Technology

It's more than the discs. It's about the fact that you're not owning what you purchase and you can spend as much as you like on digital and one day, poof, it'll be gone and so will your money. Discs aren't able to be deleted. Even if a format goes obsolete, there's media players like vlc that will play them.

That's what it's about.

Like video games

You can buy all the games you want on steam if goes away after 90 days that's just how it is but when you buy a game for a system at a what 80$-120$ a game you expect to play it forever be able to play it when the wifi goes out, be able to play with your friends, be able to save your data but all that is online and they're able to use that against the consumer.

They took split screen, they forced us to use internet, they took memory cards, they dissolved servers. What more can they do oh yeah make it so we don't actually own the game.

In a sense you're correct but in reality it's slightly different because Valve has competition with other digital storefronts as well as the rare physical PC release. Even though Sony are also the ones manufacturing PlayStation discs, they were sold by third parties, and even had the used market for their digital storefront to compete with, keeping prices and sales comparatively in check. If you can only get PlayStation games from a single place, price fixing is going to be easy because customers have nowhere else to go.

Besides what others mentioned (Valve being kept in check, barely, and offering more service as a platform), I think Sony can't afford to do what Valve does, because on equal footing they lose.

Sony saves you a bit of money on the hardware purchase, a small benefit if you buy a lot of games. Maybe some exclusives.

Steam lets you mod the game, play it on whatever device you want (PC now, PC you get in 10 years, Deck, Windows, Linux, likely even some Android devices in the future), and twink the settings to whatever you want, for whatever resolution, quality, or framerate you want. (Edit: also, your device doesn't become a useless box if Valve becomes evil)

Physicals and exclusives are just about the only thing consoles have going for them, and Sony just lost one. (Oh, and they lost couch gaming too, because SteamOS is opening up)

There was a reason people bought consoles. One of those was physical media and the fact you actually owned your copy, could resell it and lend it out. So this has nothing to do with Valve who has almost always been digital. If you want to compare it, you'd need a hypothetical like "Valve always sold digital games but will now switch to disk only games."

Because they didn't even wait a week since they showed that they can take away your purchases from you library. At least Valve to my knowledge never pulled a gane from libraries, even if the game was pulled from the store.