I think it's more that online distribution reduces distribution costs and breaks the publishers' ability to charge monopoly pricing. 15 years ago, when games w

I think it's more that online distribution reduces distribution costs and breaks the publishers' ability to charge monopoly pricing. 15 years ago, when games were sold mostly in stores, you had to go through a publisher to get your product in front of customers. And there was a limited amount of physical space in stores -- so games had to compete with all the other physical goods that store might offer. With digital distribution, both development and publishing are closer to perfectly competitive. It'd be pretty easy to build all the technical functionality of a basic online game store -- although building relationships with gamers and developers is harder. What bothers me is that Steam is starting to get lock-in -- many developers feel pressured to be on Steam, that a significant fraction of their market will be inaccessible if they don't. And as Steam builds more features into their client libraries, it's getting more tempting for developers to use those features, making non-Steam versions of things harder to keep feature parity (or even maintain two different builds of the code). Once Steam has lock-in, I think they'll try to take control of pricing from developers, and we'll see prices for Steam games rise. I try to vote with my wallet and avoid buying games on Steam, but it's getting harder and harder to do that.