If we're going to make a restaurant analogy of this.... good old games, they were happy to sell you the recipe. You could take it home, cook for your friends, some might even copy it, but most decent people would go out and buy the recipe themselves.
But then the cooks started feeling that they were losing money from copying recipes, so they switched selling cooking kits and refusing to disclose the ingredients. Some people reversed-engineering the recipe and would share it amongst themselves, saying this was madness. Others, well, it didn't matter so much, as long as it cooked right- it was a bit frustrating that their friends had to bring their own kits to parties, but not the end of the world.
But this wasn't good enough, they were still losing potential money. So, now, it's escalated to the point that you can't take anything home any more. You have to go to the restaurant, and the cook won't serve you a whole meal, just morsels, one at a time, as you eat them. Only, the restaurant is really popular, they're turning some people away, but there's already too many people and the kitchen can't keep up. The chef insists that everyone must have a restaurant experience and it's the only way the meal can work, but people are sitting there with empty plates, faces are pressed against the window, there's a huge amount of justified frustration, and the real kicker is- everyone's paid for their meal already. You can't blame them, a lot of them like the food, when they get it.
Gabe Newell gets it totally right when he says it's a service problem. It isn't that the core product necessarily sucks, it's that the service is truly horrendous. That's why people are still paying, but making a huge fuss.
