this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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If tomorrow someone made a better Steam, how many years would you have to wait to be reasonably secure that it's not fueled by venture capital and serving as a loss leader foot-in-the-door scheme? It's not impossible that Steam itself would enshittify and open an IPO, but the fact that the option's been on the table for decades and Valve hasn't taken it is better evidence than any other platform could muster. Valve has proven that it's profitable and that it doesn't need to care about YoY growth. Let's overestimate their operations costs (CDN, R&D, employee salaries, hardware production, licensing, etc etc) at 5 billion a year. If they made ten billion in revenue last year and only make seven billion this year, Valve is fine. Think about that. Think about what a sixty percent drop in profits would do to literally any shareholder-backed company. It'd be apocalyptic.
That's the main reason I'll use Steam happily but never install another storefront on my PC. I'll buy games on GOG or Itch as DRM-free installers, and store the installers locally, and I'll buy and play games that distribute without a storefront launcher, but the only "storefront platform" anyone's gonna get me to install in the next decade is Steam. If "better Steam" happens, it needs to demonstrate immunity to being bought out by Microsoft/Elon Musk for eighty morbillion dollars. And that can't be demonstrated in a day.
That's without any mention of actual "features" like reviews or remote play or proton or steam input or anything that actually makes Steam as a program good/bad. It's all about the company's refusal to go shareholder-driven. If Gabe sells Valve or his successors do, I'm off the ship and scraping the DRM off of my library. What I won't do if that happens is go to someone else's shareholder-value-generating storefront.
Gabe Newell is a man who, for the past decade at least, has had a big red button on his desk. This button, if pressed, will deposit eleven or twelve figures directly into his wallet to distribute however he likes, at the cost of letting some company gain control of how Valve operates. Make all his employees multimillionaires! Race Musk and Bezos for biggest number! Buy a small country! Whatever! Gabe Newell has not pressed this button, and has signaled that after his retirement or death that no successor to the company is going to be allowed to press it either. If Newell's managed not to press it for this long, I'll "trust" him as far as it goes. His successor hasn't earned that trust yet, so is only coasting on "trusting Newell to pick the right guy" which isn't guaranteed - a lot of guys would sacrifice a lot to press that button.
Valve will never IPO, why would they? They own a money printing machine that doesn’t need any more capital. They will print money until the heat death of the universe if we let it. Moreover, since they’re not a public company they don’t have to share their financials and if they did that people would be likely to sing a different tune.
I’ve never seen a conceivable scenario where anything else can happen unless Valve does something mental on purpose.
Some people here raised they concern that they don’t value Valve input to merit 30% cut and would take lower price if it meant it didn’t have features they don’t use. What’s happening now means there’s no real free market or competition.
Valve will never IPO, yes! I don't care why. That automatically makes it better than any other launcher/storefront platform that'll exist in my lifetime, barring one that commits to staying private, succeeds as a private company, and is content with "staying profitable" for x years. Platforms that IPO universally get worse and worse as they wring every drop of shareholder value from their users to feed the infinite growth machine. Platforms that have shareholders (which includes Epic and CDPR's GOG) have a primary motive of "being more profitable than last year". If, let's say, Epic made ten billion dollars in profit last year but also made ten billion dollars in profit in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, it'd be a failed company.
I'll happily take the only company in the PC gaming space that's content with one money printer over every other option that's always thinking about how to make a second one, or reduce the ink costs, or blah blah blah. It's just a happy coincidence that in the PC gaming space (unlike pretty much every other space), the shareholder-free thing is also the most popular, and best thing. I'd use the worse less-popular thing if that thing were the only thing free from growth capitalism.
If a game dev doesn't value their presence on the Steam store higher than the cost of Steam's service, they don't list on Steam. Simple as. It's just that a lot of dev studios consider "visible on the Steam store" to be very valuable indeed. That's what they're paying for, not the stuff about Steam that benefits the user (client features like Input, Workshop, Cloud, Community, etc).