Somewhat of a fair point. I was more so referring to back in the day where it was not a given that a game would release on steam. I clearly remember the old videos from Totalbiscuit where that was a point worth mentioning. Asset flips and the like just couldn’t be released on steam, as everything had to go through at least mid sized publishers (not an ideal solution by any means). This meant that you couldn’t get many indie titles and some bigger publishers didn’t want to use steam either, but those games that were available on the platform, while not guaranteed to be good, were at least not broken or complete trash. This changed with the introduction of steam greenlight and the later removal of almost any barrier to entry to release something on steam and that bothers me a bit.

You do know that you can disable that popup in the settings, right? You can also decide on which page the client opens. So if you set it up right you won’t see an ad inside the client unless you consciously open the store page. And I would think that ads on a storefront are somewhat the point of the storefront.

Yes, you can be bothered by how much of a cut steam takes, or how they no longer curate what gets on their store, but compared to what’s happening on consoles it’s in another league. If you don’t want to use steam, go ahead and try GOG Galaxy, it’s a bit rough around the edges and doesn’t have every game, but those it has don’t have DRM.

Rockets are just big soda cans with a nozzle to let all the fizz out.