That's because they're a privately owned company. They can decide when to prioritize long term profits over short term profits.

Most of their competition are publicity traded companies that have no such luxury. They have to make next quarter's number higher no matter what.

All that's between you and success is a consistent and reasonable performance, but seemingly everyone else in the world is too greedy to pull this off.

succeeding by not actively running their platform into the ground

As someone who began to use Steam from 2007, and play their games since 2000 - they not only made their platform better over years, they also now branching out lately. Their hardware is either the best in price/performance or outright innovative.

They are not "succeeding by not actively running their platform into the ground", they succeeding in actually providing a good service and getting better the more time passes. All that while all competition does is to attempt to expand their user base without actually providing a good service.

Just thought that if not Valve, we'd be stuck in the same shithole streaming services been lately.