The view exposed in the article is all wrong. It is MBA-analyst levels of wrong.
Valve didn't conquer anything. Valve defended PC gaming when everybody else including Microsoft, had abandoned it, and focused on consoles.
Windows XP had amazing gaming APIs, like DirectInput: still superior to XInput after all these years, because of more axis and better FFB support; and DirectSound3D, which enabled hardware accelerated 3D positional audio.
These APIs were declared obsolete by Microsoft, in favour of XBox-compatible inferior APIs, which were feature equivalent to the APIs in the inferior hardware of the first XBox console. Inferior not in absolute terms, but inferior to what a PC was capable of.
And that was just the beginning. Microsoft focused and pushed for their console, and most AAA game studios followed suit. Consoles have been incredibly profitable, so their gambit has paid off.
PC Gaming was for old nerds, old game mechanics like FPS (Counter Strike) and RTS (Starcraft) and indie gaming. Valve kept the dream alive. Valve kept open computing alive, in a sense, as consoles are closed computing, and in some cases you need expensive proprietary licenses just to produce a game for one of the consoles, like Nintendo.
So no, it was not that Valve released Steam in the right moment. Valve is a big reason PC gaming is alive and thriving. They believed in PC gaming when all the big companies went the console way.
Valve saved PC gaming.
Then Microsoft and the AAA game studios took notice and we have the XBox store on Windows, and many game launchers, but they are opportunistic companies, who would destroy PC gaming if they could, to get their console profits up.
Hopefully nothing is next for Valve except for continuing to improve what they already have. Valve is very rare in the corporate space; they never went public, and so are providing a good service to customs rather than squeezing every last dime out of customers on behalf of shareholders. The moment Gabe Newell is replaced, or Valve goes public there will be a massive problem with PC gaming.
Valve has a golden opportunity, with little downside, to go next level:
Extend SteamOS to seamlessly support other hardware beyond AMD (Nvidia, Intel), and, also offer a simple and clean Linux desktop environment on it.
No one wants to upgrade from Windows 10. A free, a fully-featured Linux OS SteamOS would put a Steam Store on every PC with relatively little effort and huge potential gains.
Furthermore, Valve can spend one of its many billion USD in closing the hardware compatibility gaps via a compatibility layer to use official driver binary blobs.
(for the time-being, in order to initially open the flood gates for non-AMD hardware users)
Additionally, create a “Steam Store Apps” that’s compatible with, say - Flatpak, and curates free MSOffice and other popular productivity alternatives.
I would love this. My wife has 11 and it's a hot mess. They've been pre-enshitifying 10. As EOL starts creeping up, I'm hoping to jump to Linux. I tried it in the past but it didn't feel ready. When I'm working I'm happy to deal with technical problems but when it's time to relax, I want it to just work and work well. The harder challenge is the pile of drivers and other for the edge cases.
If you're willing to make the jump before GabeN makes it easy for all of us, I can recommend CachyOS with KDE Plasma.
I've recently made the jump and it seems to have stuck. This is at least the fifth time I've tried to switch over the last 20 years and it's the first time it even moderately feels like most things have just worked.
Everyone has upgraded from windows 10 with the exception of like 3 people who are the same people who stayed on windows XP until their favourite game didn’t run on it.
I don't think the XP->Vista upgrade is a good example for the argument you make. Vista is ubiquitously considered a failure and disaster. Its adoption was slow and many who adopted early were disappointed, even though microsoft was running ad campaigns to get people to upgrade. People started upgrading only after windows 7.
Similarly, windows 8 failed to get traction. Most people upgraded with windows 10 (and prob a lot of them due to eol fears).
Should we also mention windows 2000? There is definitely sth with microsoft failing completely every 2 OS generations since then. Maybe they need the feedback to make sth that people wanted to use.
I am less optimistic about the future, though, because I doubt they will double down on bloatware and monetising users, too much money at stake.
Your original comment did not specify gaming, but rather "everyone". Regardless, over 1/3 Windows users of Steam still being on Windows 10 is not "3" (even figuratively). Even that 60%, while a majority, isn't overwhelming.
There is a path including more prosocial corporate structures such as B Corp, Fair Shares, et cetera that explicitly include being functional for all stakeholders.
After years of working in public companies, where nothing mattered beyond the next quarterly results, I’m lucky to be working for a company that’s both a B Corp and an Employee Owned Trust. Instead of exiting to a buyout or IPO the founder basically sold the company to itself.
Makes a huge difference when a company can just remain comfortably profitable and doesn’t have to chase double digit growth.
I have heard from other internet comments (with no sources) that Gabe is planning on handing Valve off to his son when the time comes. Does anyone know if there is any truth to this?
Hopefully some strong regulation against unregulated gambling? As much good as Valve did they are also the source of some original sins, like the battlepass system and the whole skin gambling market. It's a total black market with shady companies all around the world leeching on the Steam API without any oversight from anyone.
> “Anybody who wants to put Valve out of business could do so, but nobody cares,” argues Michael Pachter, a gaming industry analyst at Wedbush Securities.
This is untrue; many tried. Almost every major publisher has its own launcher.
The problem with them all is they absolutely suck.
Even Epic Games Store, the biggest competitor with the most money poured into it, is ridiculously bad in almost every way.
Aside from the lack of network effect, it just misses most of the QOL features, is slow, ugly, and very unpleasant to use.
Almost universal agreement in the PC gaming community is that EGS is a bootloader for free games that it throws at the user.
Every time I use EGS, I am constantly amazed by how bad it is, despite probably tens of millions of investments.
The second point that the article completely misinterprets is Microsoft's role.
Microsoft (Xbox specifically) is hands down the closest company to beating Steam in its own game. PC game pass provides a constant stream of very good games available on day one for dirt cheap. The work that Microsoft is doing on optimizing Windows for games in general and for handheld consoles in particular is very promising (see Xbox Ally X).
This is the threat that Valve faces. Not just a better store, but the absence of a store and "buying games" in general. For example, I intended to buy The Outer Worlds 2 on launch. Now that I know it will be available day one on Game Pass, there is almost zero chance that I will buy it on Steam or anywhere else.
Nothing. They are too comfortable. They are stuck in rainy cloudy Bellevue Washington, in a skyscraper with limited space. Approx the same employee count as decades ago. Neither Epic's games store, EA's Origin, Microsoft's Games for Windows Live, nor Amazon's, was able to dethrone them. They tried to branch out into Movies and Music, they used to sell movies on there but removed the ability in 2019 because no one was using it. Looking back now, it even threw me off, but it's obvious now... People don't want to download movies, they want to stream them like YouTube videos. I'm sure people would want that with games too but that's difficult to do right now. Video games are an emotion, music and movies and books and comics are too. If I were them I'd try to expand Steam so it sells all types of media content. I think it's a mistake not to.
Optimistic Me:
I was worried about them about a decade ago because anytime you think you are "too big to fail" you set yourself up for long term failure and "getting comfortable" is usually what begin's a company's decline. But they've made some really good decisions to branch out. Like getting into hardware. They've got the Steam Link, Steam Machine, Steam Controller, their VR headset "the Index", and their handheld Steam Deck.
The steam deck was a game changer. It's hard to overstate how positive it is in my mind. You can run any cloud gaming service on it. It's open and accessible. It brought a near perfect emulation (ok HAL?) layer to all my Linux machines.
It's breaking windows monopoly and cracking open the other distributors closed systems. I can even run NVIDIAs cloud gaming so I may not even need new hardware.
(Now having said all that I'm still sore over the new doom game which has ray tracing enabled permanently. It invalidates all my old hardware and the steam deck)
A Linux PC handheld is the game changing part. It's a big boon to the Linux gaming community because of the amount of effort Valve has put into Linux in the Proton layer. It gives devs a target Linux platform to build to and test to. And it gives Linux distro devs a target to get very good game compatability.
I see the handheld as a stepping stone. The big benefit to a console style device is a very small amount of hardware to target, whereas the PC market at large is a very large amount of hardware to target.
The handheld was just a market that didn't have much competition at the time. Which likely made it easy to justify it as a business decision for Valve.
Yeah, Linux gaming is amazing in 2025, and it's all down to Steam choosing to run the Deck on
Linux. You don't need the deck for it either, I'm not sure you even need Steam.
Such an incredibly pro-consumer move by a company with such a big market share. Anti-enshitification. Hard to imagine any other big name company doing something so radically positive.
I do have some concerns that other companies will manage to take legal actions that harm Valve's user experience without actually helping consumers.
They have a near-monopoly on PC gaming, which sounds bad at face value. But the only reason for that is that they've continually developed an excellent platform that helps connect people with games that they want to play, and then be able to play them. There are very few marketplaces that strike the right balance of presenting you with options you want, while not artificially getting in your way. (In other words, it's not very enshittified.)
There's nothing stopping someone from never buying another game on Steam, and moving to another marketplace on PC, unlike the store monopolies on consoles and mobile devices.
There's nothing stopping someone from never buying another game on Steam, and moving to another marketplace on PC, unlike the store monopolies on consoles and mobile devices.
Except for the (large) Steam library of games you already have on Steam.
That's a weak form of lock-in though, because you can switch to another platform going forward, and access your previous Steam purchases for free. No ads, no subscription fee. Stay signed out of Steam Chat and the social stuff, and you've basically just got a heavy application launcher.
Compared to PS+ and Xbox Live, which charge subscription fees to continue accessing online content, it's a pretty sweet deal for the consumer.
GP’s point was that you don’t need to close your Steam account because it doesn’t cost anything: you only pay for the individual games, not Steam itself.
EDIT: I believe GP is incorrect about the nature of subscription fees for PS+ and Xbox Live, though. As far as I know, standalone purchases of games from those services do not ever require a paid subscription - you need to retain your account and connectivity for the license checks, but that's free and does not require a paid subscription on either service, so pretty much the same as Steam. But they are correct that those platforms don't provide other store options. EDIT 2: Ah, I misread GP, they said "online content", and maintaining subscriptions on those services is required for that.
It's not any form of lock-in or anti-competitiveness, and it's not an aspect that's specific to Steam. You actually need to substantiate that instead of just claiming it. Almost all the online digital platforms do this, even non-gaming ones, and it's weird that it's only being argued here because it's about Steam.
This is a digital media rights issue, not a Steam issue.
I phrased that as "never buying another game on Steam" because of the existing library aspect. Sure it's nice to just have one launcher, but you can absolutely move to another marketplace while using Steam for the games that you've already bought.
You can keep Steam installed and keep downloading your games through it, but you don't need to give them another penny.
Sure, but it works on all pc platforms and the runtime is pretty light and can be pretty easily circumvented from what I’ve heard.
Of course it will never be as easy as having a single storefront for all your content, but as we can see from the streaming market, that’s not something that will happen either way.
The other platforms on PC are exactly the same though. If you're against Steam because of this particular aspect, you should be against almost all platforms on PC as well as every console and phone platform. This is how it works on almost every digital media platform. It's not sufficient reason to treat Steam like a monopoly, because in itself it's not anti-competitive behaviour.
It's also not solvable unless you legislate platform agnostic licenses that are valid regardless of platform. Fat chance of that ever happening and I doubt that's actually what you're suggesting.
Mobile, they conquered mobile gaming with the Steam Deck. Is the bingbing wahoo really that enduring? Nintendo’s insistence on infantile games will sink them.
hopefully a DRM-free, peer-to-peer network way of distributing games without the abusive 1/4 tax out of your revenue simply because they are hosting your game
don't came with visibility talk because chances of having your indie title being seen there is minimal. marketing exists for a reason and it's also costly. and don't came up with "THEY OFFER ONLINE SERVICES AND OTHER GOODS" because most don't even f* care about dark-pattern-grind-like achievements or a social-media HUB for sharing screenshots or streaming
if they at least sold Deck at a true loss and made a decent VR (also sold at loss) i wouldn't be hating for sure /s
People can always buy on another platform if a publisher chooses to make it available. This isn't the iPhone app store, where you're mostly stuck with whatever Apple demands from you.
You are also absolutely wrong about indie titles. Many of the games that I'm presented on my personalized top pages on Steam are indie. And Steam makes it very easy to find indie games.
I don't understand your point on "marketing exists for a reason and it's also costly". You seem to be undercutting yourself by saying that the marketing provided by the Steam store provides actual value.
Selling hardware at a loss only makes sense when you control everything that's done with it. Consoles can be sold at losses because they can't (generally) be used for purposes other than playing games on which the console makers make money. But a Steam Deck is just a PC. If they sold them at a loss, people could just buy them and use them as PCs.
Steam is literally a monopoly. the Apple argument doesn't cut. you are free to use (F)OSS but go freelance graphic design with Gimp or Krita telling your clients to f*-off Adobe files. or any CAD work.
the average Windows Nvidia user won't trade convenience
just take a quick check on wishlists, buys and views of indie people releasing games on Steam without marketing budget (money or popularity wise). it isn't a magic bullet, otherwise, marketing would be obsolete... even AAA industry burns millions of USD at
30% is a huge hit on top of all the thing studios have to pay. they just comply because it's either that or go home on the PC market; with rare exceptions like Minecraft and whatever popular is out there nowadays
If you buy a steam code via other means than the steam store, they don’t take a cut, and the distribution, hosting, etc is in fact free. Same for steamworks (so the achievements you mentioned).
This is utilized by some publishers who sell keys on their own website, same for e.g. humble bundles.
So yeah, it is in fact a 30% cut for just the store and visibility.
Selling anything at a loss should never be allowed because it's inherently anti-competitive. A big established company can sell at a loss far longer than a small newcomer.
Steam DRM is optional. It's the developer/publishers choice to add it. No one should be getting mad at Valve for providing an option that the publishers ask for. Yell at the publishers.
The fact you want a distribution service to be peer-to-peer kinda implies that distributing a game can have some significant costs. Maybe that 30% isn't quite as abusive as you make it sound?
If it’s optional then they should show a flag in the store indicating whether a game uses it or not. From the player’s perspective they can’t tell if a game doesn’t.
i think what comes next is the entire industry shrinking like the motion picture industry.
i think we're past peak PC gaming, and gaming in general. the real money is in social media, which i suppose steam has elements of. indeed perhaps that is the real fuel for its success, and not the game store aspect.
We are not past peak PC gaming. What we might see soon is the end of big budget AAA game production. It’s not even that AAA games are bad, it’s just they require such a ridiculous amount of production value that they have to be blockbuster after blockbuster to not fail, and when they do fail, they don’t just wipe out the lifetime saving of one guy who quit his job to make an indie game, they wipe out thousands of jobs and entire studios and franchises.
My predictions is by 2030 Xbox will be out of business, PlayStation will be where pretentious auteurs make games that are 80% cutscenes, most savvy gamers play indie PC games, and Nintendo remains the only big name game studio to not collapse.
We are already seeing the beginning of this as less and less games are made targeting the high end, bleeding edge specs. The Nintendo Switch 2 and a wave of portable devices similar in style to it and the Steam Deck will become the target platform for most developers over the next decade. There will be a proper PS6 but it will be incredibly expensive (perhaps more so than the PS5 Pro) and the audience for that will continue to shrink.
AAA games can provide experiences that indie games can't (this is nothing against indie games -- they're just different). So, there will be a market for them, but perhaps at a higher cost than currently in order to cover the risk of failure. Furthermore, large companies like Microsoft or Valve have enough resources to withstand such failures.
Your predictions don’t match any expert analysis I’ve read. Nor my own observations either.
I think Xbox game pass and their streaming services will ensure Xbox will continue to grow.
PlayStation are in a more precarious position because they rely on hardware sales. Xbox doesn’t.
PlayStation is also the hardest platform for amateurs to target.
That said, I don’t expect PlayStation to collapse either.
Your comment also suggest that you think EA would collapse. Which is laughable considering EA make a killing from monthly iterations of sports titles. They could survive on that alone, never mind all their other major cash cows.
People made the same predictions about movie budgets as well. Yet movie studios still make a killing despite the costs.
Not only is what you're saying about being past peak PC gaming factually wrong, but I can't imagine agreeing with your opinion.
How is the real money in social media? Those platforms that make money almost exclusively by making the user experience worse (in particular shoving ads and promoted content down your throat, and harvesting your personal data). In contrast, selling games actively makes money by giving people what they want.
You don't have to participate. I don't play any pay to win games. I play some games with in-game micro transactions like cosmetics and such, but I don't spend money on it.
For me it's really an ideal situation. I can play great games like overwatch 2, Apex legends, cs2, path of exile and more completely for free. I can ignore bullshit games like I dunno Genshin impact? I think that's one of the really toxic pay to win games. There's also that Diablo mobile game. I don't participate in those.
It's that simple. You offer a good deal I take it, offer a bad one I dont.
My prediction is that Netflix will buy Valve when Gabe Newell decides he truly doesn’t care anymore.
From the article:
“… the chart indicates Steam had an operating margin of about 60 per cent and made $2bn of commission revenues, for about $1.3bn in profit just from Steam commissions in 2021.”
That’s a very impressive profit and limits who can afford to buy it. Netflix could pay something like $50 billion in stock to own the gaming market.
https://archive.ph/dmHDP
The view exposed in the article is all wrong. It is MBA-analyst levels of wrong.
Valve didn't conquer anything. Valve defended PC gaming when everybody else including Microsoft, had abandoned it, and focused on consoles.
Windows XP had amazing gaming APIs, like DirectInput: still superior to XInput after all these years, because of more axis and better FFB support; and DirectSound3D, which enabled hardware accelerated 3D positional audio.
These APIs were declared obsolete by Microsoft, in favour of XBox-compatible inferior APIs, which were feature equivalent to the APIs in the inferior hardware of the first XBox console. Inferior not in absolute terms, but inferior to what a PC was capable of.
And that was just the beginning. Microsoft focused and pushed for their console, and most AAA game studios followed suit. Consoles have been incredibly profitable, so their gambit has paid off.
PC Gaming was for old nerds, old game mechanics like FPS (Counter Strike) and RTS (Starcraft) and indie gaming. Valve kept the dream alive. Valve kept open computing alive, in a sense, as consoles are closed computing, and in some cases you need expensive proprietary licenses just to produce a game for one of the consoles, like Nintendo.
So no, it was not that Valve released Steam in the right moment. Valve is a big reason PC gaming is alive and thriving. They believed in PC gaming when all the big companies went the console way.
Valve saved PC gaming.
Then Microsoft and the AAA game studios took notice and we have the XBox store on Windows, and many game launchers, but they are opportunistic companies, who would destroy PC gaming if they could, to get their console profits up.
Hopefully nothing is next for Valve except for continuing to improve what they already have. Valve is very rare in the corporate space; they never went public, and so are providing a good service to customs rather than squeezing every last dime out of customers on behalf of shareholders. The moment Gabe Newell is replaced, or Valve goes public there will be a massive problem with PC gaming.
Let's hope he wants to make Steam his legacy, and, upon retirement, will put it in a trust that precludes profit maximization.
Valve has a golden opportunity, with little downside, to go next level:
Extend SteamOS to seamlessly support other hardware beyond AMD (Nvidia, Intel), and, also offer a simple and clean Linux desktop environment on it.
No one wants to upgrade from Windows 10. A free, a fully-featured Linux OS SteamOS would put a Steam Store on every PC with relatively little effort and huge potential gains.
Furthermore, Valve can spend one of its many billion USD in closing the hardware compatibility gaps via a compatibility layer to use official driver binary blobs.
(for the time-being, in order to initially open the flood gates for non-AMD hardware users)
Additionally, create a “Steam Store Apps” that’s compatible with, say - Flatpak, and curates free MSOffice and other popular productivity alternatives.
Steam already does software.
Always hoped that Valve / Epic might find a way to collaborate on an operating system. The enemy of my enemy..
I would love this. My wife has 11 and it's a hot mess. They've been pre-enshitifying 10. As EOL starts creeping up, I'm hoping to jump to Linux. I tried it in the past but it didn't feel ready. When I'm working I'm happy to deal with technical problems but when it's time to relax, I want it to just work and work well. The harder challenge is the pile of drivers and other for the edge cases.
If you're willing to make the jump before GabeN makes it easy for all of us, I can recommend CachyOS with KDE Plasma.
I've recently made the jump and it seems to have stuck. This is at least the fifth time I've tried to switch over the last 20 years and it's the first time it even moderately feels like most things have just worked.
Everyone has upgraded from windows 10 with the exception of like 3 people who are the same people who stayed on windows XP until their favourite game didn’t run on it.
35,69% of steam users run windows 10 in june 2025 .
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
Thanks for proving my point.
They very explicitly disproved your point.
I don't think the XP->Vista upgrade is a good example for the argument you make. Vista is ubiquitously considered a failure and disaster. Its adoption was slow and many who adopted early were disappointed, even though microsoft was running ad campaigns to get people to upgrade. People started upgrading only after windows 7.
Similarly, windows 8 failed to get traction. Most people upgraded with windows 10 (and prob a lot of them due to eol fears).
Should we also mention windows 2000? There is definitely sth with microsoft failing completely every 2 OS generations since then. Maybe they need the feedback to make sth that people wanted to use.
I am less optimistic about the future, though, because I doubt they will double down on bloatware and monetising users, too much money at stake.
That is factually wrong. According to [1], Windows 11 has only just about caught up to Windows 10 in marketshare.
[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/2834970/windows-11-has-nearl...
And then there’s steam which sits at ~60% for windows 11. Or are we not talking about gaming?
Your original comment did not specify gaming, but rather "everyone". Regardless, over 1/3 Windows users of Steam still being on Windows 10 is not "3" (even figuratively). Even that 60%, while a majority, isn't overwhelming.
It really depends whether VALVe remains the Benevolent Dictatorship of GabeN or sells out, goes public or something.
In the latter case, what happens is the Extraction Vultures roll in, pitch some flashy slides about innovation and then progressively ruin PC gaming.
That can't be allowed to happen, so therefore, VALVe can't be allowed to monopolise this market.
There is a path including more prosocial corporate structures such as B Corp, Fair Shares, et cetera that explicitly include being functional for all stakeholders.
After years of working in public companies, where nothing mattered beyond the next quarterly results, I’m lucky to be working for a company that’s both a B Corp and an Employee Owned Trust. Instead of exiting to a buyout or IPO the founder basically sold the company to itself.
Makes a huge difference when a company can just remain comfortably profitable and doesn’t have to chase double digit growth.
From the article:
> it basically prints money.
Is "next" needed, then?
(the title is a hook - the article is overall a nice coverage of valve, worth a read)
I have heard from other internet comments (with no sources) that Gabe is planning on handing Valve off to his son when the time comes. Does anyone know if there is any truth to this?
Hopefully some strong regulation against unregulated gambling? As much good as Valve did they are also the source of some original sins, like the battlepass system and the whole skin gambling market. It's a total black market with shady companies all around the world leeching on the Steam API without any oversight from anyone.
Steam's anti-piracy measure is being better, convenient, adding massive value to gamers.
> “Anybody who wants to put Valve out of business could do so, but nobody cares,” argues Michael Pachter, a gaming industry analyst at Wedbush Securities.
This is untrue; many tried. Almost every major publisher has its own launcher. The problem with them all is they absolutely suck. Even Epic Games Store, the biggest competitor with the most money poured into it, is ridiculously bad in almost every way. Aside from the lack of network effect, it just misses most of the QOL features, is slow, ugly, and very unpleasant to use. Almost universal agreement in the PC gaming community is that EGS is a bootloader for free games that it throws at the user. Every time I use EGS, I am constantly amazed by how bad it is, despite probably tens of millions of investments.
The second point that the article completely misinterprets is Microsoft's role. Microsoft (Xbox specifically) is hands down the closest company to beating Steam in its own game. PC game pass provides a constant stream of very good games available on day one for dirt cheap. The work that Microsoft is doing on optimizing Windows for games in general and for handheld consoles in particular is very promising (see Xbox Ally X). This is the threat that Valve faces. Not just a better store, but the absence of a store and "buying games" in general. For example, I intended to buy The Outer Worlds 2 on launch. Now that I know it will be available day one on Game Pass, there is almost zero chance that I will buy it on Steam or anywhere else.
GOG has the only serous competitor to Steam IMO. It's the only big store that's well behaved enough for people to actually want to use it.
Pessimistic Me:
Nothing. They are too comfortable. They are stuck in rainy cloudy Bellevue Washington, in a skyscraper with limited space. Approx the same employee count as decades ago. Neither Epic's games store, EA's Origin, Microsoft's Games for Windows Live, nor Amazon's, was able to dethrone them. They tried to branch out into Movies and Music, they used to sell movies on there but removed the ability in 2019 because no one was using it. Looking back now, it even threw me off, but it's obvious now... People don't want to download movies, they want to stream them like YouTube videos. I'm sure people would want that with games too but that's difficult to do right now. Video games are an emotion, music and movies and books and comics are too. If I were them I'd try to expand Steam so it sells all types of media content. I think it's a mistake not to.
Optimistic Me:
I was worried about them about a decade ago because anytime you think you are "too big to fail" you set yourself up for long term failure and "getting comfortable" is usually what begin's a company's decline. But they've made some really good decisions to branch out. Like getting into hardware. They've got the Steam Link, Steam Machine, Steam Controller, their VR headset "the Index", and their handheld Steam Deck.
So I guess Valve's a hardware company too now.
The steam deck was a game changer. It's hard to overstate how positive it is in my mind. You can run any cloud gaming service on it. It's open and accessible. It brought a near perfect emulation (ok HAL?) layer to all my Linux machines.
It's breaking windows monopoly and cracking open the other distributors closed systems. I can even run NVIDIAs cloud gaming so I may not even need new hardware.
(Now having said all that I'm still sore over the new doom game which has ray tracing enabled permanently. It invalidates all my old hardware and the steam deck)
How was it a game changer? We had handheld gaming units before steam deck and the rig ally outsells the steam deck.
A Linux PC handheld is the game changing part. It's a big boon to the Linux gaming community because of the amount of effort Valve has put into Linux in the Proton layer. It gives devs a target Linux platform to build to and test to. And it gives Linux distro devs a target to get very good game compatability.
Isn’t the game changer proton. Not the handheld.
I see the handheld as a stepping stone. The big benefit to a console style device is a very small amount of hardware to target, whereas the PC market at large is a very large amount of hardware to target.
The handheld was just a market that didn't have much competition at the time. Which likely made it easy to justify it as a business decision for Valve.
The handheld was a necessary and sufficient business case to develop and spread proton. Now we have it.
SteamOS & proton.
Yeah, Linux gaming is amazing in 2025, and it's all down to Steam choosing to run the Deck on Linux. You don't need the deck for it either, I'm not sure you even need Steam.
Such an incredibly pro-consumer move by a company with such a big market share. Anti-enshitification. Hard to imagine any other big name company doing something so radically positive.
I do have some concerns that other companies will manage to take legal actions that harm Valve's user experience without actually helping consumers.
They have a near-monopoly on PC gaming, which sounds bad at face value. But the only reason for that is that they've continually developed an excellent platform that helps connect people with games that they want to play, and then be able to play them. There are very few marketplaces that strike the right balance of presenting you with options you want, while not artificially getting in your way. (In other words, it's not very enshittified.)
There's nothing stopping someone from never buying another game on Steam, and moving to another marketplace on PC, unlike the store monopolies on consoles and mobile devices.
That's a weak form of lock-in though, because you can switch to another platform going forward, and access your previous Steam purchases for free. No ads, no subscription fee. Stay signed out of Steam Chat and the social stuff, and you've basically just got a heavy application launcher.
Compared to PS+ and Xbox Live, which charge subscription fees to continue accessing online content, it's a pretty sweet deal for the consumer.
Eh.. how can you access your steam games on another platform for free?
AFAIK your games are locked to your account, and you'd need to log in at least once a month or something to keep access even in offline mode.
If you close your steam account you lose everything, so I don't see how that's a weak form of lock-in?
GP’s point was that you don’t need to close your Steam account because it doesn’t cost anything: you only pay for the individual games, not Steam itself.
EDIT: I believe GP is incorrect about the nature of subscription fees for PS+ and Xbox Live, though. As far as I know, standalone purchases of games from those services do not ever require a paid subscription - you need to retain your account and connectivity for the license checks, but that's free and does not require a paid subscription on either service, so pretty much the same as Steam. But they are correct that those platforms don't provide other store options. EDIT 2: Ah, I misread GP, they said "online content", and maintaining subscriptions on those services is required for that.
It's not any form of lock-in or anti-competitiveness, and it's not an aspect that's specific to Steam. You actually need to substantiate that instead of just claiming it. Almost all the online digital platforms do this, even non-gaming ones, and it's weird that it's only being argued here because it's about Steam.
This is a digital media rights issue, not a Steam issue.
I phrased that as "never buying another game on Steam" because of the existing library aspect. Sure it's nice to just have one launcher, but you can absolutely move to another marketplace while using Steam for the games that you've already bought.
You can keep Steam installed and keep downloading your games through it, but you don't need to give them another penny.
Sure, but it works on all pc platforms and the runtime is pretty light and can be pretty easily circumvented from what I’ve heard.
Of course it will never be as easy as having a single storefront for all your content, but as we can see from the streaming market, that’s not something that will happen either way.
The other platforms on PC are exactly the same though. If you're against Steam because of this particular aspect, you should be against almost all platforms on PC as well as every console and phone platform. This is how it works on almost every digital media platform. It's not sufficient reason to treat Steam like a monopoly, because in itself it's not anti-competitive behaviour.
It's also not solvable unless you legislate platform agnostic licenses that are valid regardless of platform. Fat chance of that ever happening and I doubt that's actually what you're suggesting.
Mobile, they conquered mobile gaming with the Steam Deck. Is the bingbing wahoo really that enduring? Nintendo’s insistence on infantile games will sink them.
hopefully a DRM-free, peer-to-peer network way of distributing games without the abusive 1/4 tax out of your revenue simply because they are hosting your game
don't came with visibility talk because chances of having your indie title being seen there is minimal. marketing exists for a reason and it's also costly. and don't came up with "THEY OFFER ONLINE SERVICES AND OTHER GOODS" because most don't even f* care about dark-pattern-grind-like achievements or a social-media HUB for sharing screenshots or streaming
if they at least sold Deck at a true loss and made a decent VR (also sold at loss) i wouldn't be hating for sure /s
People can always buy on another platform if a publisher chooses to make it available. This isn't the iPhone app store, where you're mostly stuck with whatever Apple demands from you.
You are also absolutely wrong about indie titles. Many of the games that I'm presented on my personalized top pages on Steam are indie. And Steam makes it very easy to find indie games.
I don't understand your point on "marketing exists for a reason and it's also costly". You seem to be undercutting yourself by saying that the marketing provided by the Steam store provides actual value.
Selling hardware at a loss only makes sense when you control everything that's done with it. Consoles can be sold at losses because they can't (generally) be used for purposes other than playing games on which the console makers make money. But a Steam Deck is just a PC. If they sold them at a loss, people could just buy them and use them as PCs.
Steam is literally a monopoly. the Apple argument doesn't cut. you are free to use (F)OSS but go freelance graphic design with Gimp or Krita telling your clients to f*-off Adobe files. or any CAD work. the average Windows Nvidia user won't trade convenience
just take a quick check on wishlists, buys and views of indie people releasing games on Steam without marketing budget (money or popularity wise). it isn't a magic bullet, otherwise, marketing would be obsolete... even AAA industry burns millions of USD at
30% is a huge hit on top of all the thing studios have to pay. they just comply because it's either that or go home on the PC market; with rare exceptions like Minecraft and whatever popular is out there nowadays
If you buy a steam code via other means than the steam store, they don’t take a cut, and the distribution, hosting, etc is in fact free. Same for steamworks (so the achievements you mentioned).
This is utilized by some publishers who sell keys on their own website, same for e.g. humble bundles.
So yeah, it is in fact a 30% cut for just the store and visibility.
The chances of having your indie title being seen anywhere is minimal.
The P2P network exists, it's called bittorrent
Selling anything at a loss should never be allowed because it's inherently anti-competitive. A big established company can sell at a loss far longer than a small newcomer.
Steam DRM is optional. It's the developer/publishers choice to add it. No one should be getting mad at Valve for providing an option that the publishers ask for. Yell at the publishers.
The fact you want a distribution service to be peer-to-peer kinda implies that distributing a game can have some significant costs. Maybe that 30% isn't quite as abusive as you make it sound?
If it’s optional then they should show a flag in the store indicating whether a game uses it or not. From the player’s perspective they can’t tell if a game doesn’t.
>Steam DRM is optional.
Having to install Steam and sign in with a Steam account to install a game is a form of DRM.
i think what comes next is the entire industry shrinking like the motion picture industry.
i think we're past peak PC gaming, and gaming in general. the real money is in social media, which i suppose steam has elements of. indeed perhaps that is the real fuel for its success, and not the game store aspect.
We are not past peak PC gaming. What we might see soon is the end of big budget AAA game production. It’s not even that AAA games are bad, it’s just they require such a ridiculous amount of production value that they have to be blockbuster after blockbuster to not fail, and when they do fail, they don’t just wipe out the lifetime saving of one guy who quit his job to make an indie game, they wipe out thousands of jobs and entire studios and franchises.
My predictions is by 2030 Xbox will be out of business, PlayStation will be where pretentious auteurs make games that are 80% cutscenes, most savvy gamers play indie PC games, and Nintendo remains the only big name game studio to not collapse.
We are already seeing the beginning of this as less and less games are made targeting the high end, bleeding edge specs. The Nintendo Switch 2 and a wave of portable devices similar in style to it and the Steam Deck will become the target platform for most developers over the next decade. There will be a proper PS6 but it will be incredibly expensive (perhaps more so than the PS5 Pro) and the audience for that will continue to shrink.
AAA games can provide experiences that indie games can't (this is nothing against indie games -- they're just different). So, there will be a market for them, but perhaps at a higher cost than currently in order to cover the risk of failure. Furthermore, large companies like Microsoft or Valve have enough resources to withstand such failures.
What would that be? I haven't had an AAA game deliver something that an indie game couldn't
Your predictions don’t match any expert analysis I’ve read. Nor my own observations either.
I think Xbox game pass and their streaming services will ensure Xbox will continue to grow.
PlayStation are in a more precarious position because they rely on hardware sales. Xbox doesn’t.
PlayStation is also the hardest platform for amateurs to target.
That said, I don’t expect PlayStation to collapse either.
Your comment also suggest that you think EA would collapse. Which is laughable considering EA make a killing from monthly iterations of sports titles. They could survive on that alone, never mind all their other major cash cows.
People made the same predictions about movie budgets as well. Yet movie studios still make a killing despite the costs.
Not only is what you're saying about being past peak PC gaming factually wrong, but I can't imagine agreeing with your opinion.
How is the real money in social media? Those platforms that make money almost exclusively by making the user experience worse (in particular shoving ads and promoted content down your throat, and harvesting your personal data). In contrast, selling games actively makes money by giving people what they want.
Only a subset of games aren't toxic as you describe. Plenty of toxic micro-transaction and gambling mechanics exist.
You don't have to participate. I don't play any pay to win games. I play some games with in-game micro transactions like cosmetics and such, but I don't spend money on it.
For me it's really an ideal situation. I can play great games like overwatch 2, Apex legends, cs2, path of exile and more completely for free. I can ignore bullshit games like I dunno Genshin impact? I think that's one of the really toxic pay to win games. There's also that Diablo mobile game. I don't participate in those.
It's that simple. You offer a good deal I take it, offer a bad one I dont.
Care to elaborate what is this "peak PC gaming" we're past?
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My prediction is that Netflix will buy Valve when Gabe Newell decides he truly doesn’t care anymore.
From the article:
“… the chart indicates Steam had an operating margin of about 60 per cent and made $2bn of commission revenues, for about $1.3bn in profit just from Steam commissions in 2021.”
That’s a very impressive profit and limits who can afford to buy it. Netflix could pay something like $50 billion in stock to own the gaming market.
this pretty much will turn Steam into a subscription.
Keep paying or loose your library of "licensed" games ????
this would probably be too evil, even for today's End-game Corporate America,
so it'll probably be a mix of a subscription for any and all new games, but you can keep your old games if your account is old enough
Netflix can't buy if Gaben is not selling.