Yep. If Valve ever announces an IPO, they should be considered dead and we should all start to migrate away.

The fact that they are privately owned is the reason why they are even capable of caring about things besides profit above all else. Large groups of people like boards of directors and shareholders are only capable of caring about things in their lowest common denominator that virtually every person cares about, such as having more money.

Note how all VC-owned and publicly traded companies behave like perfectly predictable clones of one another. They are all just apparatuses for money production, with the actual product they sell, their literal means of making the money, an afterthought.

This is true, but also kind of depressing that Capitalism is now so insidious that people treat gaben like some kind of benevolent philanthropist for choosing to sit on a huge ongoing cash cow that makes more money directly to his bank account than he's physically able to spend, rather than IPO it.