The comment you're replying to is in a discussion about the possibility that the Steam Machine will be sold at a loss, as they would be able to re-coup the funds in sales on Steam.

In this example, no, Valve would not be ecstatic if they were snapped up for things other than Steam use. Sony tried this with the playstation, and the military bought them out as cheap linux compute, costing Sony thousands

> relevant article about Sony https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomput...