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Valve isn't without its faults though. I've talked to plenty of people who are somewhat tired of the chokehold Steam seems to have on the gaming ecosystem. They may not be exactly destroying their image with mistakes like this past Christmas[0], but I imagine they're not fostering a lot of loyalty.

[0]http://gadgets.ndtv.com/games/news/steam-offline-after-secur...

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As a longtime Steam customer, I've also grown fed up with what I perceive as Valve's attitude of complacency. There are numerous GUI bugs and usability annoyances on Steam for Windows that have long gone unaddressed - for instance, the lack of a "Confirm Order" progress spinner on the store checkout page, or the mobile app's inability to correctly load the Steam market "Confirmations" view on first try (always succeeds on retry, which I _always_ have to do manually). As an outsider, I imagine Valve's flat-org developers sitting fat and happy on their pile of Monopoly money, with little incentive to improve their current product so long as it keeps printing money. In this frame of mind, I'm happy about Twitch's announcement as it means Valve could finally see some real competition.

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