You never know with GOG. Conquest frontier wars only got 95 votes, and it's here :D

To be honest, i do not understand Valves business politics. Free Steam Keys for developers is really nice but what is Valves fair share? The Gala Store, the Paradox Store and the cheap Steam Keys from GMG are great for the customers, the developers and great for the sellers, because they just give the key without any downloads or bandwidth costs. This is Valves part. I dont think, that their is a significant market of gamers without a steam account and i dont think this is just marketing for new customers.

Is this just a kind of good guy behavior?

Hmm . I see the prices in $ not in GBP .

Just a warning. If you were interested in Darkest Hour, don't purchase it yet, since you won't receive a CD-key, which is required to update the game.

Source: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?659864-Missing-CD-key-from-Steam-Version-of-DH&s=7730f492663ce304e7aa289bb7531e4e

It used to be about building a large userbase, and it probably is still mostly about maintaining the userbase, on top of the Steamworks itself being something that draws developers in and make their games for Steam.

But yeah, if a large portion of the games eventually turn out to be Steamworks, Valve needs to start getting their money somewhere else, because price is one of the few things other retailers have when selling Steam keys, although a portion of the userbase will probably keep buying directly at Steam either way either because of convenience or ignorance. One way is for Valve to have Steam exclusive bonuses when buying games. (hats particularly but not only those)

I do believe that's partly why the focus has shifted on other means to get money though, trading, community market, F2P games and Indie games. They've been spreading out a lot.