This always gets brought up when Steam and DRM are mentioned in the same sentence, and it is true technically speaking. However, I'm not convinced it matters in practice.
In reality, the vast majority of games on Steam will not start if Steam isn't running. And some which appear to work at first will have strange errors later on. There's also no way for me as a consumer to tell if a given game has DRM before I buy it. That pcgaming wiki has been wrong for me before (many times), and sometimes games that used to work will no longer do so after an update.
My point is it's not forced on to developers like some platforms do, hint Epic Games Store. Edit: Not true.
I know a plethora of people who support only Steam on principle alone. Not only have they been kind to the Linux community but they've so far held up their end of the bargain when it comes to Steam. Valve's willingness to uphold free speech (while accepting all the downsides like negative brand attention) also means a lot to me.
They used to be awful for customer service but it's really come around lately.
I'm not sure where you read that, but I can confirm from first-hand experience that it isn't true. My Epic Game Store copies of Journey and Control are both completely DRM-Free.
I actually don't have the Epic Game Store installed on my main Windows partition at all, its isolated in its own VM. As long as the games I buy are DRM Free, I can download them in the VM, back them up, and move them to my real OS, and they run fine.
Though I don't consider DRM-free the only metric for being ethical (being one of the few platforms to really support Linux, contributing back to OSS including the Linux Kernel itself, pushing free and open standards for VR, etc.. are all reasons I support Valve), I really appreciate and support GOG too.
Technical restrictions like online activation. While Steam does support these features, they're not the reason the platform is so sticky. It's because the community, features and sales are attractive to consumers. Most people don't feel like their games are held hostage by Steam. If they went DRM-free I do believe they'd stay just as popular.
The whole reason why Steam has gotten so popular is that it found the right balance between having DRM (big budget studios mandate it) and having that DRM to be unobstructive. Now, this going to have to change, but most people are used to online requirements so they won't notice...
