The private equity that would control it after it goes private, in all likelihood, would be the same family who controls it today and always has controlled it. They’re not interested in stripping it for parts, but they’re also not interested in scaling their operations down and learning some hard lessons to make a sustainable video game company.
It’s a lot more than that. SteamOS isn’t just Steam Big Picture Mode. There’s some special sauce in there to capture the active window so that you never lose focus of the game window and such. If you just run a Windows machine set to boot into Steam Big Picture on startup, you’ll find lots of times that you have to break out a keyboard to Alt+Tab for a variety of reasons that SteamOS never encounters. And given the other problems Windows has introduced over the past decade, that’s the least of their problems now.
A decade or more ago, I thought surely that was what the app was going to do, considering Humble would package Steam + Android keys in the same purchase back then.
Yes, I think it’s going to be quite expensive. They’ve been saying it’s going to be an enormous leap in performance, and that’s not going to come cheap.