Comment by helpfulclippy

So I dunno anything about Gaben’s actual motives, but I will say, I personally would not be assuaged just because the store flopped. The underlying problem is that Valve sells games, and games needed Windows, and that’s exactly the sort of dependent relationship that Microsoft (and others) use to extract value and dominate new markets. It makes sense to me that Valve looked at how hard it would be to break out of that, and decided that it would remain diligent regardless of how credible the immediate threat was.