What? How would they do that?

Why would they do that? It would tarnish all the rep they built up in the last few years. The reasoning they made when they started releasing games on PC was bullshit (The one where they said to entice players to PS5). They are looking into this long term and Spider-Man 2's announcement yesterday solidifies that (alongside The Last of Us Part 1) - both of which were announced/released less than a year from the PS5 release date. Something that did not happen years ago when they started the PC porting.

Doing this would damage their plan to expand. Development costs especially for Playstation Studios is astronomical and C-suite execs want bigger numbers which is why their branching out to releasing their games on outside of Playstation. The same reason why Microsoft is releasing their games on PC as well.

If anything, they'll want to open up PSN through those regions that dont have them to fix the issue. There's likely logistics and laws which they are probably looking into that is preventing them from opening doors automatically.

Edit: I dont see them removing the games completely off of steam, if there is a need to remove a game from Steam - it would probably be similar to what happened to Ape Escape on PS5 - where they removed it but will likely release a new version of the game.

I hope AMD clean house for their GPU side, because aty this point they need to get out of the Xbox 1 phase and get heavily into their Ryzen game. 

Yeah, it still blows my mind how all those companies adopt the same "fuck you, I do what I want" mentality, every single time they approach PC. I think execs and those calling the shots/marketing just see PC as a console, or something that doesn't deserve to be respected, because it's always the same song and dance with them (treat the customer like shit, customer leaves, "pls dun go, I'll do slightly better", ppl keep leaving, company eventually caves in after years of abusing their userbase). 

See Sony, MS and EG have all by far had their biggest wake-up calls. MS got theirs with X1 reveal, and their multiple failed attempts at swooning PC gamers. They had to spend years slowly building up trust with PC gamers, but now they've reached a point where they know they can't be like Steam, so it's now just Gamepass all the way with a still shitty Xbox App, but at least my Xbox account is a part of my OS, and so far they haven't done anything to dick around with their systems, so my sign-ins for any Xbox game is default automatic, and they don't enforce any shitty overlays over Steam's.

EG got theirs when people stood up and called Timmy out for what he was trying to do, bribe his way back into an open platform he willingly left and proceeded to insult for yrs on end, and then also had the balls to say "it won't be the customer that decides the outcome of this war, but the devs", which came off as completely tone fucking deaf as you could possibly get, and it told the planet that no, he did not in fact learn a single god damn thing from his time with MS/Xbox (He still views PC as a platform to fuck around with, and not to respect, I mean look at how he treats the new gen gamer kids with V-bucks and Fortnitifying the shit out of every collab, making Fortnite lose more of it's self identity with each collab they do). 

Sony got theirs recently thanks to the HD2 situation, and it took them a few days of shitting bricks in their office, but they did finally respond. They claimed they "heard" us, and claimed they weren't going to push crap, but it turns out that was honeyed words to get people to lower down the pitchforks and usher people back into the stadium. Now they're just using Steam as if it was their platform, where they get to just rip all the other games that were previously on there, slapping "remasters" onto the storefront with markup pricing, and all while locking out people like me, who use the god damn platform to buy my games on...

I just find it absurd as hell, that a publisher can just come on by and fuck around on this level and for Valve to just sit there and not say "hey, you're actually treating my customers like shit, taking them for a wild ride to nowhere and locking them off on my platform", is what gets me gobsmacked the most. The more this keeps happening with publisher after publisher, the more Valve will eventually have to start addressing the issues of publishers coming in and treating customers like shit (it's already happening on a dev team level on Steam forums, where devs are abusing moderator power and silencing criticism, or from saying anything they don't like). 

Sony is absolutely gonna come out with their own client/launcher, that I can guarantee you. The fact they are slapping in their PSN enforcement, coupled with PSN overlay and PSN trophies are systems that will eventually result in a client being brought forward to the market. I can easily see Sony taking a page out of Ubisoft's book, and just going "well I wanna leech off steam, but I want 100% of my sales on my own platform, so I guess I'll use both and piss ppl off on Steam enough to move to my own client?". 

The thing is, Ubisoft has done that for a number of yrs now, to a point where I just stopped buying games from them. My last game was Origins, and I haven't looked back since. No matter how deeply discounted Ubi's games are on Steam, I know I'll have to deal with Denuvo+2-3 layers of DRM and shitty optimisation, MT's and all that crap, but it's their client I absolutely do not want to deal with, so that's their loss, not mine. If Sony wants to copy Ubisoft, they are not going to win ppl like me over, I mean, they've already soft locked me out on Steam of all places, so it's not like I could buy their games from now on anyway?. 

Like all I want from them is for good PC ports, no account registration bs, and for actual good prices, not this "here's my old game from 5yrs ago, pls pay me £60", because that's going to put me off buying their games. Even if it's a game like Spider-Man 2, I ain't paying top dollar for a 1.3yr old game, that's not how this works Sony, that's not how any of this works, time changes everything, including value and prices (Publishers pitched for years that digital games would lead to cheaper prices, meaning that was all a lie as well). 

If they changed their plans and saw Steam as a competitor platform again.

Of course it would damage the brand now, but there's only one reason any developer would leave their third-party launchers intact on Valve's platform: to keep a foot on the door and tie these games back to their own ecosystem if they want to down the line.

@Bolded/italic - When did they ever see Steam as a competitor?

@underlined - The reason why they put in their third party API is because they can beef up their MAU numbers for investment calls to show how much growth there is which is what a lot of companies do whether its through profit, revenue, user numbers, etc. Its the same with every company - for a gaming company implementing a third party API helps with their investor calls.

The same reason why Rockstar, Ubisoft, EA and other companies are doing the same. Its not because they'll eventually drop out of support.

They can drop out of support regardless of whether there is a third party API - i.e. what EA, Rockstar, and Ubisoft did years ago.

Yeah, that's the part that annoys me, because I know it's never been a design choice for my best interest, but the company's interest to be able to yank that line back away from Steam. We saw Ubisoft do it, EA some years prior, and now both are back, but still require account/client usage (same with Blizzard). 

Sony's going to throw their own client out there soon enough and do the same as the others, which isn't going to make sense for the customer, but it'll make sense as a line cast by Sony. 

The way they've been pushing PSN and setting up their PSN overlay/Trophy system gives me signs that they are still seeing Steam as a competitor. If they never saw Valve as a competitor, they wouldn't need to enforce PSN, create an overlay/trophy system that is strictly tied to their console ecosystem. This just tells me they're taking advantage of Valve opening it's doors and just seeing how many people they can round up into the PSN ecosystem garden. 

Which again is weird as to why Valve just passively allows anyone to siphon from them (I know, anti-competitive laws and all that, but mankind is kinda fucked in the head to make siphoning from all the work you've put in to somehow being seen as an "ok" law to have). 

Basil, there are two reasons:

1- People that play on PC via Steam don't need to buy one of Sony's consoles to play games. Hence they are competitors because Valve/Steam is in the way of selling more Playstations.

2- Valve gets a cut from every sale on Steam. Sony would like to get 100% of the money. That is the source of most problems with EA, Ubisoft and the rest, and the reason they all launched their own stores, to try to get all the money from every game sold. They're competing for the money.

Developers/publishers can remove their games from the virtual store shelves.

But I doubt that they are allowed to remove sold licenses from Steam libraries (without refunding the money to the customers).

They can be revoked at any time for any reason. Obviously, if that started to happen en masse people would lose faith in the entire system of digital videogame content distribution, hence it seldom is applied, but there are examples.

Technically that is true even for physical copies, since that is just the means of transporting a licensed piece of software no different than digital content, but that would be much harder to enforce.

And yet Playstation games are coming out on Steam.

Also EA and Ubisoft are both back on releasing their games on Steam.

People who play exclusively on PC will likely continue to play exclusively on PC. They probably already realize that which is why the amount of releases increased and the amount of time it takes for a game to be released on PC is getting smaller. Sony's practically doing the same thing that MS is already doing but at a slower rate.

They dont see them as competitor but as a source of potential sales. Same with EGS and GOG where these games are being released as well - its not just Steam.

They cant revoke for anytime for any reason.

"We're going to revoke your game because we are opening up our own store" or "We're going to revoke your game because we do not want to sell games on PC anymore" isnt gonna cut it.

It doesnt work like that because they'll get sued to oblivion.

They can remove the games from being sold but the only reason why they can revoke a key is if the key was fraudulent. 

If you buy a game from Steam, Humble, Fanatical - these are all legitimate keys, they cannot be revoked unless they do a mass refund which I highly doubt that they will do, more than reputation, they'll lose out all the money they made and than some because if that happens, I'm pretty sure they'll get stricken down in court because it would be illegal, if not the US - likely the EU and its strict laws.

When EA and ubisoft "left" steam years ago, none of the games people bought got revoked. Why? Because it would be a massive legal headache for them.

Edit: You can use CDKeys , a store that sells games for cheaper price than any other third party but pose the risk of getting whatever game you buy revoked because a lot of the keys there were stolen, etc.

Steam store, humble, fanatical, indie gala, etc are all legitimate stores and their keys are distributed to them by the publisher themselves.

There would be no legal basis whatsoever for suing them in that case. DMCA and similar access control laws are pretty clear and have been validated by decades of jurisprudence and international treaties.

You might as well be trying to sue them because your disc copy broke and you want another because you think you bought a forever license. Nope.

As an example, a lot of late 2000s and 2010s physical PC games flat out don't work anymore. The servers required to get their keys to work are down, GFWL is down, etc.

Are developers required to do anything about it? No.