It's not about defending valve, it's about not buying epic's pro consumer rhetoric. They have a worse product, a history of anti consumer practices, and you shouldn't let them use you to gain leverage to be able to abuse you more.

Steam is DRM, but so is Epic. And if the two, Steam/valve have contributed meaningfully to open source software and the gaming industry. In a world where capitalism rules, Steam/Valve is hardly the worst option.

I for one look forward to the Steam Deck; my HP Reverb G2 became a paperweight when it lost support overnight after a Windows update, and while it's not completely open, I expect valve's headset to be supported for as long as the hardware survives.

Fuck DRM, but if you want to pay for convenience and don't care about owning your games, Steam is the best option.

What anti-consumer is exactly about Steam? Comparatively to pretty much any other online game store, Steam is a super-pro-consumer-the-only-good-choice store.

They probably will when the steam store turns to shit, valve stops supporting Linux and making hardware they want, stops doing family sharing, and pretty much removes everything from the steam client except the store.

You have to admit, valve has a pretty good reason to be liked by consumers.

Looking through my favorites list games on Steam, most games have at least one alternative place where they can be bought between GOG, Epic, Itch or the publisher/devs own store. How is that a monopoly? This is without even mentioning other consoles (which you could argue are monopolies on their own).