You’re right, they don’t care.

The very fact they no longer care about enforcing licensing anymore is itself the strongest evidence that selling Windows as a product is not where the money is.

They want you on their operating system for any price - including zero -because once you are there that’s when the advertising, cloud service upsell and data monetisisation can begin.

It could also be that inventory isn’t being replenished anywhere, and US runs out first because of highest sales volume.

People are accustomed to consoles being unnaturally cheap, and even as manufacturing costs sky-rocket manufacturers are still eating a lot of that increase because they don’t want to lose sales to the competition, and expect they can make money back later on game sales and online service subscriptions.

Valve meanwhile doesn’t have that approach, and will be selling the the Steam Box for at least what it costs.

It will be exactly the same story with the Steam Frame - everyone is hoping it will be price-competitive with the Meta Quest but I can almost guarantee it won’t. It will be FAR more expensive.

Why? Because Meta are making money back later with advertising, and selling your data, while Valve are just providing a device.

If you want a little privacy, Linux support, and hardware you control, you’ll have to be prepared to pay a premium for it.

Valve are working on what they can from the OS side, but fundamentally there’s no silver bullet and it’s up to game devs to implement anti-cheat in a way that works for SteamOS if they want games that require anti cheat to work.

My personal interpretation is that we remain in the same situation as ever, and games which have invasive anticheat will continue to not work on Linux unless the game developers make them work - and publishers won’t do that until Linux as a gaming platform has sufficient market share that they would lose a large chunk of money by not supporting it.