Sounds like Valve lacks direction.
Valve makes ridiculous amounts of money, has no board, Gabe Newell can do whatever he wants with the company. I think he's really taken a retired seat. Steam's social platform is lacking, the technology behind it all is old (Just look a the steam API), and they aren't investing into anything. Even customer support is majorly lacking. The second Amazon starts selling games, its game over. They can advertise their client and services through twitch, and connect games and players back to twitch and the Curse client. Thats the triangle of doom to competitors, where you control the product, the platform and the community. They have it all in the bag, and it was so blindingly obvious.
I agree with your main point of steam's slow movement, but the other thing is that steam is a very large incumbent with pretty high switching costs. I don't see them going away because a different platform offers twitch integration, because I can already stream twitch with my steam library that has hundreds of games in it. And if twitch limited that somehow, I think the pull of the user's library would overpower the pull of one individual streaming platform. It costs a lot more to switch the library after all.
I have probably refunded 10 games in the past year or so for various reasons. I've gotten sales and deals unimaginable before the days of steam. I can't imagine any other company letting me get away with such things. Arguably, we have the EU to thank for that, but Valve has zero obligation to allow this policy for US customers like me, but did so anyway.
> I think he's really taken a retired seat.
From my reading of recent VR history, he's fairly hands on with it. I did read an interview where he claims he purposely puts himself in the backseat because he didn't want to become "King of Valve" where his personal taste and ideas trump everyone else's. He something of the anti-Jobs.
>Valve makes ridiculous amounts of money, has no board, Gabe Newell can do whatever he wants with the company.
Privately held companies have different pros and cons than publicly held ones. I can't imagine Valve being a better company as a public entity. Think of all the investor-minded decisions (must hit certain milestones, projections, etc) that have doomed gaming companies in the past. Valve is largely immune to that, but as you say, comes with the price of being fairly slow moving compared to their peers.