alt Hacker NewsValve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly doing something evil"
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Incentives happen to be aligned on this part. That’s all.
I have plenty of complaints about them. The highly addictive gambling mechanics in their games, the extortionate cut afforded them by their dominant market position or the very rough UX in many parts of the Steam client (takes forever to startup, shows pop up ads on startup, is quite the resource hog, the store that is a pretty poorly optimized website and a lot of cruft in the less well trodden areas). But they do make some very nice open source contributions.
"We will make linux a viable gaming before we increment that number to 3!"
But I totally agree, I still install windows for gaming on my machine, but it looks like that for my purpose of gaming I can stay with Linux (I play mainly older games or indie games).
It genuinely makes me see the value in private companies. Public companies must grow. They're accountable to so many different interests. Private companies can be happy sitting at whatever profit level they want. They can take time to tinker on something that they care about. If it doesn't pay off, that's fine.
I think I would say it this way: private companies can be good or bad, but public companies must ultimately become bad.
That's more a property of the community than of the company. If the community were differently inclined then the comments would be about how Valve is making money by addicting children to gambling and so on and so forth.
People complain about the gambling/loot box stuff, and yeah there's legit ethical concerns there.
But overall Valve just seems straightforwardly less shitty towards the consumer than other major companies in their space, by a long shot.