@Hephaestic Even though his company never went public, Gabe Newell could be considered a role model given that he nearly monopolized the PC market yet he rarely receives criticism outside of the DRM-free and FOSS purists.
@Hephaestic He's not perfect (I mean Steam is still DRM and proprietary spyware) but he seems to be the go to example of when people talk about why it's better not to be a publicly traded company.
>Steam does also have a semi-obvious censorship bias due to how they've handled controversial games like Hatred
They later backed on Hatred though. I can't speak for anime/hentai games however because I don't play them. They are a lot better than GOG when it comes to content policy. I mean, that's the number 1 thing holding GOG back, at least in my opinion.
Gaben is definitely one of the better CEOs by simple virtue of locking himself in his office and playing DotA2 all day as opposed to actively making things worse like so many C-suite executives are driven to do. Though we cannot forget nor forgive Valve as a whole for normalizing loot boxes through Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike: Global Offensive.
Steam does also have a semi-obvious censorship bias due to how they've handled controversial games like Hatred, or unevenly enforced rules for anime/hentai games.