Garbage they’re largely responsible for producing in the first place

TL;DR: This is largely a review/summary of The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia by Richard Cooke

I really haven’t used it much myself, but as the other commenter mentioned, since anyone can upload I’m not surprised there’s a large amount of mediocre content. So far I’ve felt like that’s a platform where you need to go in knowing what you’re looking for. But, if Steam were ever to disappear or become irrelevant, they’d certainly be in a position to pick up some of the market.

Probably GoG, itch.io, or just direct sales. A lot of companies aren’t set up for physical distribution, aren’t big enough to get their product into the retail channels, and/or would have a hard time selling internationally. Steam didn’t invent digital game sales, they just made it a little easier. I think the first game I bought online was around 2000 or 2001. It was DX-Ball 2 from Longbow Digital Arts (RIP Seumas McNally), along with a screensaver I loved that they’ve open sourced and I wish I could get it running on macOS and Linux. I was still in high school and didn’t have a credit card, so I paid using a postal money order. If developers were selling directly in the ’90s they can make it work again.

I suspect the rich kids had a line of credit where he’d just send the parents a bill at the end of the month. My understanding is many grocers used to operate that way, especially before credit cards.