It's true that low profile cards are also only relevant for a minority of people, but AusWolf is right in that the 6400 is important for the low profile market because of its good price. Few if any people in that market will pay £100 more for a used card of similar performance just because it supports encoding.
By the way, if you're counting minor features, the 6400 has HDMI 2.1, making it "leagues above" the 1650's HDMI 2.0.
If they have any non-F Intel CPU or any AMD APU, they already have hardware accelerated encoding support though. And if not, then, well, this GPU isn't for them. And quite frankly that's fine.
I'm not sure about some of the assumptions above.
I live in Indonesia and hang out on Facebook 'build a PC' forums.
Incomes are low, compared to the West. Most builds have tended to be i3-10100f or 10105f, due to low cost and excellent spec (8 threads).
A 10100f is 980k rupiah (14.4k = US$1, but a day's wages starts around 100k/$7, so the PPP is much lower).
A 10100 is around 560k more.
A lot of people now are building i3-12100f, instead, where the 12100f is around 1600k. The premium for the IGP version is again around 500k.
A PC is an expensive purchase, and an IGP CPU in a cheap PC is a horrible waste of money, if you're going to add an extra GPU.
The GPU market here consists of:
* GT 1030 1400-1500K depending on brand
* GTX 1050 Ti 2900-3100K depending on brand
* RTX 6500 XT 3400-3600K depending on brand (cheapest = Biostar, Sapphire, more expensive = MSI)
* GTX 1650 3600-3700K depending on brand (GDDR6 for Inno3D , Gainward, Pait, Zotac etc. GDDR5 from Asus, MSI or pay more for GDDR6)
* Geforce 3050 at 5600K-5800K.
* RX 6600 at 5750K+
* plus everything above that from the 3000/6000 series
The MSI RX 6400 has landed at 2970K.
The GT 1030 is pretty horrible, and the 3050/6600 are just far too expensive in terms of absolute cost, so people are choosing between the 1050 Ti, 1650, 6500 XT, and now 6400 in that bracket.
The 6400 is a fundamental failure as a product in this context in that the price is far too close to the 6500 XT, and given that people build mini/mid-tower PCs with 550W bronze PSUs, the 'low profile' feature is of no value at all, and the 6500 XT is about 33% faster, when overclocked.
There are a lot people playing Valorant and PES, who can make do with the 1030, even though the 6400 is 3x faster, the problem is it's not at all competing with the 1030 on price but with the 6500 XT and 1650.
If the argument is 'get a Quicksync CPU', then that fails, because you would be better off with a 1650, which is significantly faster in fact when you get the GDDR6 version, and will overclock still further, works perfectly on the 10100/5f, and once you add the cost of the non-F CPU, there is no saving, plus you will get much resale for a 1650 than a 6400.
In my experience seeing people's builds/queries, a HUGE proportion say they want to stream and/or do video editing, and while they can spend the extra 500K on the non-IGP CPU, most of the time they just end up with a 1650. And if they get the non-IGP CPU then they'll get a 6500 XT, not a 6400, which only serves SFF builds.
There doesn't seem to be a premium for a low profile 1650, either.
I feel as a product that it's substantially worse than a 1650, because after PCIE3 issues, no encoder, no overclocking, a decent boost with the GDDR6 1650 over the GDDR5 version, etc., the fact that this product series is already known as a turd, and will have poor resale value.
It's nothing that couldn't be solved by cutting the price by 1/3, of course. But we need to be clear that the 1650 GDDR6 is a much better product.