Problem is there’s been reports about memory providers cancelling contracts, as the premium AI companies will pay is far higher than breaking the current contracts.

Global Offensive is still playable (at least the core gameplay) in the csgo_legacy branch of CS2 on Steam.

The problem there comes from Epic taking secret deals to settle those cases instead of let any precedent be set that would actually benefit customers.

They could still compete on I don’t know, features, quality instead of anti-consumer practices.

But Steam didn’t kill the idea of ownership of games? It never existed for digital distribution (or even physical with DRM), which existed before Steam.

I’d argue selling games and selling content in those games is the same market though.

And the problem with Google/Apple wasn’t “dominance”, but more “absolute control”, Apple blocked third party stores completely on their hardware, and Google had secret deals with phone manufacturers where they had to include all the Google apps and couldn’t include alternate app stores, and made using third party stores difficult. As long as Valve aren’t blocking third party stores on their OS and not being pre-shipped on the OS of most of Steam’s customers, there’s probably not much of a case.

Is this improving their product? These changes benefit users on non-Valve hardware playing any game on Linux (including non-Steam games). Like I’m glad Valve is funding talented free software developers to work on whatever they want but the benefit for Valve is very indirect.

Unfortunately GOG are very selective in the games they allow, you kind of already have to be a successful indie on Steam before they’ll consider you.

Right now it’s at the very top of gog.com

For what it’s worth Overwatch is in a decent state at the moment.