A UK tribunal has given the go-ahead to a £656 million ($901 million) collective action lawsuit targeting Valve over alleged anti-competitive practices on PC storefront Steam.
The legal action, originally filed in 2024 by digital rights campaigner Vicki Shotbolt, has now been given the green light to proceed following a ruling by the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal, BBC News has reported.
In short, Valve is accused of wielding its status as the dominant digital game storefront to lock game developers and publishers into release parity restrictions, and keep game owners spending on Steam when buying add-ons.
Shotbolt’s lawsuit is a collective action claim, effectively a class-action suit, which she is attempting to take forward on behalf of the 14 million UK citizens who have bought games or add-on content through Steam since 2018.
The tribunal’s new ruling, published this week, takes into account Shotbolt’s claims and an initial response by Valve designed to halt the legal action from progressing further.
The lawsuit alleges that Steam unfairly imposes platform parity obligations which prohibit publishers from selling games on rival stores with better terms, causing a restriction of competition. The legal action has also taken aim at the need to continue buying add-ons for games bought through Steam via Valve’s own marketplace, leading to a further reduction in competition. Finally, it alleges that Valve imposes unnecessarily high commission charges — essentially, the typical 30% cut it takes when you spend money on Steam — which results in higher prices for consumers.
https://steamyouoweus.co.uk/the-claim/ lol
There’s having no competition because you use market dominance to crush everyone else or buy them out or theres having no competition cos everyone else doesnt even want to invest in making a client/platform that doesnt suck total ass.
Epic still hasnt figured out that the main blocker for their shitass client is that I dont want to have to go to my password manager and log in every time i want to claim a free game i wont play. It hasnt improved in the years ive used it and im kinda married to the steam deck and steam controller software at this point cos of my disabled ass.
Yeah, not really sure if there is legal recourse for a natural monopoly situation.
I don’t want a private company to have a monopoly but I REALLY don’t want Steam to get broken up to allow the proliferation of other “store fronts” (walled gardens) like how fucking streaming TV has already become. I don’t want 57 different log ins to different stores to manage different collections of fucking games
The correct “solution” to this is to nationalize Steam
yeah sometimes monopolies are good. like roads.
need them on a tight leash though
Steam is a company run by ancap-brained people that was forced against its pwn will to be a good platform. At every point they were either bullied or sued into doing the right thing. That being said this suit is farcical on its face, but the judges are fossils that don’t know how any of this works, so it’s all on the shoulders of the expert witnesses and amicus briefs. Hope it makes Steam a better platform in the aftermath, lmao.
Ya I mean of course they did it for their own selfish reasons, but they have made gaming on Linux practical. At least we got that.
Oh, I am happy with the current state of Steam, and what we’re getting for Linux is amazing, Steam’s making BIG contributions. I just wanted to point out the comedy of errors type situation that brought us here. Which is to say, the more people fight Steam, the more their service improves. So even this stupid lawsuit might have a silver lining.
Sorry br*ts Steam is going to be blocked in the UK
retvrn to just pirating shit
Ah fuck.
Maybe Valve can convince all the business ghouls that any profit margin over 30% is illegal. That would be the real gaming the system move for GabeN and co.
Yeah he could protect the capitalist class for a generation if he fancied waiting a while for his next yacht
The legal action has also taken aim at the need to continue buying add-ons for games bought through Steam via Valve’s own marketplace, leading to a further reduction in competition.
What? Since when?
Finally, it alleges that Valve imposes unnecessarily high commission charges — essentially, the typical 30% cut it takes when you spend money on Steam — which results in higher prices for consumers.
Never saw a game with 30% cheaper base price in another storefront, it’s only cheaper with promotions/codes/discounts.
and 30% was matching physical retailers. maybe it should be less (it should be less), but if valve is made to lower their cut it would just entrench the monopoly because the shitty storefronts other companies make would be even worse because their roi would be lower.
Steam also has the best regional pricing in my country. Other launchers are just more expensive and offer less.
It might depend on where you live and whether Valve can legally get away with the price fixing this UK case is accusing it of or not.
To give one example, the base price for the standard edition Cyberpunk on the PlayStation store is CAD60 (ultimate edition CAD95), on the Nintendo eShop the ultimate edition is CAD100 (no standard edition is available), and on Steam the standard edition is CAD80 and ultimate is CAD110. Interestingly, base prices on Epic and GoG are lock-step on the standard and just $5 off on the ultimate edition with Steam’s prices.
Maybe there is price fixing going on after all, but perhaps Valve can only persuade publishers to fix the PC prices, hence the cheaper game prices on consoles.
I think that Valves contract or whatever stipulates that the devs have to sell it for the same amount as it’s listed on Steam if they are to sell it on their own.
As far as I know is for steam keys for games that will run on the Steam’s software, with others launches I think this doesn’t apply
Ah okay, that makes a lot more sense then. I can’t really see how a court (in the us at least) would consider that monopolistic.
Oh yea the reason i posted this is because Tim Fortnite joined the discourse
tim fortslop is a regular style business demon that only cares about competition laws cause the epic store is a floundering piece of shit, BUT if that results in steam not completely deathchoking indies then i’m all for it
I’m both shocked and not that Tim “Pedophile” Fortnite is still just using the same twitter account.
imposes platform parity obligations which prohibit publishers from selling games on rival stores with better terms
Wait, so platform exclusive releases aren’t allowed in the UK?
Also, isn’t 30% cut typical of across digital stores. Some physical locations like grocers expect a 100% markup of COGS for the MSRP giving them, effectively, a 50% cut. Are we to sue all grocery stores for driving up the cost of food?
To my knowledge this only applies when the games are sold as steam keys. Games get sold cheaper in other stores than Steam all the time.
edit: Not sure the lawsuit makes broader claims and I find claims that it only applies to steam keys.
I just checked GOG and Humble, and there’s definitely things on sale on GOG that aren’t on Steam, whereas the stuff on Humble seems to all be discounted on Steam with the exact same price.
It seems unreasonable to complain about (free and unlimited I think) steam keys given to the publisher come with strings attached, but these steam keys funnel people back onto steam to play the games, and are therefore preserving of steams monopoly position. I just can’t imagine any court would order Valve to give away keys both for free and with zero strings attached to the publisher, they clearly provide a service here. So I guess Valve could drop the strings and just sell the keys to the publisher and that might be less abusive idk. Certainly would incentivize the publishers to try to sell the games w/o steam keys because they make more money that way.
Yea 30% is the standard in online stores
Some years ago I read that the entire overhead of selling a game in a physical store amounts to ~30% as well. This included making the disks and packaging.
So:
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most of the complaints are bogus, or are standard practice across most of the industry.
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if it was successful it would set a precedent that would punish MUCH more egregiously monopolistic entities, namely Google and Apple, the latter of whom is engaged in a hyper-aggressive variant of the rentseeking complaint.
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even despite the previous two, the UK has essentially zero authority go enforce this ruling: Valve is an American business, and a massive one at that. Trump has already directly intervened to get massive concessions on major legislation, such as allowing Twitter’s “child porn generator” feature and Meta’s “the child can consent to being groomed by the MLK chatbot” platform.
I’m no Valve sycophant, it’s simply a capitalist entity fulfilling a niche, but this shit is about as realistic as that time Russia fined Youtube a bajillion dollars for banning RT with zero irony.
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Go menu -> add non-steam game. Oh but their forced turd party launcher refuses to launch the game.
Why no one buy game outside Steam?Until the recent GOG announcement, pretty much nobody else even has a Linux version of their launcher other than Valve. There’s great community alternatives like Heroic and Lutris, but why would I want to buy games from people who make me use someone else’s software to even run it?
Steam and Gog are the only good stores in the game. It’s not their fault that epic has somehow managed to add zero features to their store. And I hate developer specific launchers.
The legal action has also taken aim at the need to continue buying add-ons for games bought through Steam via Valve’s own marketplace, leading to a further reduction in competition.
since selling DLC and subscriptions outside of steam is allowed, im assuming this is solely talking about the inventory and item system. is there anything in steam developer agreement that if you use the steam marketplace feature in your game you can’t sell items to players outside of steam? it seems very unlikely.
