Being privately held helps a ton. Gabe is his own boss. Once a company's public they're beholden to the investors, and investors want big short term returns so they can dump their stock and move onto the next one.

Valve able to do that because they are private company, the exponential growth is only made mandatory because of the stakeholder. if the growth is stagnant(even with healthy profit), it's very unattractive to investor, hence growth is needed to keep the cog running.

Mark my word, once Gabe pass it's gonna be very very different. We have very different things to worried about, like climate change, but on software side and tech we shouldn't rely on monopolies. Valve was kept in that state because all the competition didn't actually put up a fight worth extra investment. The windows store pushed valve to develop SteamOS and Proton, they also back off on some revenue split policy because of EGS's deals. (Let's be honest, not all players care about which launcher they use, as long as they get better deals and can play the game they want.)

And to my experience, Steam's recent years' updates to store/client are not something I like as well.

• I don't like the gamification of sales event etc.
• I don't like the new unlimited scroll type, they backed off a bit and become like 3 pages long until you hit the top/popular/sales part.
• I also don't like some of the UI changes(ie the downloads/library mixed together and not separate item)
• I hated the auto start live streaming thing, if there is option to turn off that please let me know.

For EGS,

• their search sucks
• library page sucks, you can't really organize your free games/purchased games etc.
• auto updates are pretty on par so that's okay.
• their friends/etc also sucks.(not that I care much but at least it's far worse than steam one.)
• I like that they adopted Nintendo's gold coin reward type to encourage consumer to purchase there.
• games from other big publisher usually do require install their clients as well, which sucks. (it's similar on steam as well.)

Valve seems to be the only company on this capitalist world that actually understands that company profits cannot and should not grow exponentially forever without eventually destroying itself.

Nah, they are many of them, maybe even the majority of companies are like that (think SMBs). The peculiarity of Valve is that it also managed to become and stay the world leader in its domain, so every nerd knows about it.

Exactly this! I dread the day they go public :(

See also: Reddit's direction to eventually IPO

they can't think long term

Well they can, but only in one way: Grow by selling at a loss to outcompete other and then make a profit.

I'm mad HL2 ended on a cliff hanger and I'm really mad at how they handled TF2. Overall though yeah valve gud.

Honestly, when I think of the word "corporate" with its negative baggage, the last entity I will think of is Valve. They've been consistent and good for the past decades thanks to Gabe Newell. If there is any rich tech mogul who should be celebrated more than Elon Musk or Bill Gates, it's Gabe.

The advantage atm is that valves privately owned. The moment they go public, be very wary.

Valve opened in the late 90s and is privately owned. Never say never where corporations and capitalism are concerned... But hopefully they wont take the evil google approach this late in the game. I think good will from their customers really sets them apart from competitors like Epic.

LOL Valve is not "starting out". They are about as old as Google.

Valve didn't suddenly get big, they've been dominating the PC space for many, many years.

I think this is the difference between private/public companies. They don't have to deal with the "growth at all costs" mindset that plague public companies.

I really hope that he is planned out his successor meticulously,

Imagine if it was as Ban Happy as Reddit, Corporate as Youtube, or... owned by Elon Musk

I think it would be awesome if he turned it into a nonprofit with a healthy endowment. The charter could say that any profits above $X that can't be invested into improving PC gaming must go to charities that promote indie dev. So the main goal would be to do things like the Steam Deck or build innovative games, and there would be little incentive to screw over customers. It could also be structured like a coop, so if employees didn't like the CEO's direction, they could vote to remove them.

That's what I would do, but I'm obviously not GabeN.

Never seen that game in my homepage... You may have played similar games

It could be that part of their algorithm involves significantly weighting past sales by a publisher/development studio, especially early in the life cycle.

They definitely give curated preference to companies that have had successful games on steam. I wouldn't be surprised if they have something worked out with EA.

Honestly, I wouldn't try to gotcha Valve on anything. They are a games distributor, and they will do and say anything to promote games that are selling well, and the developers and publishers behind them. They don't give a crap about games or devs that aren't selling. Nor would/should they.