Bingo. Enshittification is mostly confined to companies that have gone public or whose sole aspiration is to do so quickly.

It shifts responsibility from satisfying customers/users to satisfying shareholders (who are never satisfied).

You can build the perfect product and ride a gravy train as a private company in relative perpetuity. As a corporation, you're just going to strive for perpetually increasing profits on a quarterly basis with no real care or focus past that

We need more companies like that, then.

So you're telling me that I can generate stable revenue if I work on my product and try to satisfy customers? Sounds kinda radical... who do we even screw over to get the money??

This isn't entirely accurate. If Valve were a public company, the enshittification factor would increase significantly. The reason they're great now is because the current board is the original founders who are passionate about their business, and actually care.

Private or not, once Gabe and the other old farts die, Valve will enshittificate. That's almost guaranteed.

We all know the answer to this. There will be a hundred threads with thousands of comments with people saying it's not bad, the company promised x and y and we should be cautiously optimistic, but in the end it always ends the same way.

Exactly the same thing happens with IBM buying Red Hat. No shortage of articles talking about how this will be good for Red Hat and the entire open source community but of course last month they started the enshitification process that will now March on relentlessly. Even now there are defenders of red hat, talking about how it's not that bad and there are workarounds, but in the end they fail to see this is just the first step.

Once started on this path, the rule is always enshitification, any exceptions are exceedingly rare. If steam ever gets bought/sold it will follow the same path and it's defenders will stay by its side until it looks like the screen shot above.

The point still stands though, you can easily filter out anything you don't want to see.

But I doubt the same would apply if it was owned by shareholders.