From the opinion piece:
Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin’ back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.
As a Gen-Xer I can say with some level of confidence that my gen was all about Shareware and cheering developers on when years later they would release the source code to their games (Doom, etc.). And the games you bought were all complete, no DLC.
I can’t tell you how many years I used the RAR compression format before finally paying for a license for it.
Early gaming/computing was a lot more socialistic than it was capitalistic.
Also Gen X. I seriously never paid for a single piece of software. Then it started to come with your computer. Then you got it for free or through a work account.
In the end I only pay for games.