Google isn't privately owned. It's hard to be on the stock market and not be evil. I think Costco is the only one that has managed it for any appreciable length and that is under threat of death from one of the co-founders.

In fairness Google was just becoming evil at that point. It was a fantastic company when the founders ran it.

The difference was that people pretended like Google ever had an option to “not be evil”. At the end of the day, they were a publicly traded company, and thus, line must go up, or else the collective hive mind of the public market would vote the leadership out and replace them.

Steam is private, thus, the current leaderships can ignore the demands of the public market hive mind. Private companies can be evil, but it depends on who owns them. They’re not guaranteed.

I didn't realize we were still in the early days of a platform that launched in 2003.