The big ones being the popularisation of the licence model for video games, so you don't actually own your games and they can pull your licence at any time.

This goes back decades before Gaben left Microsoft. Valve absolutely did not "popularize" it- this wa ready the industry standard. Even GoG, though they give lipservice about "owning" games, only sells licenses. They give access to files, sure, but it's still not legal to copy or re-sell them, you can't legally pass them down in your will when you die, you can't modify or reverse-engineer the code. Well, technically it depends on the publisher so you may find the occasional exception, but by and large you do not "own" your games on any platform.

They're the ones that popularised early access as a format.

First of all, I don't even know what you're referring to here. HALO 3 had a beta back in 2007. Minecraft was early access in 2009.

Second, is early access even a bad thing? It's been an incredible boon for the indie scene because it bypasses the need for a ton of up-front capital. This has allowed indie devs to throw up a Kickstarter and start getting money in the door to quit their day jobs, and also allowed player feedback throughoit the development process. Yes, there are some risks and there have been abuses. But there have also been a ton of success stories. Personally I played Subnautica and Hades in early access, and I think they were great at the time and great at their time of full release. Games like Slay the Spire, Prison Architecht, Darkest Dungeon, Dead cells, Kerbal Space Program, and more were made possible by early access. Even Baldur's Gate 3 benefited from an early access (though that was probably more about the feedback than the money).

Had to be sued into having a refund policy

They still provided refunds prior to that, it's just that before then they were such a small company it was handled on a case-by-case basis. The lawsuit was about the application of specifically Australian consumer protection law and whether that was applied to international digital commerce. The judge ruled that the laws did apply, so Valve went ahead and covered their asses by writing up the policy, which is still one of the most generous for digital videogames in the industry.

Gabe newall is a biollaire that owns a yatch company and a fleet of super yacht, all that money has been skimmed from actual hard working Devs, many smaller ones also have been squeezed into participating in steam sales when they don't want to just to get steam to promote their game. Even thought they will happily push asset flips slop.

I'm all in favor of having nationalized platforms instead, but that isn't going to happen anytime soon. Go ahead and seize all the assets of every billionaire. But if we are going to do that, I think we should start at the top with the richest and then see how the rest divest themselves of assets first.

Technically, this hurts publishers directly and devs only indirectly.

Also 30% has been the industry standard since before Valve existed, going back to physical stores. Should Valve reduce it? Maybe, but if we look over at what Epic is doing with their 12% cut I'm not impressed. The platform sucks and the savings don't seem to be passed to consumers so I don't see how that's any better.

Shovelware has always been a thing. Go look back at the great videogame crash of 1983. Go look at the Nintendo eShop today or the Google Play Store. You're kind of disproving yourself here- you claim that 30% cut is preventing indie devs from releasing on Steam, yet there were over 19,000 games released on Steam this year alone! Surely there aren't that many big AAA titles, are there?

What Steam DOES provide is tools to allow the consumer to make an informed decisions and easily filter out what they do and don't want. I see people complain about all the NSFW games even though the default setting is to hide them lol.

They have also put in place system to protect Devs from "review bombing" when those Devs screw over their olayerbase, then will also allow "legitimate" reviews after a human has reviewed them, that are just culture war stuff that has nothing to do with the game.

Welcome to the modern Internet. "Review bombs" can be for a variety of different reasons and my opinions differ. When 2K updated their launcher and added it to games that previously didn't, and broke Steam Deck compatibility, those games absolutely deserves to get negative reviews. If a company tweets a pride flag in June and a bunch of incels decide to review bomb the game, well, I'm glad Valve steps in to stop that.

I'd say Valve does a better job of handling reviews than most companies. Having information like the reviewer's play time and the ability to vote reviews as helpful or unhelpful is great. But really I see reviews as being more for the person leaving it to scream into the void than anything else. If I'm making a purchasing decision and I'm looking for more information on a game, I'll go to YouTube or Reddit or Lemmy or any one of a variety of other places first anyways.

Because steam has very few employees and basically doesn't make games anymore.

This is still an instance of them being less shitty than their competitors. They DO still make games, just smaller ones like Aperture Desk Job and Half-Life Alyx. They also support their live service games. They also have hardware.

They make good decisions and don't take dumb risks with their headcount. That doesn't make them a great company, but that makes them better than most of the industry.