Valve Knows How To Run A Shopfront But Does Not Know How, Or Does Not Want To Be, The Custodian Of PC Gaming

There are some stories going around lately aboutValve’s thoughts on AI and discoverability (mostly centred on the fact folks at the company know those are problems) that I don’t think are entirelyconstructive, because the statements were made by a couple of guys at a trade show and aren’t, like, an official edict on company policy. But they still reflect the company’s views, and there are some comments on future actions Valve plans on taking, so I’m going to talk about them anyway.

Valve knows how to make a shopfront. Steam isn’t just widely-used, it’s weirdly beloved, a combination of its longevity, ease of use, community features and frequent discounts making it the de facto home of PC gaming. Which is a goal I’m sure everyone entering a market wants to achieve, but now that Valve has largely achieved it, you’ve got to wonder if they want the responsibility that comes along with it.

Because Steam in 2026 isn’t just a place you buy PC games, it’s in many ways the lifeblood of the wider Western video game industry. Asconsoles price themselves out of existence and the AAA sector bleeds to death from 1000 self-inflicted wounds, it feels like Steam is propping the whole damn thing up. It’s home to big shooters and action games, sure, but it’s also where AA games find their market, where strategy publishers and boomer shooter teams and weird European bus-fleet-management studios and struggling Australian indies all come together to gain exposure and find buyers.

For so many of those companies, selling their games on one of the last places on Earth where people are still buying them in volume, Steam has somehow moved beyond being just a marketplace and has entered, in practice if not intent, the realm of public infrastructure. For so many developers and publishers Steam isn’t just a place to sell games, it’s the onlyplace, meaning Valve’s shopfront isn’t so much one TV station among many others, but is almost the airwaves themselves.

(The fact the PC–a platform once renowned for its decentralised nature–now has its economy shackled to a single shopfront is an irony not lost on anyone).

Which would be fine if Steam was operated by, say, the European Union, or an international conglomerate of volunteer openetplace operated by a deeply libertarian, privately-held company, and so many of people’s complaints and issues about Steam (my own included!) stem from this disconnect

I’d wager nearly every developer (and an increasing number of users!) would like Valve to act as more of a benevolent steward, a custodian of the PC gaming market instead of just a company making money from it. That would mean not just selling games but tending to the shopfront, enacting and enforcing rules that benefitted the community at large and maybe, just maybe, examining whether taking 30% of every struggling indie’s sale is a healthy long-term business plan.

Valve, on the other hand, wants to sell video games.Which it is admittedly very good at, but it’s also clear from the company’slacklustre enforcement of its own AI guidelines, its inability to tackle the issues of copycats and clones (whichother companies have takenmore direct action against) and itsyears-long struggles with discoverability that it has little interest in doing much more.

There Are More Video Games Coming Out Than We Can Ever Hope To See Or Play
Nobody says you have to play everything, but the chances of missing a classic are getting higher by the day
AftermathLuke Plunkett

And to be very clear, they don’t haveto do shit. There is no higher power that can force Valve to treat Steam more seriously, to compromise its own revenue in the name of some kind of nebulous common good. Steam is a shopfront; it’s a very good one, and in strictly financial terms there’s absolutely no reason for Valve to do a damn thing.

The thing is, Valve is now a custodian whether it accepts the role or not, and however it treats its own marketplace is how the entiremarketplace is going to be treated. If they continue to allow clones and copycats and extremely low-quality games onto the store unhindered, that’s going to harm developers and force users to wade through rivers of shit, which they will not do forever. If they continue to fail to act on studios blatantly disregarding Steam’s AI policies, they’re going to exhaust the people who are relying on those filters to make purchasing decisions.

There’s a very real risk here that Valve, like so many other companies, platforms and services in this age of enshittification, ignores these issues for so long that a rot sets in. That faith in the platform (from both developers and customers) erodes, that the very things Steam once traded on to assume its position of dominance are overwhelmed by a deluge of substandard slop.

Which would be one thing were Steam just one option among many. That’s business. But the platform’s ascendance into what’s essentially the only place PC games are sold in big numbers makes any threat to or decline in its quality a threat to everyone making and selling games on the PC itself. It’s for their sake, if nobody else’s, that when Valve’s Marc Wilkinsonsays “a significant number of people are thinking about how to solve” some of the platform’s discoverability and slop issues, I hope those people can start implementing some serious improvements!