The services of the cafe, the comfort, etc, have previously been implied to be free.
You were actually invited into the cafe for free.
Now they say: you can come in for free, but there is a minimum you have to spend, if you want all features, the cafe previously used to lure you in.
And if you bought your games at retail or in the store did not make a difference.
Okay, but in this scenario, you are sitting and eating in a cafe. This cafe is letting you bring it outside food, for which they get $0.00. They don't mind you doing this. They also offer a variety of services in the cafe (say, a VIP area and a board game shelf and wifi) which are now for paying customers only. So, even though it's OK for you to bring in your food from the outside, there are some things you need to buy something in the cafe to be able to use. We would not consider this a scam if a cafe did it. Even if the wifi used to be free, we would recognize that the cafe would be OK to make it customers-only going forward.
And to be clear, customers-only here means "you need to have bought something at the cafe. Ever. Since the beginning of time. And you can buy something now. Or you can open a tab with which you can buy something later. Or someone else can buy something on your behalf. Or someone else can give you money to buy them something. All of these things count."
Your stance is basically that this is unfair, because when you bought your outside food a few years ago, the cafe said you could bring it for free and make use of their facilities. Again, they are still letting your bring your food and eat it for free and take up a table and you don't need to purchase anything. You just can't use the Wifi or the board games that they make available for customers.
No, my argument only applies to those, who have been shortcharged compared to others.
They used to give those features to all, now they take it away from some.
Right. And? Is this actually impacting anyone? Is it unfair? Is it a slippery slope for the company beginning to charge a $50/month subscription fee and hold your games hostage? It sounds like the sum total of your objection is that conceptually you can never restrict anything once you've offered it to anyone. I'm offering you some of my bag of chips right now. It may be the case that five years from now, I change my mind about this offer because there are panhandlers lining up out the door of my apartment reminding me of my free chip offer. You're still allowed to stay in my place.
Also I am not saying it is a "great moral wrong", please don't put words in my mouth.
Sure, I'm exaggerating what you're saying, but this is clearly causing you distress, and my position is that this is overly dramatic and not grounded in the real world impact of the policy. I know you don't literally think this is the end of the world, we just have a disagreement on the severity of what it is.
And I would like to add, that Valve, and the people who champion Steam also mention those features. I don't think they are supplemental anymore. Selling games is only a part of Steams business, because a lot of sales happen outside the storefront. Of the features of Steam I regularly use the storefront is the least important one to me. Because I don't have money to spent, and have more games that I want right now. And if I buy games, I look outside Steam's store for deals. Cross game friendlists, automatic game updates, etc are more important to me. And right now Steam has an almost monopoly on that in the PC-games market. If Steam were only a storefront, were almost nobody cares about the friendslist and its related features, I would look differently at the situation.
Okay, but we've already established that the account restriction doesn't apply to you (as multiple people, and I'm happy to join the list, would be willing to paypal you or anyone else on GAF $5 if it's a financial thing), so why are you talking about what you use? It doesn't impact you. I thought the basis of your anger was "the other people" that it impacts, like your multi-account using retail buying upstairs neighbor. Unfortunately no one can seem to establish a case where an actual person is actually impacted and doesn't have a remedy. This is the issue.