They let the keys get out there so they bring more customers that get locked into Steam. Once you have games on there you have to use Steam to play them. When you do so that lets Valve advertise sales and push games that use the steam marketplace on people, thus increasing the chance they will spend money and become further locked in to the steam environment.

The problem now is places, mainly Amazon, are working with publishers to get all the keys and resell them cheaper than Valve. So Valve is having to pay for bandwidth costs and keeping steam going while all the money not going to the publisher is heading to Amazon. If this gets too huge they may consider ways to block it or charge for keys. Much like how console publishers started Project $10 in response to Gamestop actively pushing people to used games when they come in to buy a new one.

Edit:
I wondered if their sales take a big enough hit if they will start charging for keys also. If it comes to that, they will hurt indies far more than mainstream publishers. Things like indie bundles would have increased costs to get steam keys, which would cut down on the sales they get. I haven't seen any published information on this, but I'd assume a large portion of indie bundle purchasers only do so to get steam keys and never even touch the direct downloads for games. If the base cost goes up because of having to pay for keys, the number of sales will drop. For a game like Skyrim, Bethesda could easily eat the costs per key without much worry.

Good question, I will dig around and see if I can find any info.

Ok, I get it now. Sorry. So, Steam sells something through the Store, and they profit. However, if bought from Amazon, GMG, or other store, Steam gets nothing. Got it.

Either way, back to the main topic, I am curious to see what is going to happen to the people who were laid-off. I mean, based on the Rap Sheet in one of the original Citations, they are some pretty talented individuals.

So I pose a question: Will they go to another game/film studio, or do we see more amazing Indie work soon?

Hmm, maybe I should panic and buy the RPGs I own on Steam which are on sale here, DRM free, this weekend. A new set of Gothic and Divine Divinity series games might be wise. Lately, I keep buying games out of fear I will lose access to them. It is like the damned sky is falling all the time.

38 Studios/Big Huge Games
THQ
Atari

Valve?

Perhaps this all has to do with the second coming of SHODAN.

(sorry! I couldn't resist some mention of SS2!)

Hence why it's not quite so impossible to believe that Valve might actually experience financial difficulties.

Staff and consultants need to be paid on an ongoing basis, even if the money isn't coming in, and with 350 people (well, 325) plus consultants, plus Gabe's share, it's not inconceivable that HR costs alone are in excess of $20 million a year.

And as you say, bandwidth and data centres aren't free either. Consider the last Humble Bundle, which sold 395,953 copies. 75% accounted for Windows sales, and a sizable chunk of those probably won't bother with Steam, which we'll assume for theory's sake to be 25% (edit: actually, I forget that the 25% of Linux and Mac users can also use Steam as well now, but apparently Steam is used practically never by Mac users, and Linux remains to be seen, but still...)

By this conservative assumption, 200,000 Steam keys were used. HIB7 came to around 10GB. That's 2 million gigabytes or 2000 terabytes of traffic to be handled by Valve, for which they receive no money. I'm not even going to start on the THQ bundle, or on the fact that people redownload their games constantly, or on retail games or games bought from other sites.

When you consider all of this, it puts the ridiculous claim that Valve must be swimming in money into real perspective.