To be fair, only a handful of publishers were able to take their cards and go elsewhere. The media companies were a lot more on top of dragging their products off of Netflix.
Nobody would be on steam just for Valve games, after all, and indie has a much lower barrier of entry.
While they could certainly distribute their current products better, a lot of the issues they have now (see: belated frogs comment) aren't things they really had control over.