I suspect there is quite a bit of turmoil inside the walls of Valve right now due to a series of large, failed bets that will eventually threaten their cash-cow platform.

> Steam controller/Steam Link

Huge flop. These are being practically given away now as Valve looks to get rid of their excess inventory. This being hardware, it had to be an expensive venture that failed to penetrate the living room.

> Steam machines

Another stinker, though Valve was able to successfully offload most of the risk onto OEMs with this one. Opportunity cost still bites.

> VR

I commend Valve for putting all their chips in on this, but it looks like the VR industry had yet another cold start. This will go down as an almost total loss.

All the while Valve has been neglecting game development which, while admittedly much more expensive and less rewarding than running a sales platform, ensures that there's a sufficient amount of first party titles to keep users on Steam.

With the advent of Fortnite and competing platforms from other triple-A studios, it's not so farfetched to imagine a complete fracturing of the games platform market over the next 5-10 years. Valve needs a return-to-roots moment to prevent this from happening