> The consumers’ 2021 lawsuit said Amazon violated antitrust law by restricting third-party sellers from offering their products for lower prices elsewhere on rival platforms while they are also for sale on Amazon.

Holy shit, do Valve next! They do the exact same thing.

Valve does not do this. Best I can tell, the idea that they do was created either maliciously or incompetently by the law firm suing them on antitrust grounds. What Valve does is assert that you may not offer Steam keys for your game at lower prices on other platforms, permanently. This is only possible because Steam lets game makers sell Steam licenses to their games on other platforms, cutting Valve out of the platform fees altogether. If you list your game on both the Epic Games store and Steam, you're just fine setting different prices on the two. If you sell Steam products keys to your users directly, who can then go and use those keys to claim your game on Steam, you can't undercut your Steam store listing on a permanent basis. You are even allowed to do temporary promotions on other platforms where you sell your Steam keys that you don't on Steam.

There is actually an ongoing case against valve for their most-favored-nation policies: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/why-gaming-company-...

Elden Ring is currently $15 cheaper on GameBillet compared to Steam[0] - it even comes with a Steam activation key. If Valve did the same thing, sites like isthereanydeal.com wouldn't really have as much of a purpose.

[0]: https://isthereanydeal.com/game/elden-ring/info/

Every single major retailer does this. It's not collusion, it's just smart policy. Shelf space is insanely valuable. Retailers have customers walking around their stores (or making searches in Amazon's case) at the final step in the sales funnel. No retailer wants to get a customer that close to buying (often at considerable expense) then lose them because the brand either has weak channel price control or is trying to divert customers to their own website by offering a discount.

They do not. You are free to sell your game anywhere online for less. You simply cannot use the ability to generate steam keys to sell steam games externally and then proceed to undercut steam.

You are leveraging their infrastructure for that transaction and sale, they are free to set the rules there. They do not otherwise charge you for the infrastructure costs related to purchasing the game, supplying continued redownload, supplying update infrastructure and so on.

You can otherwise take your game and sell it on the Epic store or GOG or run your own download infrastructure and foot the thousands in bandwidth bills. And charge whatever you want