While there are legitimate grievances in this lawsuit, they do also complain that Valve doesn’t let developers generate as many Steam keys as they want, and then sell them on other stores at lower prices than on Steam (see p. 35, “Valve Distorts Competition Through The Steam Key Price Parity Provision”).
Keeping in mind that Valve lets developers generate keys for their games for free, this amounts to Wolfire complaining that they cannot offload the costs of hosting/services to Valve, while at the same time minimizing how much Valve earns. And that just sounds ridiculously entitled to me.
If Wolfire somehow were to win the right to undercut Valve in this manner, then I would not be surprised if Valve responded by charging developers for keys, or otherwise limited the ability of developers to generate keys. Which would have wide reaching consequences for PC gaming
While there are legitimate grievances in this lawsuit, they do also complain that Valve doesn’t let developers generate as many Steam keys as they want, and then sell them on other stores at lower prices than on Steam (see p. 35, “Valve Distorts Competition Through The Steam Key Price Parity Provision”).
Keeping in mind that Valve lets developers generate keys for their games for free, this amounts to Wolfire complaining that they cannot offload the costs of hosting/services to Valve, while at the same time minimizing how much Valve earns. And that just sounds ridiculously entitled to me.
If Wolfire somehow were to win the right to undercut Valve in this manner, then I would not be surprised if Valve responded by charging developers for keys, or otherwise limited the ability of developers to generate keys. Which would have wide reaching consequences for PC gaming