[betterbeehome]

Pulling out of the EU market is impossible. Tens of millions of Europeans have invested billions into Steam. What does pull out of the market even mean? Stop selling games? They cannot because many games would become broken, as they need steam selling functionality for those games to work. It would leave them non-functional and broken. Micro transactions, subscriptions and DLC, etc. Stop selling would cause many millions in damages and many new lawsuits.

Not to mention none of this is in Valves best interest. Even a used game license market would be preferable to pulling out of Europe...

[pkaye]

Its really the developers that hurt a bit. Valve already got their 30% cut on the game. They will comply with the laws for existing games. For newer games, expect fewer sales discounts in the EU to make up the loss. Also some bigger game developers will pull out of Steam and run their own subscription services for the EU. Things like Google Stadia start looking perfect for them. And the independent developers will just have to bare the loss in sales.

Its kind of like the SaaS model. Why pay $100 once when you can pay $10/month for years by calling it a service.