this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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First of all, I trust Ubi and WB way less than valve.
Yeah.
Because it violates their policy. That's not a "threat", those are the terms of the contract Ubi and WB agreed to. Terms that everyone has to follow.
Heck, Ubi and WB should be hit with a counter suit for trying to leverage their market position to exert control over valve and getting unusually favorable terms.
Clown suit. Ubi and WB are mad they can't break their contract with valve in a one sided way.
edit: I forgot some context:
The deal between valve and a publisher or dev is: they can sell on steam and elsewhere if steam is at least tied in price, or cheaper, but when they sell somewhere else, that includes the steam key and access to steam and steam's distribution at no cost.
What the devs and publishers wanted to do was leverage other features of steam and the steam ecosystem, while undercutting steam's price.
They are always free to just not sell on steam for a cheaper price. That's not what this is about.
edit2:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
"Steam Key Rules and Guidelines"
You shouldn't trust any of them. No billionaire has your best interests at heart. Even Gabe.
That is true, definitely a "lesser evil" situation.
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I'm inclined a little to agree with you, but it's not like he made his money because Gabe refused to be run by anyone. He pays his employees really well. My dad's friend still is working at Valve after going there 20 some odd years ago. He rakes in money like no ones business. But they are all benefitting from the work they have done.
Secondly, nobody knows how charitable he is in his private life. The fact that he's so private about it, inclines me to believe he's probably a decent guy, who just doesn't like the spotlight. He may be a billionaire, but how many billionaires have their employees love them like at Valve?
Lastly, most of his money is tied up in shares of the company, as he is 50%+ owner. He may use that to leverage cash loans, but he's also just smart. He doesn't really do that all that much, except when he's buying his research yachts. And those shares are only accessible by the workers, as it's a private company. Why? Because the money belongs to the laborers who produce the goods.
Now, I'm willing to change my view if there's ever a situation in which Gabe Newall is intentionally trying to avoid paying taxes, but that hasn't happened yet.
Bezos, Musk, Gates, Trump, Zuckerburg, Page, Brin, Ellison, Dell, Huang, the Waltons, Blomberg, Thiel. There's so many worse people out there. I do agree wealth is bad, but what the aforementioned are doing is significantly worse.
What about exploiting child gambling? Valve's value, and thusly Gabe's value, skyrocketed after introducing lootboxes to TF2, CSGO, DOTA2, etc. He can be as charitable as he fucking wants, but he still defends lootboxes while taking little to no efforts to ensure that children aren't gambling on his platform. He's had... how many years to fix this problem now? Too many. He's not fixed the problem, and continues to reap the rewards in the meantime.
As far as I'm concerned, he's just as much of a piece of shit as any other billionaire. The only difference is that he makes toys that a lot of us really, really like; toys that we apparently like so much so that we're willing to handwave child gambling as long as it doesn't get in the way of making it moderately convenient to download DRM-infested games.
Mate, I did not know parents were not responsible for their own children. That is on me. I'm glad to hear all the work I've done on my network and computers to make them safe for my children was a moot point.
Adults like gambling. It's not Valve's fault that children are using it cause their parents are ignorant of their own child.
As far as the DRM stuff goes, that's all based on the publisher. And it's not that difficult to bypass. Valve has shown time and time again, that they are a business for their customers. Their customers like a solid platform that works and is easy to use and has a community.
Let's take a look a Linux real quick. If it wasn't for Valve, Linux gaming wouldn't be what it is today. They did that and gave it to the community. I'm sorry other platforms can't be bothered to put in that kind of effort. If you wanna play with the big dogs, you gotta get off the porch. And Ubisoft wants to take the easy way out through a lawsuit. They need to do better with their storefront. Offer good exclusives. Try to actually appeal to your customers.
I still remember when everybody bitched about Steam when half-life 2 came out. It was kinda bad, and people were mad about it. But Valve was just ahead of the curve. It allowed them to publish updates, patches, anti-cheating. And soon enough, the community grew to love it. It just worked. If something broke in your game, it was probably fixed in a week if it was a Valve game. It gave so much to PC players.
No love for those companies but just because you agreed to a contract doesn't mean the clauses of the contract are legal or enforceable.
True, but this deal is that companies stick to the terms and in turn they get access to steams shop, implicitly the community.
They don't have some unalienable right to access another company's customers.
You don't have a "right" to go into a BurgerKing and advertise and sell your burgers there.
Amazon got slapped with a substantial fine (in the EU) for having basically the same "rule" in their contracts, that forbid cheaper listings elsewhere. So yes, in the EU hanging that rule is illegal. But if it applies to digital licensing is another matter.
You do know you're only renting access to the game with a one-time fee, not buying it, right?
Edit: the original comment left it unclear if the price rule only applies to copies sold that include a steam key, or if copies that work completely without steam can be arbitrarily priced. If the latter is the case, it's obviously fine. If it includes any game version, it isn't OK.
amazon's case is different. if you're selling the steam version of your game it needs to match the price on steam. if you have a separate non-steam version you can charge whatever you want.
the reason places like gog follow steam pricing is, why wouldn't they? makes them more money.
There have been several lawsuits about this policy, and the more recent class action one is about whether steam is actually enforcing this policy for steam keys only or also for games sold on other platforms without relying on steam keys. I don't think there is any actual written rule about this because it's probably illegal in several jurisdictions but there have been rumors about this since basically the beginning of third party games on steam.