I am one to always call out rent seeking where I see it… But I don’t really see how Steam fits in there. Some of us are old enough to remember when HL2 came out, and things began transitioning from physical media to Steam. No dev was forced to do anything, and for years most people still bought physical games for everything other than Valve games.

The reason other devs started switching over, and it became dominant, is because it’s just a damn good service (and also because broadband just started getting more affordable).