I will admit that I foolishly believed someone else’s summation on the situation; that sourced report, assuming the emails are real, is pretty damning. Notably the email correspondence between publishers/developers and Valve does not mention any official policy, but without additional context comes off as threatening… multiple examples of punishment and out right removal from the store, wow.

And incidents as recent as 2022. I would have figured the older examples would be there because Valve was a lot more blatantly corrupt when they were first forcing the Steam client on consumers. People tend not to bring up when Valve was buying exclusivity of already released retail CD games and taking them off shelves to force Steam exclusivity. Wonder why its taking this long to come out in a court case? Its not like there isn’t a long, recent history of indie devs yelling publicly on the internet about the dumb shit Valve puts them through.