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.
If adults want to gamble, fine. Let's enforce gambling laws and get this over with. It would also solve the children gambling problem because that would be illegal. But this is why Valve's gambling service is indefensible. Valve is actively trying to prevent the gambling classification because if it gets treated like actual gambling it most likely stops being profitable. I don't necessarily have an issue with gambling, I have an issue with it not being treated as gambling. And all the other things Valve has done that have been positive for gaming do not justify giving Valve a free pass on gambling.
To bring it back to Gaben, he isn't avoiding taxes but he is avoiding the (gambling) law because it makes him more money, so is it that different from avoiding taxes?
That is a fair point. However, I must ask, what is the different between what Valve is doing with loot boxes v. every single trading card game out there. MTG, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh, or Disney's Lorcana? You are purchasing an item that has items in it that are random. The only reason they have value is because people have the option to just buy skin they want on Valve's marketplace. Just like people have the option to buy a specific Pokémon card from a third party.
The other thing that Valve has done is, there's no inherent value to the item. You can sell items for Steam Wallet funds, to then use in the marketplace. So, to me it seems, it's really easy to set up a Steam account to not be allowed to purchase items. Which would include adding money to a Steam wallet for the marketplace. So, no this is not a "think of the children" issue. It's yet again, another people are bad parents and can't be bothered to use parental controls on their children's electronics. Or take steps to prevent them from spending real money. Or take steps to prevent them from playing too much.
Fucking Nintendo and that piece of shit Pokémon company! Fuck Magic the gathering, a bunch of groomers in the 90s trying to get kids addicted to gambling!
GUMBALL MACHINES AND THE GAMBLING OF FLAVOR!
All of those things were specificially degined to encourage addiction to buying the product, like yeah we should do something about those practices when they cross a line. Idk why you think it should all be fair game just because a less problematic version of the issue exists.
So much wrong with this. Gabe pays his extremely small workforce very well while keeping the lions share for himself. At 300-400 employees getting paid 300k on average, that is only around one hundred million in total payroll compared to 17 billion in revenue.
Gabe is in no way a good guy here. He could afford to pay his workers a cool million a piece and his payroll would still be a fraction of revenue.
Wild conjecture about how much Gabe is trickling down his wealth has got to be one of the lamest excuses I have ever seen. There is no such thing a good billionaire despite your wish Gabe is.
We already determined Gabe is not giving the money to the people who do the work, he is giving them a small fraction, less than 1%.
If you think for a second Gabe is not taking advantage of every tax loop hole his high paid accountants can find you are fucking crazy. He is definitely doing everything he can to avoid paying taxes.
Gabe has a monopoly. He has not used this to increasingly provide cheaper services like a corporation in competition would. Steam's cut should have went down over time if there was good competition. I personally think anything above 10% for a digital platform is crazy.
Had me in the first half, lost me here. Offering a decent service while everyone else shoots themselves in the face does not make it a monopoly.
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.
... and in a country with rule of law whether a contractual clause is legal would be decided by a court, no?
Yeah, isn't that the point of the lawsuit? That this exact clause is challenged in court?
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.
This is the part that was unclear from the original comment. If that's in fact the case, that's obviously fine (and different from the Amazon case).
it's called "competetive pricing". If I'm a customer and have a steam account holding most of my games (like most PC gamers), why would I even consider buying it anywhere else if it isn't even cheaper and now I got games in like 3-5 stores with at least 2-3 launcher/downloaders/apps. No, this most likely won't make them more money but much much less with fewer people buying it there.
I pay the same or sometimes a bit more for GoG games because they are DRM free. Id like better client support on Linux, but DRM free is a value proposition thats usually worth it.
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.
I do like Valve more than most companies, but this is absolutely monopolistic behavior.
I do think the R6 Siege situation is a bit different, to my knowledge it was about Ubisoft adding a new cheaper "Starter Pack" option that lets you access a multiplayer-first game on different terms. It seems scummy to give users playing the same game on the same servers different terms on different storefronts.
But were they selling Steam Keys? Sounds to me like Ubisoft was selling a UPlay version of the game for cheaper than the Steam version, which probably didn't include a Steam Key.
If the UPlay version also included a Steam Key, then yes, Ubisoft would have broken the terms of contract, but that seems unlikely to me.
I think its fair enough for Valve to require that Steam Keys, which use Steam infrastucture, are not sold for less than Steam sells them for, since Valve wouldn't be making any money on them, but would still have some of the costs associated with delivering the product (and depending on how much Steam infrastructure they use, matchmaking, anti-cheat and other things).
But requiring that keys for other Stores, with their own infrastructure, are never cheaper that Steam is definitely monopolistic, shitty and probably illegal.
Its weird to me that all articles I have found about this issue don't actually mention this crucial detail.
Ubisoft selling the game on Uplay, their own storefront, does not include a steam key with the purchase. The clause you just listed IS NOT RELEVANT to the situation. Which is why valve is being sued.
They're offering a version of the game that isn't even available on steam (so doubly no steam key), and were told that doing so at a lower price would have valve removing all versions of the game for sale. This is blatant market position abuse to fix pricing.
Who the fuck is upvoting your blatant misinformation?