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Comment by MattRix | Hacker News Reader

The fact that they’re a private company helps a lot. There’s less incentive to extract money from customers in new ways that are lucrative in the short term but damaging in the long run.

I think their company structure also helps, where employees generally don’t work on things unless they actually want to. This means that you don’t end up with designers redesigning UIs that don’t actually need it, etc.

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I think about this a lot. I don't have _that_ much invested in Steam. (about 30 games) But if they ever go public, it's all over. I can't think of a public tech company that doesn't cannibalize its user base until it becomes unusable garbage. There's also the fact that Valve has done more for Linux gaming than anyone else. If Valve goes public, I'm probably done with PC gaming for the rest of my life.

You are right, Valve being private removes a lot of the incentives to mess with Steam in ways I would consider negative.

Eventually the people that run it now will age and die, and one day the vampires will move in to suck its corpse dry. May not be our problem but will be someone's problem.

    Eventually the people that run it now will age and die, 
    and one day the vampires will move in to suck its corpse dry.
    May not be our problem but will be someone's problem.

There's gotta be a fourth verse here that completes it.

  Anyway, thanks, Past. Signed, The Present...

  P.S. Maybe The Future can stop them?

I offer the classic "This too shall pass."

Why put off today what can be done to stop them?

It's possible that the company could be converted into a worker cooperative, which wouldn't be much of a stretch given their current (largely hierarchyless) company structure. There is no reason it wouldn't work.

They're a storefront that charges ~30% and they're pretty dominant in their market.

They make enough money —they're practically printing it— to never need investment, and they don't seem to piss it away like your FAANGs.

Which is all to say, even down the line, why would they risk it all for more money? Might seem naive but private ownership allows them to maintain this course.

I wonder how much money they have in the bank compared to Nintendo.

Main problem of being too successful is that you can't let money sit in the bank, especially if you are a public company.

On the one hand it will be sad if Steam declines as it is overall a fantastic service for gamers. On the other, they definitely occupy a close-to-monopoly like position in the market so it might be good to have that opened up.

> they definitely occupy a close-to-monopoly

I think this has changed, at least in my view recently. I find a lot more of my time spent on games in Xbox Gamepass than on Steam these days and have a bunch more launchers as publishers have pushed games to their own platforms.

They also mostly tend to do things when the time is right rather than when they think other people think the time is right — they can be quite conservative both in tech and game design but that also means they don't ship broken crap too often which is surprisingly rare in the industry.

Artifact, Steam machines, Steam Link... they have a lot of misses with relatively low quantity output.

Steam controller. I waited for them to release a v2 with embedded battery and better build quality and it never came. I guess the Steamdeck benefitted from it, but I'd still like it as a controller.

Oh, very much so. Because of vision issues, I need to plug my Steam Deck into a monitor to play comfortably, but the USB-C connection isn't reliable enough while actually using the Deck as a controller. I need an external controller for my deck, but one that's as good as the Deck (non-negotiable requirements: gyro, back buttons). I wish I could just order a Steam Controller v2 (with two sticks, just like on the Deck).

I love my steam controller to this day.

Artifact… yeah.

Steam machines… yeah, maybe but no, not really? The first iteration yes, but the steam deck is a very successful handheld steam machine after all.

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