This is the same company that literally started the trend of requiring storefronts and custom installers for their games with HL2… the exact same thing people whine about EA and Blizzard doing.

But the thing is, Valve were never really dicks about it. They gave you a storefront, but it was actually useful. They collected user hardware data, but presented it aggregated to you and didn't use it for marketing. Valve did many of the things gamers are rightly wary of, and did some of them first, but they rarely did it in a way that was predatory towards their users, like many other businesses do.