Larian publishing director says Steam is dominant because 'It isn't providing a s*** service defined by public shareholder KPIs,' but concedes 'A post-Gabe world is a terrifying one'

Recent news that 72% of devs (most of whom occupied the rarefied airs of the C-suite) consider Steam a monopoly set tongues wagging all over the internet. Turns out, people have strong feelings about the videogame launcher in their taskbar, and they weren't shy about expressing them.

One of those people? Larian publishing director Michael Douse, who took to X to take a swipe at Steam's rivals. "It's almost as if it isn't providing a shit service defined by public shareholder KPIs [Key Performance Indicators]," wrote Douse.

The man has a point. Valve stands apart from its competition in being a private company. That is to say, it's not traded on a stock exchange and it doesn't have shareholders whispering in its ear demanding it chase whatever short-term trend is currently driving up share prices.

Unlike Epic, Amazon, Ubisoft, or EA (though, uh, I suppose that last one's set to change), Valve only really has to answer to its president, Gabe Newell, and he's busy buying yacht companies.

Indeed, in an alternate universe where Valve does have a cabal of pension funds and who-knows-what else setting its direction, we'd probably already have some sort of dreadful AI chatbot integrated into the storefront. The fact that the Epic Games Store doesn't have something like that is probably more to do with it simply not being a high earner (or, perhaps, an earner at all) for Epic than the corporation's shareholders being strangely sober.

It does raise the question, though, as to what happens when Newell isn't in charge of Valve anymore—a panic spiral you've likely seen play out in any comment section where this subject has been discussed for the past two decades.

Will Newell's successors open the company up to the whims of profit-hungry shareholders, and quickly enshittify the service we've spent so long building up our libraries in? Douse doesn't sound especially rosy-hued about it: "A post-Gabe world is a terrifying one," he writes in answer to someone ruminating on just these worries. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, I suppose, though speaking personally: I'm stocking up on tinned food and ammunition in the cellar.