If they used the learning of the Steam Machines ARM translation layer to ship a Steam Phone, I’d jump on it day one even if all it had was basic phone apps and games.

It has always been curious to me that Apple hasn’t put more effort into gaming. The AppleTV could easily be positioned as a game console if they put more effort into supporting developers and providing more dedicated infrastructure for games.

Contrary to what the article claims, the market being open and sloppy isn't enshittification. Jacking up prices and removing features users were using in the name of extracting profit is. But what I strongly agree with the author about is the uncertainty of Valve's fate after GabeN. Any company is able to enshittify, we are just one change of owners away. It's almost like potential energy vs kinetic energy - a company like Valve has saved up a _lot_ of enshittification potential waiting for the "right" condition to be realized.

I'd love to believe Steam will keep being the market leader because they haven't really enshittified yet. I'd love to believe that Tim Sweeney and Epic games are so unable to read the room and so blinded by being a public company that consumers just aren't interested. But considering their biggest game is Fortnite, they are practically selling to kids, who lack any sort of market opinion of that regard. Regardless, consumers don't really buy with their wallet unless there are immediate, solvable problems in front of them.

Regarding metaverse, I believe anyone who has been on VRChat instinctively understands why metaverse was doomed to fail from the get-go. I wrote some notes about my experiences which I released while doing winter-cleaning of my notes recently: https://petterroea.com/blogs/2025/living-a-second-life-in-vr.... There just simply isn't a market for what Meta are trying to sell.

> Unlike Apple hardware, the Steam Deck does not need to be jailbroken in any way, and Valve explicitly provides a guide for how to go outside their ecosystem

And this is why I'll always trust and prefer Valve over Apple.

Valve is one of the good companies out there. Love my steam deck. It just works.

in 10 years it will be Steam and Nintendo. everything else will be a dim memory.

Valve should really make something like a Steamphone.

No iOS, no Android, just raw SteamOS with gaming and privacy focus, and fully customizable by users if they want.

Make it look really sleek and cool, and dockable.

Are they actually running the Apple playbook in reverse? It seems to me that they're actually running Apple's playbook pretty squarely, just in another domain.

First-gen product that seemed to not know where it's going? Check.

Continued quiet iteration behind closed doors despite first-gen being a flop? Check.

Sticking with the product line over many years, where most other companies would have written off and thrown in the towel? Check.

Multi-pronged GTM strategy where other products prove out key bits of next product? Check. (see: SteamOS and Proton setting the stage for Steam Deck, which in turn sets the stage for Steam Machine 2)

Deep software-hardware integration in ways that are highly salient to users? Check (see: foviated streaming for Steam Frame, Steam Deck "just works")

So Valve started out rich and now is getting poorer with each passing year?!

IMO Apple and Valve are taking the opposite approaches but on a different axis than the article discusses: Apple is continuing to increase their lock in and remove choice, while Valve continues to add choice. You can argue that Steam being a nigh-monopoly means there isn't a lot of choice, but I'd argue that's not correct. For one, Steam rarely censors games (it does happen! A notable case happened this month! But it happens rarely) and doesn't have requirements for games to use Steam's platform technology to be on the market. In fact, you're allowed to offer direct competitors to Steam features in your game without penalty (some games I play have both Steam Workshop support and the game dev's own mod platform support). For another Steam doesn't try to nudge you towards their solutions constantly either (eg like in the recent article on passkeys where the user had to click half a dozen times to not use Touch ID with the Touch ID option being on every page of those clicks). And of course, there's the "Add a non-Steam game or app" button in Steam that just asks you "where's the executable" and then it gets all the non-platform features Steam offers, like the overlay, screenshots, Steam Input (I think it even supports community input profiles for non-Steam games; I'm pretty sure I've seen community profiles for Primehack on my Steam Deck), etc. Of course the Steam Deck (and now Steam Machine and Steam Frame) are constantly advertised as "it's just a PC and you can do whatever you want with it". There's no lock in; you can install competitors' stores on those devices easily.

The reverse playbook then is that Apple is trying to make every option other than staying in the Apple ecosystem a bad choice, while Valve is trying to make Steam the best option in every scenario. The difference in base philosophy is the important part.

(Of course as a profit-seeking corporation there's no guarantee they'll stay this way, particularly after gaben leaves, but I'll appreciate it while it's here at least.)