It's not just contested, but contradicted by reality. Many games on steam can be purchased from retailers who receive keys directly from the publishwr (e.g. Gre

It's not just contested, but contradicted by reality. Many games on steam can be purchased from retailers who receive keys directly from the publishwr (e.g. Green Man Gaming), at a substantial discount. Sometimes that discount price is much closer to the after steam cut amount the publisher would otherwise receive. The rumor, for many years, was that you could sell a game separately and if it didn't use steam keys and steam services Valve did not care. If you wanted to sell steam copies, there seemed to be two conditions. 1. Keys sold off of steam must make up less than some percentage of on-steam sales. 2. If you have a sale on another storefront, there must be a matching sale on Steam in some time window. It is entirely possible that valves notoriously bad communication abilities resulted in a company believing a total ban on discounts was policy, but the fact that other publishers seemingly are not and were not held to that standard for many years is certainly odd.