It’s the same thing Brother Printers is doing.
It’s called “being privately owned” or “not having to suck up to shareholders”
Valve also has a very unique organizational structure where engineers manage themselves and pretty much all decisions are handled by horizontal committees.
Not being publically traded.
Everybody keeps talking about “when he dies”, which given how rich he is, might never happen.
However, he is gonna retire and that could very well happen tomorrow!
I think it’s time to collectively freak out
Steam already has a fair few shitty issues like its promotion of gambling.
Gabe will pass one day and the enshittification will happen, it’s not like Steam is immune at end of day. People need to stop glorifying companies.
It is possible but for things like a steam deck you just move on to the next store or piracy. It’s so open you get trapped by convenience not by encryption or premium features.
You’re thinking of now not the future. It’s a great device at the moment. But it’ll become out dated with time and it’ll be easy for the next steam deck to be shit or for shitty practices to come into play.
And using the example of piracy/other stores means every device is fine. Just hack the device/remove the shitty practices and you’re good to go whether it’s a steam deck, Windows, Etc.
Devices will be outdated anyways. But the steam deck you don’t have to hack. You just enable things with touch buttons.
Valve learned from other consoles they get hacked anyways, so they enabled you to do all the mods - while at the same time you won’t have to fiddle with pirated games for a fee. Personally I don’t think this strategy will change - and if they release a more closed steam decknin the future piracy is an option again. On another device then.