I still don't like Steam. I resent that I have to have this "Store" middle man on my computer just to have access to games. I want to pay a company for their product on their web site, download the installer, and install it on my operating system directly. I don't want this other layer that I'm dependent on, who could switch off my access to the things I "bought" whenever they want.

I vaguely recall Half-Life 2's launch being pretty problematic.

I started using Steam in 2007 and it was fine. In 2006 there was still some residual animosity towards it but I think the tide had well and truly turned since the early days (and I think there were a handful of third party games on it by then too which I guess was something of a vote of confidence - a few were Source engine titles so they may have got a discount or kick-back from Valve, but not all were).

> People hated steam when it launched but you needed it to play CS 1.6.

I thought CSS was the first release on steam beta? I remember playing the crap out of it, then the actual steam release happened, and it somehow turned into a laggy buggy hunk of crap for months.

I mean, people really didn't hate it. There was some grumbling about digital and not having a cd, but by and large people liked it as soon as they had broadband.

it was pretty meh back then, so people had pretty understandable reasons. it made LAN parties harder for example :)

but it got a lot better.

Epic had more money and time compared to Valve. and their store is still worse.

sure, Steam has an enormous moat, but that won't be the case forever, Epic should be ready with a nice platform to exploit niches that Valve misses

instead they hemorrhage money on things that does not make their fundamental position any better.

Updating games on HDDs on Steam takes ages; I often see the download complete but then wait another 30 minutes for their diff to complete; and that happens with 10-20 games every week when they have big updates (10GB+). Just for this one thing I would switch elsewhere.

If Valve started to routinely do Bad Things on Steam they'd be gone pretty quickly. Many would go to GoG, some just stop buying games. Bad Things do occasionally happen (bad things like those "oops, we don't actually have licenses for the music used in the game you bought" revokes), but Valve keeps succeeding in keeping it to a rather low background noise level. Competitors have two decades of being that good or better to catch up. You can't buy trust, you can just put money into not losing any of the trust that grew over time. When competitors have done that for two decades, Valve, unless they fail in the meantime, will have even more.