There is a huge difference between Steam and Elsevier and I'm not sure why you feel the one is an example of how the other could evolve. The one sells games for entertainment purposes to the masses, the other sells subscriptions to scientific institutions to give them access to research papers. It's b2c vs b2b and a competitive space versus a captive audience.

I think the parent comment was referring to video game piracy before Steam.

It was a mess of custom launchers, DRM, losing the CD/DVD or key so people would turn to piracy to access stuff they already owned.

Fast-forward a few year and most people are fine with Steam as long as it's the unified launcher for doing thing.

Pre-Steam also coincided with pre-Internet / online gaming. Having half your software assets lurking on company servers now makes protecting your IP considerably easier.

Ok, that's a good point. But video games are rarely created with public funds and in general are not crowdsourced to then be placed behind a paywall. Even Steam has plenty of competition.

If there were a disruption of the world of scientific publishing that would have a parallel in entertainment I would have chosen Spotify over Steam.

I'm only trying to refute the claim that "piracy has one USP that the competition lacks that is very hard for them to replicate: convenience". That's disproven by the fact that many companies e.g. Steam have had undeniable success on the back of that convenience.

I think that claim was made in the context of scientific papers, where there is no counterpart to Steam or Netflix.