The real question is if Valve plans to swallow the jumps in price. They must have designed the machine before the price hikes, so I wonder if they already had a price in mind and whether they're gonna stick to it.
It's probably not the most stacked but I think 2017 was still a monster year for games.
Breath of the Wild
Mario Odyssey
Persona 5
Nier Automata
Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice
Divinity Original Sin II
Doki Doki Literature Club
Cuphead
Prey
Star Wars Battlefront II
Destiny 2
Nintendo Switch itself
These were, for one reason or another, some of the most monumentally influential games in the last 10 years, no matter if you're talking AAA, indie, platformer, shooter, open world, RPG, horror, you name it.
The price is off-putting because we can see the sticker in order to get sticker shock. But lootboxes and gambling have no upfront sticker, the true cost is obfuscated and extended over years. In that regard, Paradox is much more transparent than Valve.
That being said, my beef with them is their "subscription for DLC" model, at least the version I saw being rolled out for EU4. That and the free updates tend to be fairly unbalanced if you don't also buy the corresponding DLC for that update. That seems skeevy... but still not as skeevy as lootboxes.
Since you mentioned publishers that haven't been greedy, I'll throw a few more out there that I think are worthy of support. They don't need launchers, that don't need accounts, they don't have predatory subscriptions. They just make great games.
Supergiant Games: Transistor, Hades, Hades II
Larian Studios: Divinity Original Sin, DOS II, Baldur's Gate 3
Playstack: Balatro
Otherwise, I'm totally with you. The account-walling of the Internet as a whole has pissed me off royally and I see no reason to give those bastards what they want.
Actually scratch that, the face buttons are mushy as hell and there's nowhere to rest your thumb. I miss jump inputs like I've never played a video game before. None of the every single generation of Dualshocks I've used had such sloppy buttons.
God I hope so. My DS5 battery died within a year. It literally loses a full charge overnight, and even when it still worked it only reported battery percentage in 12% increments. My still-chargeable DS4 was still accurate to the 1%.
I still use the DS5 wired because screw e-waste, and ergonomically it's adequate. But the battery problem makes it the worst controller Sony's ever made, and I'm including SIXAXIS in that assessment.
The article says that Valve is only going to make the game a Daily Deal for a single day. The polygon commenters have it right, why not make it a week?
Why not buy 138,000 copies, one for each user that wishlisted the game, and give those out gratis? At $15 per copy, that's only 2 million dollars. That's a pittance for a company the size of Valve.