GooberMan wrote:Pretty much that.
I will always find it weird that the Internet and the press crucified MS for basically announcing Steam's feature set for Xbox One. I know people on these forums have issues with Steam (the major issue I have with it is that Steam protected games - which is the minority of games on the service to be clear - require the frontend to be loaded instead of having a Steam service in the background to handle that), but the majority of the master race loves it.
I think the distinction is that PC games had DRM such as CD keys before Steam became a big thing, so PC gamers already accepted that the era of giving a copy to a friend or buying used copies was more or less gone or on its way out, as by 2004 it was quickly becoming the norm to have to register your key with a service for each game to be able to play online. People picked up Steam because eventually it would be a convenient, single service to handle it instead of having different ones for almost every game. Console games, however, rarely had that except for several EA titles which required an online pass that required a one-time-use key.
Also, when Steam was first released, it received just as much bile for several years until people got used to it (and it became much less buggy and awful)