This is kind of necessary. You could open a store just selling Steam keys. You get Steam’s software distribution, installed user base, networking for free and pay nothing to them. Steam is selling all of those services for a 30% cut. Since your overhead is $0, you can take just a 1% fee and still turn a profit because Valve is covering 99% of your costs.

Steam could disable keys or start charging fees for them. As long as they’re being this ridiculously generous and permitting publishers to have them for free, some limitation makes sense.

I’m dubious, though. There must be a provision for promotional pricing. I’ve definitely bought keys for less than Steam prices.

I can’t believe that a company that puts out a device running Linux that gives you access to the OS in a few clicks and provides guides for how to install competing distribution platforms is more anticompetitive than Sony, Apple, Nintendo, Microsoft, Google. Valve and Steam aren’t perfect. It’s difficult to accept that having a store and charging for it is worse than, for example, Sony buying studios and paying millions of dollars for some games to be exclusive on their platform.

As someone who maintained an API, 80% to 90% of my time was discovering that hackers were attempting an exploit, blocking it, adding monitoring, building abuse prevention. After we shut our API off, we could turn services back on, especially free services that we only took away because hackers.

Not to mention the support volume. More than half of our support calls were, “Why did you suspend my account? I’m a poor old grandpa. I want to appeal.” Okay, yep we looked into activity and you sent 50000 requests in less than a minute and that’s all you ever did with this account. Did you know hackers lie and will spend hours getting tech support? You go to school to be an engineer to build cool stuff and instead field bullshit support requests all day from people trying to destroy the thing you want to build so they can maybe make thirty bucks and cost you tens of thousands. It sucked the life out of me and turned me eternally cynical.