Gamers love relay servers, NAT punching, automatic updates, matchmaking, friend lists, achievements, community forums, screenshot sharing, streaming and more.
Gamers love platforms and what they provide at least as much as they love games themselves.
Those are all features a platform should provide. Nothing about those features require that the game itself becomes unavailable should your Steam account be disabled or if Steam disappears, or that the game cannot be moved to another PC based platform. Creating a platform that allowed for/encouraged that would be a serious competitor to Steam in my opinion.
Nothing? Steam provides these features in order to maintain the network effects; losing the library exclusivity would be a crushing blow to that strategy.
They'd have hundreds more of my dollars if they worked that way. GOG gets most of my money now and I get none of those, admittedly very nice, networking and social features Steam is so great at providing.
I know plenty of people who like Steam, including myself. Netflix also does DRM but it Just Works (tm). What sucks is having many platforms.
For example, cable TV (from whereever you are from), Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime is 4 already.
For gaming, there is Steam, Origin, Battle.net, GOG that's 4 already.
If you take a smaller "app store" like Origin the question arises why does this even exist? It brings nothing on top of Steam.
If you want to compete with a product you need to compete on price or features. Well, price is zero, so you gotta compete on features. They can't compete on features, so EA enforces you to use Origin. Screw that. I want all my games in one managing app.
The reason Origin and Battle.net exist is because EA and Blizzard want control and keep people within their own infrastructure and offerings. I do get that from Blizzard's PoV. From EA's, not so much.
Plus that only works because they're reasonably big, and I doubt it works on the long term.
Valve, instead, choose to not only distribute their own games but also provide a complete platform for other publishers. They even allow you to import games which aren't on Steam such as Battle.net ones.
GOG specialises in DRM-free games which Steam doesn't.
True, my bad -- it isn't from a developer PoV, and if the developer forwards the cut to the consumer, Steam is more expensive. This actually regularly happens.
The article does mention this, and also mentions a platform who don't take a cut, and explains how it is difficult to compete with these.
I'd argue though that if you self host instead of outsource (to e.g. Steam), this also has costs. So the reasoning that you'd save that 30% would be unreasonable.
Before Steam, when I bought a game, the purchase was tied to a physical disc. I'm very bad with physical things: I break them, misplace them, give them to friends and forget about it forever. I don't have any of those physical games now.
I still have Half-life 2 that I bought in 2004 on Steam though.
Sure they do, this idea is yet another example of how disparate gaming culture is from FOSS.
The identity of belonging to a specific platform, which games are exclusives and social events promoted for gamers and devs alike by the platform holder, are very important facets.
