Compared to ubisoft, ea, amazon, basically every big developer the ultra evil crimes against humanity valve is doing are minor. Thanks to valve “mandatory, evil forced upon lootboxes” I’ve been able to buy a few free full priced games just by playing cs and tf2 and not opening any of them. Its not valves fault other companies do it worse and there are very few games with lootboxes that are not yearly rerelease scams. Sure valve takes a big cut out of developers but as a developer it is the cost of doing business. They provide a lot of opportunities and take off a lot of the headache as well. They also single handedly screwed over MS by making linux viable for the regular gamer, popularized vr only for zuck to kill it, have cloud saves, are pioneering less wasteful, less power consuming arm devices for gamers, are advocating for right to repair with all their hardware. They are almost european.

Yet somehow, they’re the darling of the gaming scene.

It’s fucking bizarre.

It’s really not bizarre at all. You wanna know why game enthusiasts like valve? Take the list the other guy gave you and find a store that has close to half of the features steam offers. Add in great hardware support (my controller and my deck are some of the best experiences I’ve had), and a healthy dose of actually making Linux gaming viable for the average person, and it’s obvious AF why game enthusiasts like valve.

Even if they can’t count to 3.

Compared to other platforms, they have a lot of good features and generally act in the public interest.

In regards to their DRM system, honestly some people are going to add DRM to their games no matter what. I’d much rather they use Valve’s system than some insecure third party spyware.

People have also mentioned their 30% cut which honestly seems pretty normal for an online storefront. It’s especially fair when you consider the fact that they provide marketing, hosting and payment processing for you. Not to mention things like achievements, matchmaking and workshop support if you want it.

There’s also the fact that a lot of the anti-monopoly folks tend to be Linux and/or foss advocates, and Valve has been pumping a lot of resources into open source projects.

Honestly, in the Linux space, the only reason Valve has a monopoly is because the other players just aren’t making any effort to compete.

Tl;dr Valve uses their market position for good (in general) and Steam is a good product.

They’re a monopoly because they’re the best in town and it isn’t close. Steam has a(n easily circumventable and long, long-beaten) DRM available, but it’s hardly the selling point of the platform nor a requirement. Steam provides automatic game updates, social and community help features, a built-in mod uploader/downloader, image hosting and a screenshot button, cloud saves, excellent network implementation (holy shit I do not miss the days of trying to get Gamespy and GFWL to let me connect to my friends), the Community Market and cross-game trading, built-in control remapping support, Twitch-style drops and giveaways from livestreams, recommendation features like Discovery Queue to find new and interesting titles, a community reviews and tags system that while imperfect is definitely the best I’ve seen thus far, an in-game overlay that has semi-recently gained some excellent features like game recording and the ability to pin a clock or notepad on top of the game, and one of the most recent updates reworked family sharing so that any five accounts can basically just merge their libraries and all play each other’s games at the same time, an extremely convenient feature that far and away beats out consoles’ digital sharing or traditional “pass the disc” borrowing.

Additionally, huge proponents of non-Windows gaming. Initially trying to do Mac ports, but moving onto perpetually pushing Linux as Apple continued to not care about gaming at all until like five minutes ago when they started paying Capcom and Ubisoft for ports.