[ChrisNorstrom]

Pessimistic Me:

Nothing. They are too comfortable. They are stuck in rainy cloudy Bellevue Washington, in a skyscraper with limited space. Approx the same employee count as decades ago. Neither Epic's games store, EA's Origin, Microsoft's Games for Windows Live, nor Amazon's, was able to dethrone them. They tried to branch out into Movies and Music, they used to sell movies on there but removed the ability in 2019 because no one was using it. Looking back now, it even threw me off, but it's obvious now... People don't want to download movies, they want to stream them like YouTube videos. I'm sure people would want that with games too but that's difficult to do right now. Video games are an emotion, music and movies and books and comics are too. If I were them I'd try to expand Steam so it sells all types of media content. I think it's a mistake not to.

Optimistic Me:

I was worried about them about a decade ago because anytime you think you are "too big to fail" you set yourself up for long term failure and "getting comfortable" is usually what begin's a company's decline. But they've made some really good decisions to branch out. Like getting into hardware. They've got the Steam Link, Steam Machine, Steam Controller, their VR headset "the Index", and their handheld Steam Deck.

So I guess Valve's a hardware company too now.

[jvanderbot]

The steam deck was a game changer. It's hard to overstate how positive it is in my mind. You can run any cloud gaming service on it. It's open and accessible. It brought a near perfect emulation (ok HAL?) layer to all my Linux machines.

It's breaking windows monopoly and cracking open the other distributors closed systems. I can even run NVIDIAs cloud gaming so I may not even need new hardware.

(Now having said all that I'm still sore over the new doom game which has ray tracing enabled permanently. It invalidates all my old hardware and the steam deck)

[wordofx]

How was it a game changer? We had handheld gaming units before steam deck and the rig ally outsells the steam deck.

[ixwt]

A Linux PC handheld is the game changing part. It's a big boon to the Linux gaming community because of the amount of effort Valve has put into Linux in the Proton layer. It gives devs a target Linux platform to build to and test to. And it gives Linux distro devs a target to get very good game compatability.

[wordofx]

Isn’t the game changer proton. Not the handheld.

[ixwt]

I see the handheld as a stepping stone. The big benefit to a console style device is a very small amount of hardware to target, whereas the PC market at large is a very large amount of hardware to target.

The handheld was just a market that didn't have much competition at the time. Which likely made it easy to justify it as a business decision for Valve.

[samrus]

Its all part of the stack. Every part of it was critical. Id say proton without the deck wouldnt have the same impact because there would be nothing to create the groundswell of linux adoption for gaming

[jvanderbot]

The handheld was a necessary and sufficient business case to develop and spread proton. Now we have it.

[multjoy]

SteamOS & proton.

[specproc]

Yeah, Linux gaming is amazing in 2025, and it's all down to Steam choosing to run the Deck on Linux. You don't need the deck for it either, I'm not sure you even need Steam.

Such an incredibly pro-consumer move by a company with such a big market share. Anti-enshitification. Hard to imagine any other big name company doing something so radically positive.