This means if you go to steam to find out about a game and then decide to buy it from the manufacturer’s website the manufacturer makes more money because they don’t have to give Valve a cut, and Valve might even authorize you to activate that product on steam.

Expecting valve to offer their marketing and delivery systems without any incentive for you to sell products through it would defeat the purpose of their platform.

You can only activate that product in Steam if it’s sold as a Steam key. Also, any game added to Steam from outside the platform has no access to their SDK, so this point is moot.

I’m not defending either Apple nor Google, but their business model is essentially the same, with the exception of the hardware integration, which again, doesn’t even matter that much since Steam is at 75% PC market share. And if you read some of the comments in this thread you’ll find out that for many people, the moat is not the hardware, is the platform itself.

Again, weird to see people defending anti competitive behaviour coming from a multi billion corporation, just because they sympathize with them.