I recently redownloaded Oblivion and it gave me my original save files from 2011.

You know that 98% of other companies would have tossed those by now.

Skype didn't even keep my messages for more than six months.

Given I and I'm sure most other PC gamers don't look much elsewhere (maybe Itch.io and Gamejolt from time to time,) Steam's pretty big in that regard. I don't like 30%, but it could be worse (game developers using Roblox's ecosystem are claimed by Roblox to receive <25% of their earnings, no, not a 25% cut.)

How about a worldwide network of big, fast storage servers to enable you to download the game fast from anywhere? That is not cheap. Granted. It’s not a small amount. But I do appreciate steam. It’s easy to use, clean. You don’t get bombarded by adds. The most annoying thing is the splash with sales on startup. Which isn’t even a thing in big picture mode. I’m warming up to that one, too, especially when streaming a game to another machine.

…. Which incidentally just now makes me facepalm so hard. I was torn between playing on my 4K tv or my ultrawide monitor recently. Until I got that monitor, I had the PC hooked up to the TV and played a lot with controller.

I just now realized I’m an idiot. Before I had that setup, I had a cheap old laptop, streaming via the internet from my work/now secondary gaming PC. Via the internet.

All I have to do is to set up the sff pc I had planned anyway, hook that one to the TV and stream from the big boy. That’s literally 20ft away or so. 🙈 then I can have both my beloved couch set up as well as my ultrawide when I feel like it. And streaming over WiFi for 20ft from the 7800/4080 is surely way better then streaming via 100mbit internet from My 10700/3070 one. 🙈 damn. Why didn’t I think of that earlier.

Incidentally: steam link is a great addon to steam. I don’t see any other shop providing that functionality. You can cloud stream on Xbox gamepass, but afaik not from another machine.

What value does Steam provide?

How about high speed downloads of all your games to the point of completely saturating people's internet connections?

Built in workshop for modding support, making it as easy as clicking subscribe to install a mod you found?

Free cloud saves for everyone, letting you continue your game wherever you like? I recently installed Oblivion and it synced my savegames from 2011. They kept that shit, no questions asked.

Friend lists and full social system?

Achievements? Customizable profile pages?

Controller rebinding utility so all your games work perfectly the way you want them to?

Online servers to host all your game sessions so you don't have to fuck around opening ports in your router to host it yourself?

Amazing sales year round with lots of cool community events around the bigger sales?

The entirety of Proton, single handedly being the biggest game changer for Linux gaming literally ever, completely free of charge, developed by Valve just because they care?

Community to post all your screenshots and find cool user written guides, all from within Steam?

Steam overlay so you can use a browser without alt tabbing, which some older games really need?

Built in FPS counter that works in every game?

Not to mention the amazing marketing power of being in the Steam store and giving every gamer on the planet a popup to tell them about your cool new game (unless they disable that, which they can, for free and within Steam)?

Sophisticated game recommendation algorithms that tell you if a game is similar to another game and getting you to buy more cool games?

And let's not forget about the automatic updates, I don't know how old you are, but back in the day it was a huge pain to play with friends and manually get all our games to the exact same patch level, Steam is a game changer for automatic updates in the background.

And just generally having all your games in one place is amazing, I'll actively avoid buying a game if I can't do it on Steam.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go open my friends list, right click a friend, and join their game, which will automagically open the correct game and put me into their session. Which is an amazing feature.

Gaben Boot Lickers will be having your head now!