There was a lot of speculation and no confirmation, this is confirmation

I had thought Valve might have been pre-emptive owing to the refund requests tbh.

Most people blamed valve

More like "Microsoft is fucking up. Quick, do something that is shitty but isn't as bad as closing studios. Account registration requirements? Perfect! Fuck those poors in unsupported countries."

You would think that when a company like Microsoft is catching so much shit, a company like sony would think it's a good move to do something good to look even better. But somehow they see it as a challange to be even worse somehow

No matter how poorly thought Sony's international release plan is for PC, that's far easier to assume brief incompetence than malice around. Firing people who made a GOTY is a whole different level of evil.

I'm not sure what the future holds in regards to whether they will try to pursue this again or not, I certainly hope they won't. This information doesn't change anything that is going on right now.

Here is the reason I posted it, I think it will help: There were people online saying that Valve may be the ones who delisted HD2 to protect themselves legally, instead of sony being the one's who delisted it. This is primary source evidence that it was in fact Sony who delisted it, not Valve.

We can try to draw conclusions from it and I think it is very strange that Sony hasn't re-enabled purchasing in these countries now that the PSN requirement has dropped, companies typically try to sell products to as wide of an audience as possible.

I know that doesn't directly answer your question but unfortunately I think only time will tell.

Up until this point I personally haven't seen Valve or Steam make direct comments as to who exactly made this choice. I may have just missed it but I always look for something directly from the company. I also don't have knowledge on how steam pushes changes, I think if you have intimate knowledge on that it was obvious? This is also just pulled from a post on Reddit, so it could also be 100% bullshit. To me though this was the first thing I saw that allowed me to start forming an opinion to your above question, without giving Sony the benefit of the doubt. I hate to give that to Sony because I hate what Sony did, but for arguments sake I personally don't ignore things like that.

These are my reasons for sharing.

They delisted them before they announced that they wouldn't require accounts after all.