Free Valve Is Running Apple's Playbook In Reverse 2025
In November 2025, Valve “unveiled” the Steam Machine – a living room PC designed to bring your Steam library to the TV. Gaming press covered it as news, but what was missing from the headlines was that this is actually Steam Machine 2.0. Valve already tried this a decade ago, and it flopped.
Because Valve learned from that failure. They learned what Apple had figured out years earlier – hardware, software, and services need to, to quote Jobs, “just work” (2011 WWDC).
This isn’t speculation. Take it from Valve co-founder Gabe Newell’s own thoughts on threats to PC gaming:
The threat right now is that Apple has gained a huge amount of market share, and has a relatively obvious pathway towards entering the living room with their platform [...] I think Apple rolls the console guys really easily. The question is can we make enough progress in the PC space to establish ourselves there, and also figure out better ways of addressing mobile before Apple takes over the living room?
(Talk at University of Texas’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, via Polygon in 2013)
Newell wasn’t worried about Nintendo, PlayStation, or Xbox; he was worried about Apple, who weren’t even in gaming then (and still aren’t today).
His solution? Run Apple’s playbook, but do it in reverse.
To understand what Valve is doing, it helps to see the paths both companies took, and how they mirror each other.
Apple’s path to becoming the modern corporate juggernaut that nobody saw coming even 20 years ago needs little introduction: Macs, to portable Macbooks, to portable music (iPods), to iPhones, to App Store, to Everything Else, each step further locking customers into the ecosystem through hardware that “just works”.
Valve was founded by ex-Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington in the late 90s following their frustration that, among other things, Microsoft was getting outflanked in gaming by startups with a better understanding of how to use the internet. As you might expect from a company with that origin, they started by making video games like Half-Life, Team Fortress, and Counter-Strike.
Source: HackerNews
