The model where you pay $X to get a game and Valve collects $aX where 0 < a < 1 is a user-friendly model in the long term.

Contrast to the awful "free-to-play" mobile game model and Xbox's GAME PASS model that is certain to go to hell the same way Cable TV went to hell. (Parents who hate video games and would think their kids will quit playing if the games are boring will rejoice but their kids will be grown up by the time it gets that bad.)

My argument is probably insufficient because I think the Apple App Store and Play Stores are really crammed with crap and I'm quite annoyed that the App Store hides the search box because they'd rather spam me with ads for games and apps I don't want.

Boy I feel like a voice in the wilderness railing against GAME PASS because I often pay anywhere from 10% to 5 times the monthly sub to get a game and defenders of GAME PASS will point out "Look, there are even some of those weeaboo games that you like on GAME PASS".

Steam's single/noise has been getting worse, very slowly but surely. Its still 1000x better than the App Store/Google Play, but I think Valve needs to be extremely careful, and invest that chunky 30% cut in the tools that surface good games.

And its not just steam. Other PC gaming storefronts, even ones that dont sell Steam keys, tend to be way better than the mobile stores.

That’s a loaded question. I don’t think Valve avoided enshittification at all.

Valve was an industry leader in integrating gambling into mainstream video games. They’ve also integrated pay-to-win microtransactions and exploitative battle passes into recent titles.

There are a lot of possible reasons, but I think most of them boil down to Valve being privately owned. There isn't an enormous table of shareholders begging for constant growth and return, so Valve was given time to scale naturally and colloquially "pick up [sic]Steam".

Depends what you mean by that. In my opinion their game development is pretty "shittified":

- They completely abandoned beloved series like Portal, Left4Dead and Half-Life. Half-Life 2 Episode 3 is legendary for the fact that it never got made. It has been 16 years since Episode 2 and the wait was so long that even the lead writer decided to leak the story. Almost no one played the VR game since only 2% of Steam users have a VR headset.

- Team Fortress 2 has been terrorized by a small group of unhinged trolls for years. These people use bots to invade games en-masse and cause havoc, preventing the game from being played as intended. Valve ignored the problem for years until the TF2 community finally railed up the social media, which finally caused Valve to finally fix the problem, except the fix was very short lived and the game is back to the terrible state it was in previously.

- CS:GO had plenty of controversies, for example cheating in high-level tournaments (spectator/coach bug) and the marketplace being a vessel for gambling that involved minors.

- Every single multiplayer game suffers from either hacking or "smurfing" (highly-skilled players making new accounts to dominate the lower ranks). Every single attempt to fix the situation is temporary and never lasts long enough to make any difference.

- The only new games released in the past few years (Artifact, Dota Underlords) were attempts to capitalize on existing trends rather than original new games and both failed miserably as a result.

Everything they seem to do in terms of game development is subpar. It's like it just needs to be good enough to sell virtual items, which makes them no different than any other AAA developer in recent years. As a fan of what the company used to be it's heartbreaking to see it in such a state.