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That lawsuit against Steam’s 30% cut of game sales is now a class action, meaning many other developers could benefitLawyering intensifies
Lawyering intensifies
Image credit:Valve
Image credit:Valve
An on-going lawsuit against Valve about Steam’s “anti-competitive” practices and especially, its infamous 30% per-game revenue cut, has taken an interesting twist. According to a report, it’s now a class action suit that could benefit any developers or publishers who have sold a game over the Steam store on or after 28th January 2017.
Here’s the broad background: in April 2021,Overgrowthdevelopers Wolfire Gamesfiled an antitrust lawsuit against Valve in the USA, arguing that Steam uses its dominance of PC game sales to distort the market and bury the competition, and in particular that the company’s base 30% cut of revenue from each video game sold on Steam keeps overall game prices artificially high, with Valve allegedly pressuring developers not to sell their games for lower prices on stores with smaller commissioning fees.
As you’d expect, Valve pushed back on all this. In July 2021, the company accused Wolfire of failing to supply evidence for their allegations, while describing the 30% basic revenue cut as an “industry standard” - a claim that, whilenot unfair, flies in the face of bothgrowing developer discontentand competitors such as Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store lowering their commission fees in recent years.
The judge further rejected Wolfire’s somewhat bizarre assertion that Valve has illegally tethered the Steam store (which sells the games) to the Steam platform (which encompasses social networking features, achievement tracking, game library management, and so forth). The judge found that the Steam store and platform are, on the contrary, a single product, with game sales funding the platform’s various ‘free’ features.
Fast forward to today, and GamesIndustry.bizreportsthat the combined suit has been recategorised as a class action suit. A class action suit is, broadly, one brought on behalf of a group of absent people, going beyond those actually in court. In the event that the plaintiffs win, everybody in that group of people stands to benefit. There is an absolute world of finickity legal detail within that hazy definition, mind you, even if you confine your attention to the laws of a particular country.
What happens if Wolfire and Dark Catt win? According to my “PhD in Googling” grasp of class action law, it potentially means that Valve might have to compensate a large number of parties, adding up to far more than if they’d had to compensate Wolfire and Dark Catt alone. In turn, this might lead to a larger policy change at Valve, which would have dramatic ramifications for PC game publishing as a whole.
If you’d like to dive into the nitty-gritty of the legal proceedings, theGameDiscoverConewsletter is worth signing up to. One question it raises is where, exactly, Wolfire and Dark Catt are getting the money for their legal expenses, given the vast expense of discovering and amassing evidence for a case like this.
