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Steam is your anathema; GTK3 is mine! Valve's accountants wouldn't coincide that it's at all a blunder, but I agree -- it's a good idea poorly implemented, and its exclusivity is really baleful. Much of this is imputable to the incipient obsolescence and sequent productive decrement of optical discs in all media, which is a horrid trend to be blamed primarily on our respective generations.

Moreover, Steam's failings and abuses are microcosmically symptomatic of so many godawful trends: corporate overreach, exclusively non-physical distribution, and the commercial redefinition of ownership. You can blame Jobs, Gates, Ballmer, et al. for that latter. Crapple and Microsoft pioneered the corporate subversion of proprietorship, which is sick and unnatural.

Maybe this will help: https://appuals.com/how-to-play-steam-games-without-steam/

Maybe "blunder" wasn't the perfect word, because in the business world it can imply something which caused heavy financial losses, but I was of course viewing Steam from the perspective of the consumer. I agree that online distribution is not inherently bad; it can be done well, and it can be done poorly. It is a shame that Steam and many of the other platforms ended up being done poorly and restrictively.

I wrote this to try to turn other PC gamers away from Steam, as I believed that the arguments for doing so, when weighed against the reasons to stay, are very compelling. They have been for me, at least, as I have largely been able to avoid Steam. Also, don't say bad things about Gates and Microsoft! >:(