They don’t have the means to produce at scale, which has resulted in wild price fluctuations on their end. (even though to steamdeck OLED did sell out at the much higher price.) To me at most they will continue with the controller, but that’s about it.
Windows is something like 93% of the Steam market the last survey. Valves survival depends on Microsoft not fucking them over. Doing something that may strictly be costing them some money for reducing the threat makes economic sense.
Pushing the Linux number higher will make it more attractive to make a native Linux version of games.
This is a rational long term business plan. As long as their board, investors, and CEO can avoid the chronic “line need go up now!” motivation that pretty much every public company succumbs to we’ll be alright.
Valve is not public, Gabe owns more than 50% of the shares so he has de facto 100% of the power.
Even if they were public, don’t you think that shareholders, CEOs, board would realise the same thing and adapt a similar strategy? Ubisoft, EA and the likes have all pushed their own Steam competitor because they were under the thumb of Valve dominating the market on PC. Which one of the platforms is the one that regularly handed out free games? They don’t have the same urgency to do hardware because they have consoles if Windows locks down.
Yeah, they still have investors, a board, and CEO per my comment, as long as they don’t lose their mind like a public company would, we’ll be good.
Ubisoft is public and EA was public until recently.
Do you mean they lost their mind when they developed their steam competitors?