But there's no practical way you could hold the future owners of the business to that directive. If you own the business, you get to set the directives, including overwriting previous ones.

The only way to enforce it is to maintain controlling interest in the business. Or, at least spread the interest among multiple parties so no one person can dictate it.

This is the same company that literally started the trend of requiring storefronts and custom installers for their games with HL2… the exact same thing people whine about EA and Blizzard doing.

But the thing is, Valve were never really dicks about it. They gave you a storefront, but it was actually useful. They collected user hardware data, but presented it aggregated to you and didn't use it for marketing. Valve did many of the things gamers are rightly wary of, and did some of them first, but they rarely did it in a way that was predatory towards their users, like many other businesses do.

What valve does is so distinct from what most of the industry does the comparison is laughable. Valve is still a company and not our friend sure, but they are not openly anti-consumer like EA or Blizzard. And they don't abuse their monopolies like Google or Microsoft.

just because they started packaging wine with their app

Even if that's all they did, that is more than anyone else is doing. What they really did was make nearly every game they sell easily playable without requiring you to use Windows. As byproduct, DXVK (part of Valve's Proton) provides greater compatibility and performance for Windows users as well (Intel ARC driver and DX9 game support for example). They have salaried employees working exclusively on making this work and their development is open source for anyone to use modify and share. Epic or any other store front could freely take advantage of this work and benefit why don't they do that instead of whining?

@SkyeStarfall @xkforce how do you know this?