This.
Valve doesn’t release games, it releases ads for Steam.
Which is fine. It’s great. Makes for great, cheap products and long-term strategies that aren’t trying to shake all the money off of you.
But that’s the end goal, still.
As a friendly reminder, Valve also universalized DRM, invented multiple new types of microtransactions and actually kinda invented NFTs for a little bit.
People outside the Anglosphere still have a different experience. I mean, the whole “UK refuses to give up, fights for what’s right” bit is… not how that is played out elsewhere.
If you’re from a big chunk of occupied Europe the narrative is more Star Wars-y. The Empire has won, it’s about the plucky resistance. Only a lot more bleak. If you’re from Northern Africa… probably no good guys in this one. If you’re in Spain it’s more of a Game of Thrones. It starts in 1936 and it ends in 1975 after a very long timeskip before which a bunch of resistance fighters wait to take back their country holed up in the mountains and are betrayed by the US and UK because they worry about their ties to the soviets. If you’re from China, the narrative doesn’t have many people from Europe at all, but it sure has a whole lot of Japanese bad guys and an entire holocaust spin-off that somehow you never hear about.
They all get the Hollywood version of it, most people are at least told one alternative take at some point in their lives. I sometimes forget that’s not the case with many things in the Anglosphere.