I think the justification would probably be that if they continued listing the item:
It maybe mislead consumers into paying more for the same thing
The reason why people pay more in that scenario is for convenience (IE all games in the same place) but that would be exersizing valves monopoly, so it may be safer to just remove to reduce complaints to steam about the higher pricing because there will be operational cost to processing those support requests and complaints
I don’t feel like valve does everything because of lawsuits. Open sourcing proton wasn’t due to a lawsuit. Releasing Cs2 as a free upgrade to csgo wasn’t due to a lawsuit.
On the other hand and in response to your comment, I think the regulatory fix is that platforms must display their platform fee clearly and separately to the publishers price.
CS2 as an “upgrade” to CSGO has been less than well received from what I can tell. If they wanted it to be free it should have been a new game and left CS:GO in place. Removing a game many of us paid for in favor of a newer, different game isn’t something that should be praised, and should be called out as the anti-consumer move it was.
Fyi I like valve but im in no way sworn to them.
I think the justification would probably be that if they continued listing the item:
I don’t feel like valve does everything because of lawsuits. Open sourcing proton wasn’t due to a lawsuit. Releasing Cs2 as a free upgrade to csgo wasn’t due to a lawsuit.
On the other hand and in response to your comment, I think the regulatory fix is that platforms must display their platform fee clearly and separately to the publishers price.
Wine and dxvk was already opensource. They couldn’t have closed it even if they wanted to.
Minor note about only a single point here
CS2 as an “upgrade” to CSGO has been less than well received from what I can tell. If they wanted it to be free it should have been a new game and left CS:GO in place. Removing a game many of us paid for in favor of a newer, different game isn’t something that should be praised, and should be called out as the anti-consumer move it was.