They wouldn’t operate this way if they didn’t have Steam. These days it’s just a bunch of people taking care of a money printing machine. They get bored and try other stuff sometimes. The problem is that this other stuff won’t make anywhere near what Steam does. The only real work at Valve these days is ensuring they have plan B for when Windows becomes less viable as a platform for them.
That’s not that long in the grand scheme of things. It’s been almost 20 years now since Steam was opened to third parties. Valve stopped most of the game development once Steam got into dominant position.
- Steam was always open to 3rd parties.
- Valve never stopped game development. They just haven’t released any new games in a long time unless you counter Counter-Strike 2 as a “new” game or don’t consider any maintenance, changes, additions, or other continued support as part of development.
I mean this is kind of true, but taking care of the money printing machine is kind of what every profitable company does. They definitely still innovate, even if nothing comes close to being as profitable as Steam.
Right now they are making more upstream contributions to the Linux ecosystem than anyone else as well, which is awesome.