if you have a separate non-steam version you can charge whatever you want.

This is the part that was unclear from the original comment. If that's in fact the case, that's obviously fine (and different from the Amazon case).

why wouldn’t they?

it's called "competetive pricing". If I'm a customer and have a steam account holding most of my games (like most PC gamers), why would I even consider buying it anywhere else if it isn't even cheaper and now I got games in like 3-5 stores with at least 2-3 launcher/downloaders/apps. No, this most likely won't make them more money but much much less with fewer people buying it there.

There have been several lawsuits about this policy, and the more recent class action one is about whether steam is actually enforcing this policy for steam keys only or also for games sold on other platforms without relying on steam keys. I don't think there is any actual written rule about this because it's probably illegal in several jurisdictions but there have been rumors about this since basically the beginning of third party games on steam.

Did you read the article? This is about a completely different version of the game that was not even sold on steam.

"It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers."

That's a very fair way of phrasing it and should make sense to anyone saying "but what if they want to sell it cheaper elsewhere?" Seems most people don't even understand the actual issue, they just are butthurt over headlines

But it says nothing in your link about selling games that work without steam key on another platform?

I do not see where steam keys are mentioned in the article? Why do you care so much about steam keys if that's completely irrelevant in this case?

The service part only applies to copies sold that include steam keys and therefore use the steam-API related things (workshop, cloud saves). I haven't read about this specific case in detail, but as long as that use of steam for copies sold is part of what they wanted to leverage but essentially not pay for, that's obviously bull.

This honestly is somewhat unexpected and I had to re-read the comment I replied to to understand it correctly, hence my misunderstanding of that aspect. It's unexpected cause ubisoft in particular for the longest time had their own "store" and games required at least their own launcher. I haven't played Ubisoft games in at least a decade, so I don't know/remember if the games reuired your own ubi-account, or if the games relied on Steams systems (workshop/cloud saves/...). I would've assumed no, and that they only use it as a downloader cause players essentially wouldn't buy it outside of steam (or at least not enough).

Top be clear: if steam allows copies of a game listed on steam to be sold at an arbitrary price as long as that doesn't include a steam key, this is perfectly fine. Actively thinking about it now I would assume it does, as I'm pretty sure I bought games without steam keys for less than the listing on steam was.