No, I can´t remember where I saw that. Prolly reddit.

I'd be surprised if their "DRM-free" offerings didn't have the standard PopCap one-time activation nonsense. If they bother with downloads at all.

Also... combo Steam-keys are back, I guess?

But how long will this business model work? The funny thing is, that Valve does not see a single penny for every game sold throug GMG, Humble oder GamersGate, but GMG, Humble and GG are actually saving money with just selling a key and don't care about file storage and bandwith anymore.
I have no problem with Steam/Valve and as a gamer I am fine with their service, which i think is great. But the whole gaming industry is going into dependency from Valve and Steam. What kind of business developer would go into a dependency with the services of the main competitor? Valve can always move the switch and stop offering free keys and demand a handling fee.

It works for these Steam key seller stores, as long as Valve has the policy of letting game publishers generate Steam keys for their Steam games free of charge. The day Valve changes that policy, there goes the market model for these digital stores without their own infrastructure that they have expanded and developed (instead of diminishing their own service to obscrurity, by profiling themselves as Steam key stores).

So in a way I feel it is the case of short term vs (potential) long term rewards. A bit like Nokia suddenly stopped developing their own mobile OSes that they can at least partly control (Symbian, Maemo, Meego), and handing that part of their business completely to Microsoft, by agreeing to use only Windows RT on their future phones. (Microsoft bought out Nokia mobile phones later completely, so...).

I actually don't understand this part of it. A given dev would have had to sign up to some agreement with Valve in order to be able to a) sell their game via Steam Store and b) have a mechanism to able to generate Steamkeys. I doubt Valve/Steam is a charity and their is some fee or % on sales or something like that written into some contract (i dont know how it works, and i doubt anyone else does unless a dev or someone in the actual know says something).

Generation of Steam keys for devs is free. They hand those out to sell on their own or for third party sellers to sell without Steam taking a cut.

The benefit from this for Steam is longterm, banking on the future patronage of those people who buy the Steam keys, as well as making their platform grow even more, which increases popularity. Seems to have worked out quite well for them, although I always wondered if it wouldn't backfire if it got to a point where the bulk of their games were Steamworks. (since other retailers compete on Steam keys by selling them for less).

Have Gamers Gate officially said they're phasing out their own servers in favour of being a Steam re-seller?
They seem to be about 50/50 Steam key and self hosted at the moment...

No, and neither has GMG. Despite that...

Looking at their games, id say its more 30/70. They don't have *that* many steamworked games as far as i remember
Id say there is a fair chance GMG will - 80% of the games they sell are steamkeyed games. Those that arent are usually older games using their Crapsule service

No, but take a look. I just checked the Top 10 from GMG: 6 Steam Games, 2 Uplay Games, 1 Origin Game and 1 Telltale Account Game. No Capsule at all. Most of the recent releases are just Steam Keys.

Gamersgates Top 10 shows a similar picture: 7 Steam Games.

Yeah but check the rest of GG's game database though. They have a large number of drm free games (not on Steam or GOG) & Securom and other drm solutions on many of the games.

Yeah, in GGs case its had to know if its GG themselves who are deciding to go in that direction or if its more down to the direction most individual publishers want to go
They certainly still sell a lot of stuff that hasn't / is yet to make it into Steam - some 1C Company stuff, for example

Plus Steam then has a HUGE retail base that is direct marketed to every single time a customer logs in. Their whole plan involves social networking (think how many times you've been playing a game only to see "XYZ friend is now playing ABC game". Or the feed on the side telling what game one of your friends just bought. Or all the groups ranging from really specialized modding to huge AAA title groups - oh and don't forget giveaways. Every day at least a handful of games are on sale. THEN they added trading cards - and I gotta tell you, that was effing brilliant cause all those pennies add up to a lot of money over time! And well, trading cards are highly addictive and add another social networking layer...

So yes, allowing developers to print Steam keys without a fee is in actuality printing money for Steam. It's akin to a monopoly in many ways but hidden behind a screen of "openness" wherein most of the benefits accrue to Steam.

Well I have not installed the recent update to"Capsule", which I'm told is much better, but I hated the previous version and never bought another game that required that service. It doesn't matter how cheap a game is - I decided that tying myself to Steam and Desura and GOG was more than enough platforms - with GOG obviously being the best in terms of no "big brother" crap. Ultimately, I can wait for games that haven't shown up yet.