In the second instance, Warner Bros. found itself in a similar situation. In 2017, as the publisher was preparing to launch Middle-earth: Shadow of War, the company was allegedly informed by Valve that pre-orders for the game had been removed from Steam. Valve's reasoning was that the price was “significantly higher than what was available at other retailers for the same version of the game.” David Haddad, president of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, allegedly tried to resolve the situation directly with Valve so as not to face its ire.

I am honestly struggling to see the issue with this one. Seems to me that Valve wanted the pre-order price to be lowered on their on platform to reflect how it was elsewhere. To me that looks pro-consumer, but perhaps I’m looking at it from the wrong angle? But both examples given just seem (to me) to be them trying to get the same price or product for their platform’s consumers as other platforms and not them driving up the price on other platforms. If someone has a better angle with which to view this, please share it.

You can hate Valve/Steam all you want of course but I would ask you all to remember that Steam is one of the only platforms that has completely rejected the introduction of AI slop in its entire UX (so far). No slop button, no chatbot dialogue that you can't switch off, none of that. In my daily computer experrience, that's pretty magical.

Steam and Hexbear are the only sites that don't have that crap (off the top of my head), and I respect ol' Gabe for that. Would have been sooo easy to announce some AI crap bolted onto the UI but they didn't.

I get all my games on steam sales and if the price never goes down to my liking I sail the high seas

Steam is unique in this I'm sure, unlike most other private businesses which are way too ethical to do something like "protecting their market share"

Thank god for the Russians. Extremely easy to circumnavigate that shit.

Gamers would still defend Steam monopoly

steamfront