EA has had a long history of bullstuff like closing down studios, milking franchises, securom, forced marketing, and bad business designs like charging people for ammo.
As for an anology:
EA is like a dog that digs up the lawn after you tell him not to do it, you get angry at him then forget about it until the next time he digs up your lawn again.
Valve is a cat, he claws you and coughs up a hairball and then a lot of cute things so you can forget.
Activision is that guy who tells the joke ever year.
Indie Devs are like mix of autistics and artists. Some times they can make an original idea that is a master piece. Other times they wear their pants on their hand and tell you how great their pile of stuff is*cough*fadgames*cough*.
Anyway cloud software and online distribution is bullstuff in my opinion. When you buy a product on steam or origin, you agree that you are buying a license to a product that the company owns. Which means you are paying full price for something that is not even yours. If you modify in some way, you are labeled a hacker. If you circumvent the license, you are pirate. Hell you can't even fully share them or even share them at all.
If some reason your steam account got hacked and said hacker used cheat vac server, your account is now banned. If you do recover your account valve has decided that they won't lift the ban even though it wasn't you who cheated. Any game that using VAC is now rendered useless, which means you will have re-buy said game on a new account.
Another worse case scenario is that Valve, EA, GOG, or Uplay go out of business, your investment goes with it. Your games are now gone and any games that use those services for hosting are now dead.
Remember that license part where they own that product that you don't even own? Well they also own your computer. They can just collect date and use you as a guinea pig to throw advertisements and products your way. It's just not your computer anymore. Enjoy the rootkit.
On the subject of refunds. These companies will rarely refund you if you bought a bad product. On the other hand in Europe you are entitled to getting a refund because European Union that's why, but in America there is little consumer protection.
In way they also operate like monopolies. Whoever owns said distribution system, can take whatever cut of the profit they want. So Valve for example could take a very generous cut of the earnings on game sales and item transactions.
Now there are benefits like sales, not having to worry about lost cd keys, damaged discs, allowing games to gain recognition. However all of that is bundled with all that other bullstuff.
