Comment by frollogaston

Steam was beneficial for small devs who otherwise had no good distribution options and were way too easy targets for piracy.

Otherwise, it's just a pain. Like my favorite PC game Age of Empires 2 was a CD, then when they finally remade it, it was like oh you gotta sign up for Steam first, and now you gotta launch this adware to play your game, which btw is an entire Chrome browser, and sometimes it'll refuse to launch your stuff too. Then several game publishers made their own Steam-like launchers except even worse. The situation is worse now, good thing I don't really care about video games anymore.