Good customer service and mostly benevolent for the last two decades, it buys them a lot of goodwill they otherwise wouldn't have.

That and people simply trust steam because it has always been trustworthy (on the whole).

Most Steam games don't actually have any DRM. They just link to steamapi.dll for things like achievements, and that makes you think you can't run them without Steam.

Some have DRM, of course.

I sort of get it. Every competitor, except maybe GOG, has come down hard in hyper-capitalist value-extraction mode quickly after pretending to do any good-will. For Valve, being a somewhat decent company is part of their ethos, for their competitors it's a means to an end.

I trust Valve not to screw me over, even though I know they totally could. Their own DRM is pretty weak (just put a modified DLL in the game directory and the game will launch), luckily.

> Steam for some reason

Currently probably because of Valve's work on Proton, and before because Steam just worked and didn't seem to exploit players.

Steam games are not required to have DRM, it's entirely up to the game developer/publisher.

It allows you to play your games offline though, so if Steam's servers go down you can still play your games. I'm not sure if that's permanent or if you need to reactivate your DRM / license every once in a while though.