1 - I refuse to click anything from Polygon, these guys proved to be idiots often enough by now...
2 - I am no big fan of Steam, but as far as DRM system and digital storefront goes this is the only one I use (along the Android and Ios stores, on their respective platforms, maybe eventually the windows store, IF and only IF I have no choice one day... )
3 - Complaining about the sales is counter productive, sure you pay much less for the games - however I, along many many people, bought games on the cheap I would never have considered otherwise... the point is, the money get spent, and the big titles get their early adopters $$$ (look at their best selling list, there are plenty of full price games in there)
4 - Who are you to complain about low prices? you're an investor? how is this the gamer's problem? I mean, there is enough back catalog, freeware titles, etc. that if there is some bubble and people sell their games "too cheap" (which is the publisher's prerogative to do it or not, believe me, they would not do it if it made no sense) and a couple of studios are forced into closing, we get less new stuff for a couple of years/months, we still have plenty of the old stuff to play with! yay!
5 - The rest is more or less blowing smoke to try to get people to consider the other storefronts, now they may have some benefit here and there, however, Steam is also the only one I can use as an interface for an HTPC! and it has its own features and benefits that no one else has... what can we do, trade one evil overlord for another? get all our games on the windows 10 store? or the EA/Ubisoft variants?
The only way to get out of this spiral is to buy only indie games from the studio, refuse to deal with publishers and commercial storefronts, adopt Linux or FreeBSD and use only open source software as well as creative common assets! - EVERYTHING else is a compromise in therms of retaining control of your software library (also, refuse to use "cloud" services, even the free ones, if you need that kind of thing, buy or build your own NAS, otherwise you are not in control of your data).
