[anywherenotes]

Steam lets you buy games from multiple publishers, and a lot of times they have very good sales. I wouldn't call Steam a company, isn't the company Valve?

I'm not sure about other companies, but don't they only sell their own games? And they get a bad rap for being a publisher, not as a game-store. They might not be a good game-store, because they don't have games from other companies, only from themselves.

You are right that Steam's policy is to not offer refunds, and that is a horrible policy IMO, because you may buy a game, but your computer may not run it (if you're on the border of required hardware for example). But ease of use and deep discounts probably are more important than the refund issue for most honest customers (those who aren't interested in finishing game in under 7 days and returning it). Android offers two hour refund policy, which I think would be good.

In my opinion it's hard to compare a store such as Steam to a publisher such as EA. Even comparing Steam to EA's store, I don't think EA's store offers games from other publishers, so it's still hard to compare. This means Steam has far more games offered, some with deep discounts.

[anywherenotes]

Also, to add, Steam doesn't check system requirements to even suggest that the game may not run on the PC. I had received a beta invitation and downloaded the game, before finding out it's 64 bit, sadly my PC still has 32 bit OS.