Imagine there’s a huge fuel station that’s so big they essentially set rules towards suppliers that they can’t offer their gas to other stations at a cheaper price otherwise they can’t sell it in their station with 95% market share.

That is specifically not what is happening.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

“Steam Key Rules and Guidelines”

“You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers.”

Valve does not “dictate” prices in any way.

Ubi and WB are free to sell their games for as cheap as they want. But if and ONLY IF they offer a steam key with the purchase, they can’t undercut steam.

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.

Ok. The rule is, actually let me link it…

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

“Steam Key Rules and Guidelines”

“You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam.** It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers.”**

Just read that paragraph. It should be pretty clear what the whole thing is about.

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.

That is true, definitely a “lesser evil” situation.

Bloomberg cites two high-profile cases referenced in the ongoing lawsuit, one involving Ubisoft, and another Warner Bros.

First of all, I trust Ubi and WB way less than valve.

Valve allegedly threatened to delist all editions of Rainbow Six Siege after Ubisoft offered a cheaper option on its Uplay store.

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”

Duh. I wouldn’t have called it “addiction”, but dependency was clearly the goal, otherwise they wouldn’t take away classical search.

I thought that was obvious from the start.

Removed by mod

This part of the UX and development of linux is still very much taking baby steps unfortunately. Massive lack of interest and manpower to do these things cleanly and provide good documentation.