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.
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.