No, Valve's rule is that you can't sell Steam keys at a lower price in different places. You can sell the game at any other price without the potentially-unlimited Steam keys they provide to devs.

Steam key rules and guidelines in the Steamworks docs: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys#3

Only for Steam keys

Yes, that's the "collusion". Pretty much every platform has similar rules. I don't think collusion is the right word, as that implies some sort of agreement between them, when in reality they each just have the same agreement. But I do think it's a valid complaint and the implications of such a suit are wide-reaching for that reason.

Yes, there is a rule and contract when selling games on Steam. Microsoft knew this day one, as any other publisher (not sure why Microsoft is singled out here). Valve wants to have price parity of games sold on Steam and other stores. But exceptions are made for short term sales.

Probably either aiming for deep pockets that they think would be willing to pay them to dismiss the suit, or someone behind the scenes trying to target those companies with bad press.

It’s hard to tell with Microsoft since they’re always out shooting themselves in the foot publicly, but I’ve noticed an interesting recent uptick in articles trying to paint Valve and Steam in a negative light.

From what I remember, if you publish on Steam and other platforms, you are not allowed to offer bigger sales on other platforms. If you don't offer a similar discount/pricing on Steam in the coming weeks/months, Valve warns you about removing it from its storefront. And that's what's also written here.

Steam is the best launcher, store and gamertoolkit for consumer, I agree with that and especially since that I'm a GNU/Linux gamer. However that doesn't mean Valve is clean and has no cartel behavior. They make their money by create incentives for gamers to gamble on lootboxes.

Why is "Gabe follower" a loser alias?

Well....yeah? Last I checked, Epic hasn't been heavily investing in things that deliberately loosen Microsoft's grip on the market lol

Yeah, but a handful of extremely wealthy people can't make more money because Steam offers the people what they want, and really, something should be done about this.