this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
344 points (85.5% liked)
Technology
85142 readers
5536 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The crux of the case is whether Valve is applying that rule to non-Steam keys or not. Lawsuit says they are, Valve says they aren't. If Valve is telling the truth, they've done nothing wrong. If Valve is lying however that is an anticompetitive practice that should be punished. We won't really know until the trial concludes though.
Personally I think the most likely answer is that some junior support people at Valve misunderstood the policy and told some people the wrong thing. There's a decent chance that when those accusations first surfaced a decade or so ago (yes this has been a thing for that long) Valve probably sent some internal memos to clarify what the rule actually covers and what it doesn't and hopefully that was that.
Speaking from my company experiences as an employee:
If it's not written in a clear language (e.g. ONLY keys generated and distributed by Valve need to follow the same price on other storefronts. We do not care about 3rd Party key generator/distributors like uPlays own infra) and somewhere accessible it will be forgotten or misinterpreted by employees.
I can't even count the amount of "With this email we inform you of policy X and order Y".
This email will be lost and new employees will never receive it.
And employees will repeat the rules in a flawed way.