this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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I'd say it's even more unique than a valuable competitive mistake/opportunity.
Valve has the chance to grow the brand and make a bunch of money and all the other standard goals for a company, sure. But they also have the opportunity to benefit the world in subtle but significant ways while getting richer.
A normal megacorp might not give a shit about that last part. But a company that is majority owned by one individual who is already a billionaire that looks like santa claus and presumably cares about his legacy and maybe even other people... it might just be possible!
It's even still a valid course of action if there's literally no interest in making the world better.
They've potentially found a way to make their nearly omnipresent e-commerce platform share a name with the operating system, which is coincidentally mostly developed by others. They get to associate their name with a few tens of billions of dollars of development effort for a fraction of the cost.
To be clear, this isn't bad or anything. It's quite literally what a lot of the people doing all that legwork want. It just doesn't require any altruism from valve. They make money selling games, and they sell more games when people think it's easier to play them. A desktop with the ease of a console is a big selling point for a lot of people.
I am hoping that Gabe someday creates a PayValve service, to let perverts and LGBTQ+ customers to have a True Neutral transaction processor. Just a 1% fee would let Valve get a little bit of profit from everyone who doesn't use MasterVisa - including competing game stores, or other markets.