There's nothing stopping someone from never buying another game on Steam, and moving to another marketplace on PC, unlike the store monopolies on consoles and mobile devices. There's nothing stopping someone from never buying another game on Steam, and moving to another marketplace on PC, unlike the store monopolies on consoles and mobile devices.Compared to PS+ and Xbox Live, which charge subscription fees to continue accessing online content, it's a pretty sweet deal for the consumer.
AFAIK your games are locked to your account, and you'd need to log in at least once a month or something to keep access even in offline mode.
If you close your steam account you lose everything, so I don't see how that's a weak form of lock-in?
EDIT: I believe GP is incorrect about the nature of subscription fees for PS+ and Xbox Live, though. As far as I know, standalone purchases of games from those services do not ever require a paid subscription - you need to retain your account and connectivity for the license checks, but that's free and does not require a paid subscription on either service, so pretty much the same as Steam. But they are correct that those platforms don't provide other store options. EDIT 2: Ah, I misread GP, they said "online content", and maintaining subscriptions on those services is required for that.
This is a digital media rights issue, not a Steam issue.
You can keep Steam installed and keep downloading your games through it, but you don't need to give them another penny.
It's also not solvable unless you legislate platform agnostic licenses that are valid regardless of platform. Fat chance of that ever happening and I doubt that's actually what you're suggesting.
Of course it will never be as easy as having a single storefront for all your content, but as we can see from the streaming market, that’s not something that will happen either way.