this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2026
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Can anyone overthrow Steam on PC? "As long as Valve is independent and not a publicly traded company," analyst says it looks impossible (www.gamesradar.com)
submitted 1 week ago by alessandro@lemmy.ca to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[–] fartsparkles@lemmy.world 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

This is covered in the video I linked…

“Valve is not a publicly traded company. Being a publicly traded company adds a bunch of headaches and it [doesn’t] really solve any problems for us… It [would mean] that control around decision making now involved third parties… The whole point of being a privately held company is to eliminate another source of noise in the signal between the consumers and producers of a good.”

Valve are absurdly profitable. What purpose would being public serve? They don’t need to raise extra capital, they don’t have shareholders to provide liquidity to, they don’t need the brand recognition, they don’t need stock for acquisition currency, they don’t need it to attract or retain talent, Gabe doesn’t need an exit strategy when he’s already cash flush to be buying mega yachts.

For every reason companies go public, none of them would benefit Valve.

[–] NekoKoneko@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Exactly - which is why going public is generally not in the interests of any sustainable company or their customers.

It is, however, in the interests of (1) company insiders that want a huge payout, (2) companies that are not sustainable pre-IPO and need to transition their business model or practice and set the IPO as a ticking clock where they fund or fail, and (3) companies and CEOs who borrow cancer's business model and are dissatisfied by anything except infinite expansion.

None of those benefit the customer and it makes it rational to expect an IPO to destroy what's good about a company and its products.