Yes, Apple were the first to make PCs without floppy drives, and also the first to make them without optical drives. Mac users kept buying Macs; other PC manufacturers saw that people were willing to buy PCs without optical drives, so they copied Apple, and now you can’t buy any PC software (including games) physically. This all happened in parallel with the rise of Steam, as Valve somehow got PC gamers to insist on DRM.
To be clear, there was no collusion or conspiracy going on, just people reading the market and finding ways to consolidate power and income.
Reading this and your other comment, this bit seems a bit disingenuous to me. Nobody is insisting on Steam in order to have DRM. Valve found a way to make Steam’s DRM palatable to gamers, and from there even managed to make people have a preference for it as a distribution channel. You pointed out yourself, gamers were not happy about this with the initial roll out with Half-Life 2. Whether it was their own games, helping jumpstart the age of indie devs, or the other parts of Steam like the communities and chat, they did actually add stuff to the program that gamers found value in. Nobody should operate under the illusions that a corporation is their friend and will actually look out for their interests, but it doesn’t help anyone to exaggerate making claims like “PC Gamers insist on DRM.” Heck, one of the most common complaints I see about Steam is people complaining about it having DRM like Denuvo in some games, or requiring you to launch some publisher’s launcher and sign in to one of their accounts to play a game when you’re already signed in to the account in Steam you bought the game with.
Yes, Apple were the first to make PCs without floppy drives, and also the first to make them without optical drives. Mac users kept buying Macs; other PC manufacturers saw that people were willing to buy PCs without optical drives, so they copied Apple, and now you can’t buy any PC software (including games) physically. This all happened in parallel with the rise of Steam, as Valve somehow got PC gamers to insist on DRM.
To be clear, there was no collusion or conspiracy going on, just people reading the market and finding ways to consolidate power and income.
EDIT: I said the same thing in a longer form further down
Reading this and your other comment, this bit seems a bit disingenuous to me. Nobody is insisting on Steam in order to have DRM. Valve found a way to make Steam’s DRM palatable to gamers, and from there even managed to make people have a preference for it as a distribution channel. You pointed out yourself, gamers were not happy about this with the initial roll out with Half-Life 2. Whether it was their own games, helping jumpstart the age of indie devs, or the other parts of Steam like the communities and chat, they did actually add stuff to the program that gamers found value in. Nobody should operate under the illusions that a corporation is their friend and will actually look out for their interests, but it doesn’t help anyone to exaggerate making claims like “PC Gamers insist on DRM.” Heck, one of the most common complaints I see about Steam is people complaining about it having DRM like Denuvo in some games, or requiring you to launch some publisher’s launcher and sign in to one of their accounts to play a game when you’re already signed in to the account in Steam you bought the game with.