Valve antitrust class action lawsuit

[Shifty Geezer]

Steam antitrust lawsuit expands to include anyone who has "paid a commission" to Valve since 2017

A 2021 antitrust dispute brought against Steam has now been expanded into a class action lawsuit.

www.eurogamer.net

As a parallel to the Apple and Google ongoing antitrust lawsuits, this one has been upgraded to a class action lawsuit for any dev who has paid Valve commission for a Steam game since 2017.

 

[pcchen]

IANAL but I think this is very different from the Apple and Google suit. In Apple's case, the App Store is the only store available, and in Google's case it's the default store. However, Steam is not even the default store on Windows, nor is it installed by default. They'll probably need to provide evidence that Valve is doing something illegal to maintain or expand its market dominance (e.g. requiring games to be exclusively on Steam).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I think the argument is they are the de facto monopoly. Competition isn't the same for digital content versus retail. Developers don't sell game stock to the different stores for them to sell on, so there's no real pricing competition. Epic dropped their fees for devs, but the devs didn't choose to lower their prices so that consumers would want to buy from Epic instead of Valve; they just kept the higher profits per title. Given no reason for consumers to change seller when they all sell for the same price, Steam will end up the main store by a huge margin. It's so big even publishers capable of operating their own stores without a 30% cut are still selling on Steam.

Additionally to that, there are certain potential anticompetition policies like not being allowed to sell cheaper on other stores. I don't know how valid these are.

Regardless, 30% of everything sold on platforms with hundreds of millions or billions of users and crazy profits certainly seems excessive, and without a market-force capable of driving that down, the only way it'll ever change is state regulation.

 

[pcchen]

I do understsand the argument of "30% might be too expensive" but right now I'm not convinced beacuse the "cheaper" EGS is not outperforming Steam in any way. It lacks important basic features even after this many years, and this is from a very profitable gaming company with quite some ambition on this front. I mean, all they need to do is to copy Steam, and yet they can't do that even on basic features, and have to rely on giving out free games to maintain daily users. This makes me thinking that maybe it's not that simple. I mean, if you can do something no one else can do, it must has some value.

 

[iroboto]

Additionally to that, there are certain potential anticompetition policies like not being allowed to sell cheaper on other stores. I don't know how valid these are.

Things like this are the only thing the anti-trust case can go after here.