[baroffoos]

>Other than as you mentioned, the huge amount of eyeballs on all of their library content which you just won't get anywhere near close to.

We should have had search engines like google for games.

> Along with people already having credit on their steam account so they can instantly buy a product without entering payment info.

Browsers these days have a payment API and stores the users credit card details which can be used on any website.

>There's also the distribution and update mechanisms which are such a huge win for the customer as well as developers.

This could have been done without centralization similar to how package managers work, the games repo would just be added to your client and downloaded from that.

So I guess I could put it yes valve has added value from what there was before but its totally possible to replicate all the value easily without centralization.