It's a company. They realized they make platforms even better than games and capitalized on that. I see no issue with that.
Moreover, they were working on Source 2, HL: Alyx and Counter Strike 2 recently, which I would say is immense work for a company, even more so considering their very humble employee count (compared to direct competitors, e.g. Epic)
Others have pointed out there a private company, but to be more specific on what that means, they are not openly trading their shares. The majority of shares are all owned by a handful of people who care about the long term health of the business. A lot of companies that we see doing major face plants right now are publicly traded, so any big fund or individual with enough cash can swoop in and buy up enough shares to control leadership, then use that control to get the company to do stupid stuff generally or maximize short term profitability at the expense of long term health.
A similar thing can happen if someone with a majority of shares choose to sell too a ghoul.
Nah, go public and commit to a restless chase that gets exponentially demanding and caters to a bunch of disinterested bottom-feeders rather than improving services and products for the customers
This is a common thing to say, but I want to push back on it. There's nothing magical about being a private company that means they'll make better decisions. It merely removes one big thing that causes companies to make bad decisions. There's still plenty of private companies run by shitbags.
I think they may have remedied this eventually, but for a long time they were in violation of consumer law. They went a long time misleadingly displaying prices to Australians in USD despite having Australia-specific prices, and once they finally fixed that they still continued imposing international transaction fees on purchases.
I think they've mostly, if not completely, gotten rid of this recently, but they used to do some really gross exploitative psychological tactics during their sales. Then there's the DRM inherent in the platform requiring you to run their client in order to play your game—yes, other platforms apart from GOG all do this too, but that's the point: Steam is bad, but others are even worse. This becomes especially bad when you consider the risk of losing access to all your games just because Steam decides you should, or because you disagree with a changed terms of service.
Then there's just the ways that it's bad for the gaming industry. Steam acts as a monopsony as game developers are basically doomed to fail if they're not on Steam. Steam's strong emphasis on its regular sales cycle might appear good to consumers at first, but like the net neutrality violations in "unlimited bandwidth to [our partner website]" coming from your ISP, this creates a short-term benefit to consumers in exchange for causing longer-term harm.
Oh and also I'm salty about their recent in-game overlay redesign, and the fact that it took away the ability to "ctrl-f" to help me find the achievement I'm working on.
Steam DRM is opt-in and even then rather trivial to circumvent, practically all it does is prevent things being as simple as copy+pasting files. GOG can go completely DRM-free because the bulk of their offering is stuff they hold the rights to, way fewer publishers would put games on Steam without that basic DRM being available. They're not trying to defend against hardened pirates but opportunistic copying. If you want to ship a rootkit with your game you will have to include it yourself, Valve doesn't offer that kind of thing.
Their monopoly position is an issue, yes, but also frankly speaking not their fault. Though things will get interesting once the EU vs. Valve case is through and they have to allow resales, it's probably going to mean more than resales within Steam.
As to the cut they're taking -- meh. I think it's too high, of course I think it's too high because it's money not landing in my pocket, but it's also ballpark market standard. And much unlike other companies they actually spend the money they rake in on sensible stuff, like the work they do on proton.
