alt Hacker NewsNot really, what they actually do for most games is basically what Google and Apple do: a token review, then nothing apart from some niceties for players. Then they pocket an immense profit, it came out in one of Epic's cases that Valve net $50 million/year profit per employee.
The only thing for developers they still do better than Google and Apple really is a few promotions throughout the year that target specific genres for released games developers can register for (whereas Google and Apple select the games they promote), and the "Next Fest" 3x a year for unreleased games.
They used to do stuff like "visibility rounds" that would reach 100,000s of people who didn't know about your game - the same feature today targets people who already wishlisted your game, so these days most developers have to put significant effort and money into promoting their Steam page on other channels like tiktok/youtube/reddit.
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What Steam brings is a firehose of gamers with their credit cards ready to all the games they think will be successful.
There's a reason why everyone launches on Steam.
Well, plus there's the whole version management and packaging and hosting and distributing giant amounts of data.
If you are an indie team that makes a 50GB game and has 50k players, distributing and update management would be a gargantuan task without Steam or something like it. 2.5 petabytes of bandwidth isn't cheap.
Yes what they do is profitable, I'm not saying that it isn't. But paying for what they do is (clearly) still more attractive to developers than rolling their own infrastructure to do the same.