Valve could use their market power to prevent this kind of rug-pulling behavior by publishers. Customers expect Valve to ensure that the software they provide is free of viruses, spyware, and harmful defects; this seems like a similar type of defective and/or malicious software that they should prohibit from sale.
Valve don't have the market power with the big players you think. Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft all sell a subscription service and their games & DLC directly. Epic have a competing store, and pumped in enough money that people have gotten used to having their owned games in multiple wallets. The small and medium players are who Valve has power over, and even they get to choose between Valve's large cut or accepting a bribe from Epic for exclusivity. I see a remarkable change from when your game was on Steam or it didn't exist.
Valve has enormous power and uses it often, even at one point de-listing our entire catalog without warning because we had an additional asset in a game which was granted based on region. (and we got blamed in the media for it).
Ubisoft games are still on Steam despite this, though the big publishers despise this amount of power, and sometimes valve does come across as bullying when you’re on the receiving end.
You took away "expired" my hard earned ubi points that could be used to lower purchase prices.
Since then I'm not spending money on your platform anymore
I think the reasonable thing Valve could do is to allow refund for products that stop working. It is one thing for multiplayer servers being turned off, but single-player game stopping working should allow refund from anytime in past 20 years.
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