Regardless of their reasons, in my view it looks like steam's neglect of allowing third party publishers to do whatever the hell they want through their platform has finally backfired on them.
EA and Ubisoft are especially guilty of this because steam is realistically nothing more than a pass through and people write reviews warning them on that because at the end of the day if I understand correctly because I don't really buy these types of games through steam for that reason you click on it and then it forces you into their launchers so you may as well have downloaded their crap separately.
If they wanted to remain viable they should have never have allowed this crap to seep in and basically enforced a rule of "You must have a one click launch process in order to sell on our platform" and this is a purely pragmatic point of view to protect their business too. Other developers did this and that's why they're not dealing with any fallout right now. It just auto logs you in and they've clearly linked the steam database somehow to their own launchers properly.
The big publishers though? They've been getting away with this shit for years.
True but if the removal WAS done by Steam, this could be not just protecting themselves legally but also opportunistic retaliation and setting a line in the sand.
In the past, I don't think Steam had the leverage or power to tell publishers not to do that for fear of losing games being published on their site.
Current day, we see how MASSIVELY bad all game studios and publishers are doing financially thanks to both ideological decisions and mismanagement. Might be the perfect opportunity to do this now right when Sony made the biggest blunder with a once praised game when they have the maximum leverage and Sony have little to retaliate against since their other games have been suffering thanks to their mismanagement.
If the removal was done by Steam, it opens Steam up to a lawsuit from the publisher. For a non-valid reason, they restricted it to a number of countries for their own business gain at the cost of the second party's income. That is a form of tortuous interference, and Steam would be liable for all the refunds and all the lost potential sales.
Steam is stupid, and has more than a few danger-hair DIE types, but I don't think they're quite so terminally stupid as to do that.
Not that I know the finer points of business or contract law—or whatever contract Steam may have in place specifically—but I would think "you made it so that the people here literally cannot use this product, we cannot sell it to them because of that" should be a valid reason.
"We aren't obligated to continue to sell a non-functioning product that could open us up to legal liabilities" should be somewhere in Steam's contract, one would think.
It's a Sony published game but Steam is just too big a market anymore so they thought they'd use it to try to drive traffic back to psn and whoops it backfired.
Regardless of their reasons, in my view it looks like steam's neglect of allowing third party publishers to do whatever the hell they want through their platform has finally backfired on them.
EA and Ubisoft are especially guilty of this because steam is realistically nothing more than a pass through and people write reviews warning them on that because at the end of the day if I understand correctly because I don't really buy these types of games through steam for that reason you click on it and then it forces you into their launchers so you may as well have downloaded their crap separately.
If they wanted to remain viable they should have never have allowed this crap to seep in and basically enforced a rule of "You must have a one click launch process in order to sell on our platform" and this is a purely pragmatic point of view to protect their business too. Other developers did this and that's why they're not dealing with any fallout right now. It just auto logs you in and they've clearly linked the steam database somehow to their own launchers properly.
The big publishers though? They've been getting away with this shit for years.
True but if the removal WAS done by Steam, this could be not just protecting themselves legally but also opportunistic retaliation and setting a line in the sand.
In the past, I don't think Steam had the leverage or power to tell publishers not to do that for fear of losing games being published on their site.
Current day, we see how MASSIVELY bad all game studios and publishers are doing financially thanks to both ideological decisions and mismanagement. Might be the perfect opportunity to do this now right when Sony made the biggest blunder with a once praised game when they have the maximum leverage and Sony have little to retaliate against since their other games have been suffering thanks to their mismanagement.
If the removal was done by Steam, it opens Steam up to a lawsuit from the publisher. For a non-valid reason, they restricted it to a number of countries for their own business gain at the cost of the second party's income. That is a form of tortuous interference, and Steam would be liable for all the refunds and all the lost potential sales.
Steam is stupid, and has more than a few danger-hair DIE types, but I don't think they're quite so terminally stupid as to do that.
Not that I know the finer points of business or contract law—or whatever contract Steam may have in place specifically—but I would think "you made it so that the people here literally cannot use this product, we cannot sell it to them because of that" should be a valid reason.
"We aren't obligated to continue to sell a non-functioning product that could open us up to legal liabilities" should be somewhere in Steam's contract, one would think.
It's a Sony published game but Steam is just too big a market anymore so they thought they'd use it to try to drive traffic back to psn and whoops it backfired.