Steam has done more to normalize digital "ownership" than any other org.

A whole generation of gamers has been brought up to think that they're buying "Steam" games when they're really buying PC games that artificially have a middleman now where one never had to be before.

Steam always treated games as collection items. They understood that gamers wanted to collect games and today most games bought are not even played, they are sold to be collected.

The ubisoft vision is not compatible with that.

Ignoring the DRM thing, Steam didn't really add a middleman. Instead, they replaced the old middleman.

Microsoft used games to prop up their windows monopoly, but provided a terrible user experience.

Steam provides an excellent, OS-agnostic user experience. Instead of using it to prop up an unrelated monopoly, they take a cut of sales.

It's not great (middlemen rarely are), but it is an improvement.

Unfortunately, even when purchased on steam, Ubisoft games will launch through the Ubisoft app (forgot what it's called), where they're free to make you sign up to play and advertise their subscription services to you.