You've always been able to turn Clippy off.

You've always been able to go through twelve screens of settings and figure out which Facebook radio buttons are the "don't share everything" option.

You've always been able to opt out of spamming all your email contacts when you import from LinkedIn.

You've always been able to cancel your recurring subscriptions, you've just got to call our customer support number, no it absolutely cannot be done online.

Super obnoxious defaults are still super obnoxious if they can be changed. I've used Steam for a while, and don't mind the ads that much, but it would never would have occurred to me that I had the option to turn them off.

Have you considered that for a lot of people the ads aren't obnoxious because they actually help keep them up to date on new releases?

I too like the ads. But programs with "tip of the day"s in them have had this problem solved for a long time, just including a check box for never show me again. You could make the argument with some programs that it interferes with a minimalist design, but you'd have to admit this does not appear to be what steam is going for.

It proves that people are more willing to play a massively multiplayer typing game than a point-and-click adventure.

GOG also assumed that, and made a mistake delaying the release of the much awaited Divinity Original Sin, because they weren't ready with multiplayer support in their Galaxy. A lot of users were quite upset, and GOG rushed to release the version with single player only as a first step.

They also publicly admitted the mistake. Not many companies do that.

Steam’s preferences are an absolute mess. Completely disgusting and disorienting UI. Valve have only themselves to blame for this. There is no excuse for that atrocious UI.