Global Offensive is still playable (at least the core gameplay) in the csgo_legacy branch of CS2 on Steam.

The problem there comes from Epic taking secret deals to settle those cases instead of let any precedent be set that would actually benefit customers.

But Steam didn’t kill the idea of ownership of games? It never existed for digital distribution (or even physical with DRM), which existed before Steam.

What profit? I can guarantee that Valve has spent far more in hiring hundreds of highly skilled full time contractors for 5+ years than they’ve made from the 3% of Steam’s users on Linux.

Obviously it’s a long term strategy for them to eventually make money but we’ve only gained from their investment.

The problem is these stores (Epic but also the Microsoft Store and Amazon’s PC game store) only come along because some executive says “hey what if instead of Valve taking a cut from most PC games, we took a cut from most PC games”, there’s 0 interest or intent for them to be competition (as seen by the exclusives) for Steam or improve the developer/user experience.

Any time these massive companies offer a cheaper subsidised alternative to any existing product it’s to push out the smaller players with less resources and build their own monopoly.

Luckily for you, there’s more games without any loot boxes or micro transactions than you can play in your lifetime.