linuxmemes

Just my two cents but as others have said, not being publically traded helps a lot. The focus on short term benefits that come with shareholders stops "master plans" when they come with mistakes. Learning from relative failures, like the steam controller and the like, ultimately contributes to major successes like the steam deck. Being able to stay committed to improving the software experience over time, instead of killing the product when it didn't immediately succeed, is fairly rare in the tech industry. And in all honesty, it would be better if they released a polished profuct, but being committed to it made it a success.

I feel like the pressure to have a majorly successful product day one means that smaller companies can't innovate the way they want to, so they have to find other ways to produce revenue. Huge companies, like Apple can afford to do both but still stumble, like with the vision pro. Maybe it'll be a success, but for now its not great and iteration makes it more difficult to maintain the original vision.

Honestly, the secret is not being a publicly traded company. All the others have to make the shareholders happy while steam just does steam. If the line doesn't have to constantly go up you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you're still making profit. And if what you're doing is already working you don't need to add gimmicks or advertisements to milk it as much as you can just to appease the shareholders.

Private company with long-term strategy VS public company chasing short-term profits to pump stock prices for shareholders.

"Don't interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy

I can't really get my head around why people dislike Gabe Newell. As best I can tell, he's been a fantastic steward for Steam.

I’m not quite sure they have “done nothing”. They have made a digital storefront that other storefronts strive for, they have help with Linux compatibility with windows only games, have released a few bits of awesome hardware every now and then. I think this is what happens when you are not beholden to shareholders and the mantra “make line go up at all costs”

'Not sucking'

Being a private company, it's what it is called

Ultimately it's a slow and steady strategy. There goal is long term profitability, not short term gains. In the long term, the best strategy is not to piss off your customers.

The advantage of this is that it can snowball to impressive levels. At least until a exec with more education than brains does a pump and run on it. A mistake steam seems to know to avoid.

They were not liked at first, but they've spent enough time making money while not pissing people off that they are doing far better than every public company who must find a reason to piss people off to be more profitable.

They've been able to use that time to "cook". Valve time has been known to be within its own dimension, but from that we got Linux to be just click start and play for 90% of games like Windows, and with the Steamdeck a powerful, comfortable, DIY-able handheld PC gaming device.

You'd think it wouldn't be that hard for publishers with billions of dollars to hire enough competent devs for enough time to make a halfway decent storefront, especially when they don't even have to reinvent the wheel on a lot of UX and marketing research that's already been done for them by Steam existing as long as it's had.

That none of them have even come close to that is a monument to their incompetence.