There, your logic breaks down when you say kids can then redeem the items for money within the same platform. First off, the very nature of making purchases on steam requires you to be 18 or have parental consent. Also people cannot exchange the goods on steam for USD only steam points. Steam points are not dollars and cannot be transferred back into USD or any other currency. You have to go through a third-party website to do that and valve has cracked down on those websites in the past. This is up to further legislation further up the pipe to curb this problem.

Also, I want it to be clear to everybody reading this. That steam does require developers to list steam keys STEAM KEYS at the same price they sell them on steam. Developers can mint steam keys for free.

You see this policy is in place because if someone were to start selling steam keys on a platform that wasn't steam suddenly, steam will not see any profits off those disproportionate sales because they weren't made on the platform. And once word gets out that it's cheaper somewhere else nobody will buy it on steam. And then steam is then responsible for all bandwidth now and forever into perpetuity for all of those users downloads and updates.

Many developers have actually tried this look up facepunch. They tried to sell steam keys outside of steam to get all the profit. They decided that it was ultimately worth the cost to just go through steam because hosting their own sales and refunds and support network for their game was too much. Even with the piggybacking off of steam's bandwidth. By the way, facepunch is worth millions. Steam just provides a good fucking deal.

If you wanted to have your own storefront that sold your game exclusively without steam keys. You could list it to whatever price you fucking wanted. Even if you were selling it on steam for more. But if you want the bandwidth and support network that comes with the steam deal, then you have to follow their terms of service. Go figure.

Anyway, I'm done listing the obvious.