They'd have issues with their DRM doing that.
They should ship the Steam binaries properly through apt and yum repositories, but I doubt that they'll ever ship the games that way.
They should ship the Steam binaries properly through apt and yum repositories, but I doubt that they'll ever ship the games that way.
Possibly a bigger issue would be that Steam has incremental updates (fixing a bug in a game requires downloading a fixed binary but not the multi-gigabyte data files) while most Linux package managers do not support incremental updates (when Debian releases a new LibreOffice package that fixes some dependencies for the s360 archictecture, I still have to download hundreds of megabytes of changes on amd64).
I think it makes sense for Steam to be isolated from the rest of the system as much as possible.
It is also helpful to Valve if it is as consistent with Steam on other platforms as possible.
Game downloads can be pretty big and take a while too, I'd rather not have apt locked for an hour while it grabs some large game update.