What’s funny about that is that people don’t own anything they buy on Steam either. Valve can turn around and ban your account for no reason and you’ll have no recourse against them. They have complete control over the distribution of content through their platform, not the users. They (and probably the publishers as well) can decide to remove a game from their servers completely and it will be just too bad for you if you purchased it.
Yeah, you don’t own anything you buy there.
(Well, some games on Steam are in fact completely DRM-free, but that’s another story)
The main difference is that Steam is overall so much more customer friendly than say Ubisoft or EA, to the point these other stores realized they can’t miss out on the sales they get by distributing their games there.
Steam offers a lot more features and ways to deal with your games. For example, once you’re logged in, you can still access your games even when offline, which other launchers don’t allow you to do. Infuriating when the internet is down and you thought you could still play one of your singleplayer titles.
And they even go so far as to still provide games that were taken down to those who bought them before, which I don’t think any other platform does.
But in the context of the current conversation, Steam is no better than any other option that isn’t DRM free (there are DRM free games on Steam but you can’t download the installer itself, you download the game through Steam and then can copy the install folder elsewhere as backup).
