Valve Is Running Apple's Playbook in Reverse
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The debate rages on: is Valve quietly taking aim at Apple's dominance, or are they targeting a different aspect of the tech landscape altogether? Commenters are divided, with some arguing that Valve's true target is the broader gaming industry, where Google, Microsoft, and Apple are all vulnerable. Others point out that Apple's lack of investment in PC gaming makes it an unlikely target, although CharlesW counters that Apple still controls a massive gaming economy. As the discussion unfolds, it becomes clear that Valve's potential moves are being closely watched, with many speculating about their next step, from improving desktop Linux to releasing a Steam Phone or VR headset.
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Valve could branch into Apple's areas, but they don't seem particularly interested in doing so yet.
It doesn't have to be. Proton runs fine on Android.
I’d love someone to actually compete with Apple at the specific kind of thing they do, but I don’t see it in the cards for Valve. Too much distance, with things they don’t have to solve to hit other (apparent) targets of theirs.
As for Microsoft, what is Valve threatening? Home no-business-use-case (mostly gaming and maybe light web browsing) PC owners, and I suppose x-box? The former has got to be negligible at this point, and the latter… I guess maybe, yeah, they could threaten that.
With the broader job market being not-great, and everyone trying some sort of side hustle with the aims of making it big, it's definitely the bubble I'm in, but the "home" case has a lot of Google free office suite business looking usage, and even if there isn't a side hustle, maybe my friends are super weird but they use Google sheets to organize things even for non-business life things when things get complicated. Eg planning a wedding. That's Google and not Valve, but if customers get Steamboxes to access that vs Windows laptops (or Chromebooks), it looks like a threat to Microsoft to me. (But it's been the year for Linux on the desktop for decades now, so I'm not holding my breath.)
The third party Mac software is often better, but not always.
And yet, Apple controls the world's largest gaming economy (~$78B in 2025), dwarfing Sony's (~$31B) and Microsoft's (~$24B).
The kind of gacha games that dominate the in-app sales charts, sure. Actual gaming, they don't care about or even understand.
Apple cares about gaming on their iDevices and related Apple store profits, macOS not so much.
Is Apple invested in anything at all right now? Seems like they are only ever iterating over the same products in their idiotically domain separated legacy zoo of devices. Lately even fucking that up with UI "innovation" literally everyone hates. I mean, who's talking about Apple VR anymore? Apple AI is a meme. What are they cooking with all that cash?
I don't think Valve has to even consider Apple.
From what I see, Microsoft is the only one they have been gunning for, and even that behemoth is looking to get out of the way. Their Xbox platform has practically imploded, and they have specifically designed Windows 11 to be less of a PC operating system and more of an ads platform and a cross-selling channel for their AI/cloud offerings indicating that they've lost interest in the consumer market as a whole.
I mean.. it's pretty obvious such a thing would be immediately suicidal for them. If Steam stops being an open platform, it stops being a PC platform.
Seems unlikely because we believe Valve has integrity. But it's possible they have less integrity than we think, and they pursue this strategy to make some of those games with kernel-level anti-cheat available on the Steam Machine.
1. Unlock the bootloader and install an alternative OS (e.g. Graphene).
2. Relock the bootloader and still benefit from the Pixel's hardware security.
The above is not possible on modern video game consoles, or other phones, for the most part. Hardware cryptography has historically been used to lock customers out of their own machines for the purposes of profit, but that doesn't mean it has to be.
In the threat environment as it exists today, in a world where almost everyone has an always on, always networked computer which must perpetually reveal its location to interface with the network, something like the Pixel's design ought to be the minimum standard for a computer in your pocket. Sadly, the only other device on the market with similar hardware security features is the iPhone, and it's as locked down as a games console.
i dont think that's possible unless steam choose to go the route of what apple does with iOS and macOS - both essentially are "different" OS's.
But if that's the case, then games would have to be written "twice" (or have engine support directly from engine vendors). I highly doubt this can or will occur, as game developers are short on time as is.
It’s closed in the sense that you can’t install whatever you want, not in the sense that Valve is going to make their own framework devs have to use.
Microsoft has been trying to corner Valve. Valve is finding clever ways out by getting developers to finally make their games Linux compatible.
If Valve's consoles become broadly successful, that's an added bonus. The real win is to outflank Microsoft.
One of Microsoft's biggest mistakes was to give up on Windows Phone. One of Meta's biggest mistakes was to give up on their phone (they gave in early due to technical choices, not just lack of user demand).
Owning a "pane of glass" lets you tax and control everything. Apple and Google have unprecedented leverage in two of the biggest markets in the world. Microsoft wants that for gaming, and since most gaming is on Windows, they have a shot at it.
Valve is doing everything they can to make sure developers start targeting other platforms so PC games remain multi-platform. It's healthy for the entire ecosystem.
If we had strong antitrust enforcement (which we haven't had in over 25 years), Apple and Google wouldn't have a stranglehold on mobile, and Microsoft would get real scrutiny for all of their stunts they've pulled with gaming, studio acquisitions, etc.
Targeting Linux means probably targeting all distros, and that's asking for trouble I reckon.
It still has some assumptions about host system, though, but that's a problem for those who package steam. For example, my non-FHS NixOS provides everything required, and it works out-of-the-box.
They had no other choice.
The technical foundation of the prior WP versions (aka, Windows CE) was just too dated and they didn't have a Windows kernel / userland capable of performantly dealing on ARM, x86 performance was and still is utter dogshit on battery powered devices, they didn't have a Windows userland actually usable on anything touch based, and most importantly they did not have developer tooling even close to usable.
At the same time, Apple had a stranglehold over the upper price class devices, Android ate up the low and mid range class - and unlike the old Ballmer "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS" days, Microsoft didn't have tooling that enticed developers, while Apple had Xcode with emulators that people had been used to for years, and Android had a fully functioning Eclipse based toolchain.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2013/aug/15/...
This is the kind of shit regulators should stop. In the 90's, this would have gotten Microsoft broken up into several companies.
What I don't know however why Microsoft insisted on the ability to not show ads and download videos when copying that concept. They had to know that they were directly cutting into Google's bottom line.
Microsoft tried everything to get YouTube on Windows Phone. At one point, they negotiated with Google and Google said they were going to work on an app. That didn't happen.
Microsoft tried to use the proper APIs, but Google kept shutting them off:
https://www.windowscentral.com/youtube-access-and-windows-ph...
"Downloading" the videos was Microsoft trying to work around API limitations and shut offs.
Imagine Microsoft's customers getting angrier and angrier that YouTube kept breaking. For years.
Microsoft tried really hard here.
What Google did was abuse their market position to cripple Windows Phone. Customers abandoned Windows Phone because it didn't have YouTube.
MS made that offer to probably every developer on top 100 on ios/android stores. That usually meant some small shop in Eastern Europe will be contracted.
As others have said, lack of critical apps and shenanigans from Google is what killed sales which led to the death of Windows Phone.
I don't follow the console market at all, but don't its players subsidize their hardware by keeping software (game) costs high? I didn't think they had anything like Steam's level of regular discounted sales. "Price is king" can cut both ways.
The prime Nintendo games (i.e. Animal Crossing, Pokemon and anything Mario related) are rarely discounted, yes - and Nintendo can do this because these games have borderline drooling fanbases and the games aren't available anywhere else.
But everything else? There's constantly something on sale on the Switch store.
What platform has more exclusives than PC?
It's also the most convenient by far, and the new Steam Family stuff lets you share all of your games with all of your siblings. I have 4 siblings and most of us are married. Our combined Steam library is well over 1000 games
ish. Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo likely have contracts locking down RAM prices whereas Valve will have to negotiate theirs based on current prices.
For business use, the Beelink equivalent is about $350, because the GPU in the Steam Machine is useless for business or AI use. The Steam Machine is going to be more than $350.
In this example, no, Valve would not be ecstatic if they were snapped up for things other than Steam use. Sony tried this with the playstation, and the military bought them out as cheap linux compute, costing Sony thousands
> relevant article about Sony https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomput...
It's not talking about selling at a loss.
And that was a reply to my comment saying that nobody sells their consoles at a loss in 2025.
They had hoped for a second wave of Yaroze like indie developers, instead the large majority were repurposing their PS2 as MAME like emulators or Linux computers.
Console users now - Don't get a price subsidized console - Have to pay an online membership - Pay the premium for any games released on the platform
How could anyone ever justify getting triple taxed!
Valve is insanely profitable with only a single tax on generally much lower base prices. Nintendo is in a whole different league.
Turns out that the usual Microsoft incompetence-and-ADHD have kind-of eliminated that threat all by itself.
Also: turns out that, if you put enough effort into it, Linux is actually a quite-usable gaming platform.
Still: are consumers better off today than in the PS2 era? I sort-of doubt it, but, yeah, alternate universes and everything...
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-s...
If you're using nvidia like 75% of Steam's hardware survey reports, it's a mixed bag and 1% lows are fucking abysmal compared to windows.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/ars-benchmarks-show-s...
And that's great! But for a random owner of random hardware. the experience is, well... same as it ever was?
Gaming on linux in 2015 was a giant pita and most recent games just didn't work properly.
In 2025 I just buy games on steam blindly because I know they'll work, except for a handful of multiplayer titles that use unsupported kernel level anticheat.
Far from it... the only area you tend to see much issue with a current Linux distro is a few wifi/bt and ethernet chips that don't have good Linux support. Most hardware works just fine. I've installed Pop on a number of laptops and desktops this past year and only had a couple issues (wifi/bt, and ethernet) in those cases it's either installing a proprietary driver or swapping the card with one that works.
Steam has been pretty great this past year as well, especially since Kernel 6.16, it's just been solid AF. I know people with similar experience with Fedora variants.
I think the Steam Deck's success with Proton and what that means for Linux all around is probably responsible for at least half of those who have tried/converted to Linux the past couple years. By some metrics as much as 3-5% in some markets, which small is still a massive number of people. 3-5 Million regular users of Desktop Linux in the US alone. That's massive potential. And with the groundwork for Flatpak and Proton that has been taken, there's definitely some opportunity for early movers in more productivity software groups, not just open-source.
The 2015 experience was nothing like this, you'd be lucky to get a game running crash-free after lots of manual setup and tweaking. Getting similar performance as Windows was just impossible.
the performance difference between SteamOS and Windows did
>Well, other than the Steam Deck, which is a well-defined set of hardware for a specific purpose, and which is the main driver for Linux game compatibility... >And that's great! But for a random owner of random hardware. the experience is, well... same as it ever was?
the 2025 ars technica benchmark was performed on a Legion Go S, not on a steam deck
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/steamos-vs-windows-o...
It was astoundingly unusable for sharing Microsoft's own game within my own household with my own family members. Completely broken user experience.
It's not hard to believe that Steam was able to thrive because Microsoft has just done an amazingly bad job with this. I've been in software dev for 20 years and it still baffles me that companies with tens of thousands of engineers can produce such shitty software experiences.
However the other is what do you do when the higher-execs don't give you time / space to fix the bugs, performance issues? No one writes genius code from day one of a project.
I've had to angrily pitch to execs who've totally ignore the fact that $app could optimized and be pushed to milk further money but denied because it's a waste of time, cost and "didn't provide anything to the company". After finally pressuring them, got the classic response of "Oh!, why didn't you say so" and then was fired. So maybe I'm bias.
Yeah, I briefly addressed that concern in the article as a comparison to Facebook; probably could've expanded on it, but it was already quite long and didn't feel like it fit naturally into the topic at hand
Valve is the one putting in the effort and at their own expense. If they ever lose interest in paying for it, like GabeN retiring and Ebenezer Scrooge replacing him, then it's game over for Linux gaming (literally).
valve would recoup the cost from a bigger customer base, as well as paying it as insurance against windows/microsoft targeting them as an existential threat.
It's cheap for what they're getting. And iirc, it being open source means the foundation could be built upon by others if they do decide to call it quits.
The Wikipedia page has quite the description of the view from within Microsoft:
> Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft's gaming division, has also opined that Microsoft Store "sucks". As a result, Office was removed as an installable app from the store, and made to redirect to its website.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Store
Having an app from an exe installer sucks because you have to update it manually, or, it uses resources while you’re using it to check for updates. With the windows store I can update everything at once and don’t need a million individual update checks on startup.
https://chocolatey.org
https://scoop.sh
Just in case you don’t know about these. :)
Windows RT also drew ire from people other than Newell at the time IIRC. It was widely perceived as a trial balloon for closing down Windows almost completely. The first Steam Machines a decade ago were Valve's answering trial balloon. Both failed, but Valve learned and Microsoft largely did not... They haven't locked down Windows 11 to the point of Windows RT, but they're abusing their users to the point of potentially sabotaging their own market dominance for consumer PCs.
One could get that impression from the Windows Store/Microsoft Store. And also the state of the Settings UI for at least the past 13 years - Windows 8 moved a small fraction of Settings to Metro design, but 13 years later there are still some pieces of Windows 7 UI left.
Or the Edge browser fiasco - how can a company as large as Microsoft conclude "eh, I guess we just can't have a browser that works well enough for enough of the web to be competitive, let's just give up and do a Chrome branch"
Or the Kin phone: "we launched this 4 weeks ago and I guess it sucks, let's just pull the plug and never mention this again"
Or Windows features like home group, libraries, and Windows Home Server - they're around for a few years, then someone decides "we don't really care about this" and dump them.
In a 2013 interview with Gabe Newell: "Windows 8 was like this giant sadness. It just hurts everybody in the PC business. Rather than everybody being all excited to go buy a new PC, buying new software to run on it, we’ve had a 20+ percent decline in PC sales — it’s like 'holy cow that’s not what the new generation of the operating system is supposed to do.' There’s supposed to be a 40 percent uptake, not a 20 percent decline, so that’s what really scares me. When I started using it I was like 'oh my god...' I find [Windows 8] unusable." [0]
The Windows Store probably was a part of it, sure, but looking at that quote from 2025, after having your SSD broken, your recovery unusable and your explorer laggy? It's quite bitter-sweet.
[0] https://archive.is/eBP6q#selection-3645.0-3645.729
It is like arguing Windows is a quite-usable UNIX platform thanks to WSL 2.0.
The right way to push for Linux gaming is how Loki Entertainment was doing it.
Microsoft telegraphed its intention to kill Steam. The plan was a hermetically sealed ecosystem where only cryptographically signed code could run on Windows computers, from UEFI boot to application launch. This meant users would only run software Microsoft let them, and there was no room for the Steam store in Microsoft's vision of the future then.
I find this framing to be beyond maddening. Sure, it wasn't an iPod, and if you measure it against that kind of expectation, of course it's a flop, because it wasn't an overnight success.
But I think it's more appropriately understood as a soft launch of an ecosystem, to strategically rebalance Valve away from the potential risk of being locked into Windows. It was also a thoughtful partnering with hardware vendors, so they weren't shipping hundreds of thousands of units to Walmart shelves was just sat there and lost them tens of millions of dollars, which is also what I think of when something's considered a flop.
But it was a thoughtful, intelligent long-term commitment to an ecosystem that bore fruit in large part due to the credible long-term commitment as the library of steamos compatible games grew and set up the Steam Deck for success. And now it looks like the wind is at their back with the new line of hardware, but I think it's best understood as a return on investment that begun those many years ago.
I think it reflects a kind of intelligence and long-term thinking that Google is pathologically incapable of, by contrast.
> I find this framing to be beyond maddening [...]
> It was also a thoughtful partnering with hardware vendors
As numerous post-mortems (some of which I quoted in the article) recount, the hardware partners themselves largely consider their experiment back then a flop as well.
> But it was a thoughtful, intelligent long-term commitment to an ecosystem
With respect, I think you're overselling it. It's hard to call a machine that basically didn't play any of the at-the-time hits well "a thoughtful, intelligent" move. If you read some of those linked post-mortems, I think you might agree as well.
> I think it's best understood as a return on investment that begun those many years ago
I think there's nuance here, which is that Valve made lemonade from the lemon that was the flop of the Steam Box. They turned that failed move into an initial investment through diligence and effort. In a sense, that's part of what I'm trying to bring attention to -- Valve didn't just write off the failure and abandon the market, but took signal from it and tried again.
I don't think I'm underestimating it at all. Proton and SteamOS were huge, they were extremely well-timed, and they've been a boon for everyone involved (except M$ shareholders, I guess).
However, none of that necessitated whatever the Steam Box release was. It's not like it moved a significant number of units and that's why Valve invested in Proton/SteamOS; Steam Box was long discontinued before the first public release of Proton (2018, IIRC).
> Simply put, there's no Steam Deck without the Steam Machine
Agreed, and I call that out in the article, but that doesn't make its original release not a flop. Hence my lemonade comment -- you don't make lemonade from apples; you have to have a lemon first.
>It's hard to call a machine that basically didn't play any of the at-the-time hits well "a thoughtful, intelligent" move.
And on the other hand you're saying:
>I don't think I'm underestimating it at all. Proton and SteamOS were huge, they were extremely well-timed, and they've been a boon for everyone involved
If you were actually acknowledging that it would have showed up in your definition of success, but it doesn't, despite it being the most important thing.
They also continue to have first class support for BOTH windows and Linux without forcing it down anyone's throat which is not the strategy for literally every tangent related market. There are no super annoying layers to this strategy Valve could have done a number of things to force users to use Linux such as. - Linux game exclusives and Linux discounts. - Preventing the steam machine from running on a windows machine by dropping certain hardware - Making windows users second class by not releasing the latest updates and features. - Making other hardware incompatible with windows e.g. Valve Index, Steam Controller etc
Yeah, it's like the people who say, oh, the iPhone mini was a flop. That was a BILLION DOLLAR product. How many companies would LOVE to have a billion dollar product???
Their original answer was a resounding "nothing" - Steam Machines solved a problem for Valve (fear of an impending "Windows Store" being added by Microsoft that would steal the battlefield from Valve), but very little for the customer.
I guess that same question needs to be asked again here: are there sufficient problems that the average game-player at home has that are better answered by a Steam Machine than a Windows 11 box? Are those real problems experienced by the broader market of people, or are those just tangential issues cared about by a more vocal few?
It fixes a lot of issues for me (I will buy a steam machine upon release):
I used to prefer consoles for the living room - put the disk in, and go. But nowadays consoles have the same issues: Giant downloads, patches, tweaking GUI settings and fear of not getting the best performance (PS5 Pro variants, Xbox S/X etc., performance vs. quality mode settings). PC games are now not only more price competetive through the sales, but consoles use now downloads at high prices to undermine the second hand market, or account-lock your game even when purchased as disk. Plus, I need a subscription to play online.
Game controller support has become superb on ALL OSes (I use a PS5 controller on macOS as well as Linux, and it is pretty much flawless.
Windows is annoying. I used Windows 10 for a long time as a glorified bootloader into Steam (on a dualboot Linux machine), but it become full annoyances and win11 worsens that ("You need a Onedrive account" - "oh, did you try Edge yet?" - "Your computer is at risk" - "We installed copilot for you!" etc.). I basically want a computer that boots into steam BigPicture and is quiet the rest of the time.
Can I build my own living room PC? Yes, but then without proper SteamOS installation, or finicky linux setups. With the Steam Machine I just buy the package, put it next to my TV and lets go. I will re-use my PS5 dualshock controller and be done with it.
At least for PS5 the opposite is true: if a game uses kraken texture compression, and many do, PS5 variant will be the smallest.
Absolutely. The UI on Windows 11 is not designed for couch gaming, and Microsoft licencing rules mean that you are not allowed to hide Windows.
What do you mean? As in - manufacturers can't create an overlay similar to Steam Deck's "Gaming Mode"?
> manufacturers can't replace Explorer with a desktop similar to Steam Decks GameScope.
You have to use Microsoft's OOB experience. Improved with "handheld mode", but still not as slick and you are not allowed to improve it.
You can have a "full screen launcher", but you have to boot to Explorer and then run your Big Picture Mode.
And while people don't care how much spy/adware their computer is, they do care when frequent notifications, popups and updates interfere with what you're doing. Nothing more annoying that having a windows notif steal focus from a game you're playing through steam link in the other room (personal experience).
I'm so glad that they've improved steam and link on linux so much, having to run it on my s/o windows computer was a pain.
I want a new computer that just works, and plays my games. This looks like it will be designed to do exactly that.
* Almost. Anti-cheat remains a big hole.
** No, I'm not going to use a keyboard and do Windows admin crap from my couch, stop suggesting it.
When I fire up my linux workstation or steam deck and browse my library, there are countless games, marked as "platinum" in ProtonDB, but do not work OOTB. Sometimes it's a later Proton version that broke the compatibility, sometimes you still need to tinker in the settings in addition to choose the correct proton version. All in all, I've spent quite some time getting games to run I just wanted to play a single afternoon as nostaliga hitted hard.
As long as issues like this are not resolved, I don't believe in Steam Machines as alternatives for consoles in the living room space.
And yes, I'm still considering a steam machine for my living room, even though I will need to support my wife and kids in getting games to run on the TV.
And if it doesn't exist then maybe you should go and make it!
I'm not a media outlet! Just some dope who noticed a thing and wanted to get the thought that wouldn't leave out into the world so I could use my brain for other things.
> as the reality is something different
That's fair. My anecdotal experience (as outlined in another comment) is that platinum has generally just worked for me. That's probably because I'm on Steam Deck rather than a "generic" Linux install (I also use Windows for my desktop gaming).
That said, do you think a parenthetical note is necessary for accuracy? I figured it might be getting too into the weeds since the article is primarily about the platform/ecosystem/hardware comparison between Apple and Valve...
in my experience the older games are more of a pain to get running, as a lot more tweaks are needed
it's the case on Windows too, but on Linux there's an additional need to mess with DLL overrides DXVK settings and the like
Open source Mesa Turnip drivers fix a lot of problems with Snapdragon GPUs, but the drivers don't cover every available chipset from Qualcomm.
The GPU driver issues leads to situations like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (released in 2022) + Mesa drivers often getting better gaming compatibility than the newer Snapdragon 8 Elite (released in 2025)
Here’s the latest copy of the original article in The Cambridge Student:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20220924191721/https://www.tcs.c...>
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")