them to different addresses. Different home addresses.

Valve sells its hardware directly through Steam.

They ship it to you.

No stores.

Sure, secondary markets always exist, but it is at least kind of hard to like, buy 100 Steam Machines or 100 Steam Decks on one legit Steam Account, they can easily just say uh no, you get a max of 5 or 2 or whatever.

So yeah a call center could pull off buying a bunch of them, in the sense of them being a scam call center that specializes in fraud and identity theft, yeah, they'd be able to figure it out, but it would probably be decently illegal.

Beyond initial development costs, it didn't cost Valve anything to ship the Index with Alyx though. Bundling in a $200 voucher would be increasing the system price by $160 in direct cost to Valve for no reason, as consumers are likely to spend that after purchasing the system, but might be dissuaded by a high initial purchase price.

A more apt comparison in that scenario would be Valve bundling their entire software library with the Steam Machine, or developing a new game to bundle with it as a means of adding value.

The problem with that solution, from Valve's perspective, is both the cost of providing the voucher (they would have to pay developers at least 70% of the voucher value) and the risk that an end-consumer that doesn't intend to use Steam simply converts it to money by selling Steam gifts, replacing a sale they would have otherwise had while not generating additional sales from the Steam Machine user.

The ideal means of doing it to diminish that risk would be to make the voucher not usable for gifts, though Valve would still need to price the system to account for the cost of providing the voucher.