If companies like Valve find it difficult to distribute their content without paying a vendor tax, I fully anticipate some kind of boot to Acme Games Inc. boots

If companies like Valve find it difficult to distribute their content without paying a vendor tax, I fully anticipate some kind of boot to Acme Games Inc. bootstrapping. All one requires is a lite distro that'll fire up steam. They can ship it on USB sticks. If it's not possible to boot from USB, just install it from the USB. Would make the physical packaging smaller. Imagine popping into you local shop, picking up a free (or nominal) USB. Installing the mega lite distro before downloading and playing games. Whilst the vendors will inch towards owning the ecosystems for their platforms, they'll always be innovators who will circumnavigate. Unless you're leasing the hardware under license I struggle to see one can realistically prevent OS installations on standard hardware.