I see 0 reason to buy a used game over pirating it so I don’t really see what was lost. In both cases the devs get nothing, and buying from someone else is a hassle, and having large physical media instead of just some files is also annoying.

If we didn’t have steam we’d instead have the fucking epic games store or EA origin (or whatever they renamed it to). Just because valve isn’t perfect doesn’t mean any publically traded company wouldn’t have been so much worse. And they also did plenty of actual positives with SteamOS, Steam Deck, being the first to push consumer VR with the Vive…