Stream uses DRM, has famously bad customer service, geofilters content and uses differential pricing, keeps content it produces itself exclusively to the platform and withholds it from others, bars some content based on arbitrary criteria, maintains a singular store that doesn't play especially nice with third party indexing tools etc etc etc.
Even Valve doesn't believe in Gabe's statement, and never did. Dozens of media companies have much larger market caps than Valve's estimated value.
The statement conforms to the prejudices of a lot of Hacker News, but there is significant evidence that it's not empirically true.
So DRM, geofiltering, and differential pricing are all requested by publishers and distributors. If you want something more equitable then try GoG, but as you'll notice that not all new or big games are on that platform.
As for third party indexing tools, I read that to mean scraping the site for various reasons. Which I can understand they might not want due to the extra load it generates.
I said make it easy, steam did make it easy. It is easy to use steam to buy and play games. Maybe it's not easy to use steam to buy a game, and then play it without steam... but then that wouldn't fit into my argument.
Even Valve doesn't believe in Gabe's statement, and never did. Dozens of media companies have much larger market caps than Valve's estimated value.
The statement conforms to the prejudices of a lot of Hacker News, but there is significant evidence that it's not empirically true.