I think that "killing physical media on PCs" is a bit of a misattribution here. Physical media is all but dead on consoles as well, and people mostly buy their games online. PC gamers are fortunate enough that at the exact right time, a company operated with a bit of moral character essentially created the killer app for digital distribution, and with its dominant position forced tons and tons of positive changes to the PC ecosystem. Without Valve there would be no proton/Linux support, granular regional pricing, unobtrusive DRM, game library sharing, steam workshop, the ability to mod accessibility into games through forced controller mapping, booting games directly into friend's lobbies through the friends list, and probably more I can't think of offhand.
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Valve is a good pick, at least as much as any company can.
but the one mark against them is that by pushing Steam, they normalized DRM in the video game space and killed physical media on PCs.
I think that "killing physical media on PCs" is a bit of a misattribution here. Physical media is all but dead on consoles as well, and people mostly buy their games online. PC gamers are fortunate enough that at the exact right time, a company operated with a bit of moral character essentially created the killer app for digital distribution, and with its dominant position forced tons and tons of positive changes to the PC ecosystem. Without Valve there would be no proton/Linux support, granular regional pricing, unobtrusive DRM, game library sharing, steam workshop, the ability to mod accessibility into games through forced controller mapping, booting games directly into friend's lobbies through the friends list, and probably more I can't think of offhand.
I think customers chose that. GOG has been around forever, but Steam is so much better that DRM was worth it to millions of gamers.