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Comment by icapybara | Hacker News Reader

They also face a more competitive environment now than possibly ever before. There are other game stores/fronts like Epic's and Activision's, and the console giants are coming for a piece of their pie (Xbox Game pass and Sony's equivalent). There's also the ever-looming risk that Apple decides to go after their market with Apple TV/iOS somehow.

If I was an executive at Valve, I'd probably be happy with the current success, but nervous for the future.

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Apple's paying a bit more attention to gaming these days, but I don't think they'll ever release an Apple TV that performs better than a midrange phone.

If they really wanted to make a big push into gaming they could; they certainly have the gazillions for it. Make a more powerful Apple TV, invest a billion into game dev studios to target MacOS and iOS, either make Apple Arcade free or beef it up for the same price. I just feel like they would've done this by now if they were ever going to.

Nothing of this is "new competition" though, and the threat from console gaming was arguably much bigger in the past, yet so far Steam has weathered all storms pretty well. There are now more ports from Xbox and PS to PC than ever before that would have been exclusives in the past (e.g. Sony 1st party titles like God of War, ten years ago something like this would "hell freezing over territory").

They faced Origin and won. I'm not sure about Ubisoft, but I think some of their games are available without using a non-steam launcher. Doesn't mean they'll win but their record is pretty good.

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