Valve does a lot of things that gamers love. They make universally acclaimed games, and they often offer them for absurdly good prices. They also managed to defeat piracy of their games with a platform that has proven surprisingly tough to crack. I remember when Steam used to garner almost as much hate as others' DRM, but its been several years. My friends used to be very vocal about hating how much memory it used and that you couldn't move it from one harddrive to another or back it up. Those things were eventually solved though. I wonder if popular opinion favoring valve is more due to these being solved, the fact that steam has been around so long and we got used to it, or the goodwill garnered from good games and/or good offers on games.