• Maybe not beholden to shareholders external to the company, which the alienation thereof only encourages short term profit extraction, but Valve has shareholders within the company which are of course still profit-seeking. Valve’s business model will continue to adapt towards that goal, regardless of moral imperatives.

    I disagree on “good”, I do enjoy steam and the hardware, but it’s still an exploitative business with iffy ethics, just less so than Amazon. Like I said above, it simply fills the niche of the market for videogame hardware/software which wasn’t exploited for a long time, if not ever. convenience for consumers is just smart business practices.