to elaborate since i came of like an ableist asshole in my first post admittedly
I perfer supporting valve because:
they're responsible for popularizing PC gaming with Steam aka the greatest launcher of all time
they're responsible for many masterpieces including TF2, Half life, L4D2, Portal, and many more
they're a private company (so you know they'll never bow to investors cuz they don't have any to begin with)
their CEO is literally one of the few good CEOs on planet earth
long after making good software they're still innovating with stuff like steam workshop, valve index and the steam deck which is on track to actually popularize linux gaming and put it on the same level as windows (which would be the best thing ever and that's a fucking fact)
not to mention steam is fucking great, it's a chat platform, a social media platform (with none of the toxicity or retardation of places like twitter and reddit) a place to host games, a place to mod games, and most importantly, a place to buy and sell games. It alongside gog should be the only launchers on my desktop, because it's one of the few that actually warrant being a launcher for any reason that isn't insane greed
And despite that people still find reasons to hate Valve despite them contributing a shitton to the game industry.
What has epic done for the gaming industry?
made some admittedly legendary arena shooters (unreal/unreal tournament) throughout their time from the late 90s to early 2000s
immediately took a nosedive when they released gears of bore on the 360
Made unreal engine 4 which is an overhyped, overrated engine that does nothing but make overly "realistic" generic graphics while having shitty physics (every unreal engine before 4 was actually competent)
Made rocket league which is actually a pretty good and fun game in all honesty
cemented their drop in quality with fortnite, which somehow managed to be the game of the late 2010s despite being an unoriginal crappy ugly mess.
oh yeah and just to shit in the PC gamers cereal too, they decided to make a horrible fucking launcher which hasn't even caught up to steam in features, games, community or aesthetic despite being the latter being from fucking 2003, and has the AUDACITY TO SAY "it's for the sake of COMPEITITON" when the only competition they're using is buying exclusivity left and right which does not a good launcher make (and can be circumvented anyways by just pirating the fucking games they make exclusive)
and made UE5 which looks to be more of the same from 4
oh, and they also bought fucking bandcamp too. i loved that site, nice to know they're gonna fuck it 4 years from now or whatever