alt Hacker Newsvalve started this [1]
I remember half life 2 sucked -- you bought a physical game disk in the store... and you had to create a steam account to play it. I thought they were jerks at the time because before that a physical disk was what you needed to play your game.
What they did was set a bad example, and then the floodgates opened for all the rest to pull that nonsense.
Other big companies set bad examples too. All the fashionable but flawed Apple UI designs get copied by everyone else. For example Tesla has a similar iphone/ipad UI in their cars -- but they are moving vehicles and you don't want to be swiping on a screen to defrost your windshield.
I really wish companies would step up and set GOOD examples and follow through.
[1] In November 2004, Half-Life 2 was the first high-profile game to be offered digitally on Steam, requiring installation of the Steam client for retail copies. During this time users faced problems attempting to play; part of legal issues that Valve had with Vivendi, who claimed that physical copies it published could not be activated as to it the game had not been released. The Steam requirement was met with concerns about software ownership and requirements, as well as problems with overloaded servers - demonstrated previously by the Counter-Strike rollout.