He has 2 sons

maybe they can take over - and not fuck it up (they literally have to do nothing to achieve success!)

Well thankfully Gabe has lost a ton of weight in recent years. Man is looking absolutely svelte these days. Here's hoping he has many more years of good health.

I'm also guessing he'll hand pick a successor that will carry on his views, instead of dying in office and having some kind of CEO election free-for-all.

Steam is just another profit business. I don't get why people think they're about anything else. They take a huge part of the sells and don't even let you own the games. Owning means you can sell, give or do whatever you want with your games. Oh and "likely to die before 75", lol, says fucking who, the 4chan doctor?

I mean, its possible.

But then again, people have now known the beauty of steam. If this does happen as you say it could, it does open up the possibility for someone to make a Steam_v2.

I have faith that there are enough people who are passionate about Linux that it's possible for Windows to lose some of its dominance in the future. Maybe the enshittification of steam is needed to make that a possibility.

Steam, my Steam library and Proton could disappear. But at least it will have supported a big traction in the ecosystem : Wine, DXVK, Lutris, Heroic Launcher, Bazzite, etc... are all open source projects (so they can't really disappear) that have never moved as fast as they are today.

I think anon has it 100% correct. The instant Gabe is out of the picture, I expect to hear talk about how "you don't understand, we have to fuck out users, won't someone please think of the IPO?!"

if steam dies we need to support GOGS

No no..it’s going to be much worse than that.

It’ll be a subscription just to play the game you already own.

Piracy is a service problem. They'll reap what they sow if they change course. I'm not afraid to hoist my sails again when I need to. ;)

What will happen to the Steam Deck? Will they discontinue it and support for existing units, or replace the OS with Windows (causing degraded performance and exposing their users to Microsoft adtech enshittification)? The Steam Deck is a star product of theirs, which hopefully will count for something.

It is funny that people think Valve would sell out instead of becoming the big evil.

As Valve continues developing an OS agnostic platform, they start building into various tools that require a Steam account to play games in order to defend their app store. Maybe they buy Unity and make it a Steam exclusive, maybe they make their own engine that can be played on Windows or Linux.

Integrate Chromecast technology to make a console like multimedia device to compete against XBox and PlayStation. Then, start selling video and integrating streaming access.

Push the Steam Store to become bigger. Sure, you aren't forced to use the Steam Store on most Valve developed hardware, but it is default.

Then, like Google did with Android, pull the tech stack from the open source tools to become wholely integrated with Steam Services.

Can't Gabe do what John Bogle did with Vanguard and transfer ownership to the employees and clients?