The competition is trash. Other game stores spent their money on enshitification and they’re reaping the rewards of that choice.

I don’t see a cogent argument here. Valve is providing exactly what they say they are, money for a service, and very convenient too.

Valve doesn’t prevent games from being sold elsewhere, they don’t enforce exclusives.

This is like saying Costco is ripping me off because it won’t stock coke if the price would be higher than sam’s club.

This is not new, but it’s well sourced and easily digestible for most people. The issue is that Valve has de facto monopoly and when Epic Games (even selfishly) tried to address that issue gamers went for their throat instead of cheering.

There are small storefronts that exist in the background, but they are either indie only like itch.io, Game Jolt or run by a publisher with primarily their catalog like GOG, Origin, Uplay (or whatever it’s called now), Battle.net, etc. And even then many of them eventually become available on Steam because that’s what gamers ask for. People are too stupid to help themselves, so unless some regulations force a change, we are stuck with this.