Yes, but thats irrelevant in the context of what you replied to. When choosing a platform, PC is objectively the best one, cost of entry aside, as it gets all exclusives but Nintendos (and it can emulate the Nintendo exclusives better than Nintendos consoles can natively run them). Plus, theres no concern about backwards compatibility, as thats just the default.
You can resell the physical media for a pittance, unless its out of print and rare like any other collectible. As for the rest, youre completely uninformed about the PC gaming marketplace. Steam sells games directly, and outlets like GreenManGaming, Fanatical, Amazon, GamesPlanet, Humble Bundle, etc., sell Steam keys. They are constantly competing with each other on price, and there are constant sales, so you can buy games for a fraction of the cost of console prices if youre willing to wait a short time. For instance, at launch, you can basically guarantee a game will be 12% off or so at GreenManGaming. When I bought Tales of Arise, I got it for 35% off a month or so after launch. Humble Bundle in particular is ridiculous value wise, you get games for pennies on the dollar.
Youre wrong though, as I explained above. They drop in price quickly and drastically on PC. The reason they dont on consoles is because consoles are closed platforms, and Microsoft / Sony / Nintendo have the only storefront and they can charge whatever they want, as theyre youre only option. Physical plays a part here too, as Wal-Mart and such would throw a shitfit if Microsoft and Sony were undercutting physical games with digital prices, so they literally couldnt even if they wanted to, or stores would refuse to stock physical games. Thats not a digital games thing, its a broadband becoming ubiquitous thing. They started doing patches long before digital games were a thing. The difference back then was that they couldnt assume everyone had broadband. A 10 GB patch was a non-starter when most people had shitty internet, so they had to make sure the actual released product was good.
I trust Valve not to do that, as theyre a privately owned company who isnt beholden to shareholders and they have a long history of being extremely pro consumer at this point. If they ever do that in some hypothetical dystopia, Ill just start pirating games again and I havent really lost a thing, because Im on PC, am open platform where its easy to do whatever I want.
I'm pretty sure we've talked about all this before as well so I'm gonna keep it brief so it doesn't feel like we're just re-litigating everything.
PC is the best if you want to put in the elbow grease yes, but that's also if you want to do Linux, or really know your way around Windows since a lot still doesn't work on Linux still. But not everyone wants to drop the entry cost for that obviously.
I wasn't going to list off every single digital storefront as we were originally talking about specifically Sony > PC, but yes Green Man has discounts here & there, GOG does as well, even Epic Games and their monthly free games they do while they lost millions of dollars. But this is again a trend that PC gaming started. You lost physical discs first, disc drives disappeared, then everything became digital media. Consoles have slowly but surely followed, & like you say, Sony/Microsoft do price gouge & we've ended up spending more now on games even when digital was hyped to lower those costs for the consumers. This is my point that the worst trends started in the PC gaming sphere, & console players were much too late to really do anything about it.
Stores are supposed to compete under capitalism though, so if the stores refuse to actually compete, then the free market is obviously fixed & price leadership takes precedent over actually offering goods at lower & more competitive prices so that the consumer ends up getting fucked anyways. This is an issue in all industries, but clearly in the gaming industry it can be pretty insidious as even Walmart in your example is not even all that cheaper for most goods now. Digital games should be undercutting physical sales anyways, it's 1s & 0s in a digital storefront, that's not either of our faults though.
A whataboutism, the prevalence of broadband & internet being more widespread is not an excuse for discs to just be a license check so they can sell broken products on release that require internet to actually patch & update the game. I can't understand why anyone would argue FOR that practice to become the norm but that's your stance I guess. If years ago I could buy something on a console that had internet connection capability, but didn't need it to launch & install & run the software, any deviation from that is just flat out laziness & anti-consumer.
Valve is currently involved in more than one lawsuits though. One is antitrust, which is true they do have a very heavy monopoly leaning presence in the industry compared to all the other storefronts which are either so garbage they're pointless to use, or are so tiny that the meager offerings they have basically has no blip on the radar like Bethesda's or Ubisofts. A company is not above breaking the law & screwing over consumers, regardless of how their reputation may seem. Remember how positively viewed CD Projekt Red was before Cyberpunk, Nintendo calls themselves a family friendly company while they nickle & dime over nothing, break up tournaments, artificially supply to increase demand, etc etc. The other lawsuit with Valve is BS though & I hope they prevail on that, it concerns rumble functions & the patent troll company suing them says Valve is infringing on it. If Valve is pro consumer, they'll pull off a win against them. But given Apple & Nintendo didn't bother & just settled, we'll see how it goes.
Either way, it's a tangled ball of yarn of bullshit & nonsense in gaming at the end of the day, single people are powerless to change much, but I do write my senators & complain about it a lot for more consumer protection like what the EU & AUS gets. I remember being promised cheaper games because of digital shit by Sony & Microsoft back in the 360/PS3 days, but that never happened & those markets have just gotten worse. That's why I bought a steam deck & have begun building up a steam library like I told you before.