Valve have shown themselves to be reasonably trustworthy unlike say, Sony and Microsoft. If there are no disks then there is no point in consoles in my view, they're just worse computers.

plus, nothings stopping you from distributing a physical PC game. Heck, iirc steam still supports it. Even if it didn't, you could still buy a physical PC anyway since they can just have an exe, flatpak/snap/appimage, or dmg

Steam only exists because Valve forced players to install it, force an online activation, and permanently bind their retail copies of Half-Life 2 to a Steam account. They also forced patching which meant in an era of dialup you couldn't play your single player game for hours, and needed to be connected every 30 days or your game would stop working.

None of the console manufacturers pulled that shit, that Valve gets a pass is wild to me.

They are the only platform owners championing for an open platform. That should be enough to consider them above all others, no trust required.

And "open" platform where they get a 30% cut.

I mean the devices where steam operates are fully open, even the ones valve makes. You can install any OS you wish, any software or competing store front and thus give them 0% cut.

You wouldn't complain that Walmart takes a X% cut when you have a healthy competitive market and can chose other store fronts with better prices.

Can’t I back them to physical media?

On PC you can fight this by buying from GOG DRM-free digital storefront or the second more sinister option

Gog might consider linux more, which will make me reconsider it. I stopped buying from them because the lack of linux support

Use something like Heroic Launcher which lets you easily download/install GOG games via Proton.

I'm in the same boat, GOG's lack of Linux support has been unfortunate.

Yeah, but games get bigger and more frequent discounts on pc, besides the base game price for a lot of games sometimes decreased after some years.

I have a PC and PS5, and bought game for PS5 just because they were on disk, despite that they would've ran and look much better on my pc.

Sony is releasing like 2 single-player games a year, I might get a PS6, but I'll be in not rush with so little offering, anything else I'll get on PC.

> steam games don't have discs either

Disc > Steam > Digital console

Steam games exist on physical media that players have some control over: I can copy my Steam data directory across PCs/Steam Deck, I would not be able to do that on a PlayStation.

Sure, I can't resell my Steam games, but the openness of the PC platform has advantages over closed consoles. Valve can't brick old games the way Sony can - a new computer in 2046 will be able to play single-player games backed-up from Steam, not so much for consoles.