I'm on the same boat as you. I despised the very idea of Steam when it first launched, and was a firm believer in owning games outright without depending on a p

I'm on the same boat as you. I despised the very idea of Steam when it first launched, and was a firm believer in owning games outright without depending on a platform on which one had to log into (well, technically I still do believe in it, but I am resigned to reality). However, I have to say that Steam and its prophet St. Gabe Newell have truly stood the test of time and been a force for good in the PC games industry (all the more so as a Linux user). In fact, Valve is a great representative of a conclusion I reached a while ago (not original by any means), which is that privately owned businesses whose owners give a shit about the value they create are of much greater social value than the paperclip-maximising entities that often result from publicly traded corporations. Another example, though defunct, was OKCupid when it was still owned privately by its founders before it was sold off to the Borg of Match.com. When Adam Smith said that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest” it was a description of reality, not a prescription to be maximised through layer upon layer of purely financial self-interest. Doing things for pure profit optimises the market and society benefits only as a side-effect. Doing things for profit, while actually caring for what you make, may not be market-optimal but can be much better for society.