You’re right, I don’t, but it sure as hell makes it a lot easier to keep the hundreds of games that I have purchased organized. Not to mention I don’t have to manually keep each of the 95 games I currently have installed updated or have to worry about backing up game saves or having them available across multiple different devices with zero effort from myself.

Steam isn’t perfect, but it does add a massive amount of value for consumers like myself who take advantage of a lot of the different features that are mostly unique to Steam as a platform.

Also, I believe when a developer releases a game on Steam they are given the opportunity to use Steamworks, which provides a lot of potentially useful tools for a game deceloper.

It’s a developers choice to release on Steam with DRM, Valve does not enforce it, there are games with no DRM on Steam.

Half baked features? I don’t remember the last time I tried using one of Steam’s features that I listed (and others I didn’t list) and it didn’t work incredibly well.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe DRM generally only causes problems for paying customers and I’d be much happier without it, but I think Steam’s DRM is one of the least invasive solutions that currently exist.

“…their useless proprietary launcher.” Steam is by far the least useless launcher out there. Steam has so many incredibly useful features such as remote play together, community controller layouts, the workshop, cloud saves, family library sharing, etc. Not to mention that they continue to keep adding new features that no other launcher is even close to having such as the new game recording feature that is currently in beta.

Sure, Valve charge a pretty decent amount to game developers for the sale of a game, but they provide a load of features in exchange.