Not to mention, it was Steam that was responsible for the advent of not owning the games you buy, something I consider to be one of the worst things to ever happen to gaming.

Hate to break it to you, but you didn’t own your games even when they were still sold physically. The standard liscence agreement for software as we know it today started in the 80’s, and it was mostly because of Microsoft.

Valve is, however, responsible for lootboxes which first saw action in TF2.