> and give refunds so they get a free pass.

They only begrudgingly conceded refunds in 2015 after the no-refunds policy they had maintained for 12 years was found to be illegal in Australia.

I truly believe that Valve has two fundamental things working in their favor:

Firstly: Despite inventing or at least popularizing a lot of new microtransaction concepts, they've just never been the greediest company in the business when it comes to microtransactions. Mobile gacha games have cleaned up their business quite a lot lately, with most of them being significantly less predatory than they used to be, but even back when TF2 introduced lootboxes and hats, the important thing was that the game was not pay to win; you could get all of the items in relatively short order just by playing, and the only benefit to paying was cosmetics.

Contrast this to the earlier reign of Korean MMOs: pretty much all of them had egregious microtransactions. MapleStory, PangYa, Gunbound, etc, and even some current platforms like Roblox. Valve also came into this whole thing before lootboxes became the root of all evil, and while TF2's lootbox mechanism looks bad in retrospect, there was simply no stigma against a system like that, and it never felt like a big deal during the game's heyday. Just my opinion, but I strongly believe it to be true.

Secondly: The most egregious things going on are not things Valve is directly involved in, they are merely complicit, in that they don't do much to curtail it. It's not even necessarily cynical to say that Valve is turning a blind eye, they benefit so significantly from the egregious behavior that it is hard to believe they are not influenced by this fact. But: It is consistent with Valve's behavior in other ways: Valve has taken a very hands-off stance in many places, and if it weren't for external factors it seems likely they would be even more hands-off than they are now. I think they genuinely take the position that it's not their job to enforce moral standards, and if you really do take this position seriously it is going to wind up looking extremely bad when you benefit from it. It's not so dissimilar from the position that Cloudflare tries to take with its services: it's hard to pick apart what may be people with power trying to uphold ideals even when it is optically poor versus greedy companies intentionally turning a blind eye because it might enrich them. (And yes, I do understand that these sites violate Valve's own ToS, but so does a lot of things on Steam Workshop and elsewhere. In many cases, they really do seem consistently lax as long as there isn't significant external pressure.)

Despite these two things, there is a nagging feeling that every company gives me that I should never take anything but a cynical view on them, because almost all companies are basically lawnmowers now. But I really do not feel like I only give Valve the benefit of the doubt just because they support Linux; I actually feel like Valve has done a substantial amount to prove that they are not just another lawnmower. After all, while they definitely are substantially enriched by tolerating misuse of their APIs, they've probably also gotten themselves into tons of trouble by continuing to have a very hands-off attitude. In fact, it seems like owing to the relatively high standards people have for Valve, they get criticized and punished more for conduct than other companies. I mean seriously, Valve has gotten absolutely reamed for their attempt at adding an arbitration clause into their ToS, with consequences that lingered long after they removed and cancelled the arbitration clause. And I do hate that they even tried it -- but what's crazy to me is that it was already basically standard in big tech licensing agreements. Virtually everyone has an insane "you can't sue us" rule in their ToS. It numbs my mind to try to understand why Valve was one of the first and only companies to face punishment for this. It wouldn't numb my mind at all if it was happening to all of them, but plenty of these arbitration clauses persist today!

So when I consider all of this, I think Valve is an alright company. They're not saints, but even if the bar wasn't so terribly low, they'd probably still be above average overall. That can be true simultaneously with them still having bad practices that we don't all like.

The same api users use?

And it's the reason why for several years I didn't consider buying anything that had an AMD card (not now, but for many many years it was insanity).

It's different definitions of "easy."

With hardware, you have about one billion validation tests and QA processes, because when you're done, you're done and it had better work. Fixing an "issue" is very very expensive, and you want to get rid of them. However, this also makes the process more of, to stereotype, an "engineer's engineering" practice. It's very rules based, and if everything follows the rules and passes the tests, it's done. It doesn't matter how "hacky" or "badly architected" or "nasty" the input product is, when it works, it works. And, when it's done, it's done.

On the other hand, software is highly human-oriented and subjective, and it's a continuous process. With Linux working the way it does, with an intentionally hostile kernel interface, driver software is even more so. With Linux drivers you basically chose to either get them upstreamed (a massive undertaking in personality management, but Valve's choice here), deal with maintaining them in perpetuity at enormous cost as every release will break them (not common), or give up and release a point in time snapshot and ride into the sunset (which is what most people do). I don't really think this is easier than hardware, it's just a different thing.

Software is easier than hardware in general but companies generally pay their hardware guys 25-50% less than their software counterparts

Software can always ship a new update for bugs or features.

Hardware not so much

I've done both. There are difficulties with both but overall I would say software is significantly more difficult than hardware.

Most hardware is actually relatively simple (though hardware engineers do their best to turn it into an incomprehensible mess). Software can get pretty much arbitrarily complex.

In a way I suspect it's because hardware engineers are mostly old fogies stuck in the 80s using 80s technologies like Verilog. They haven't evolved the tools that software developers have that enable them to write extremely complicated programs.

I have hope for Veryl though.