Valve faces $843 million lawsuit in UK for allegedly overcharging 14 million gamers

midian182

midian182

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In brief: Steam owner Valve is being sued for £656 million ($843.2 million) over claims that it has overcharged 14 million PC gamers in the UK. The class action alleges that Valve abuses its market dominance and charges an excessive commission, leading to consumers paying too much for their games and other content from Steam.

The case, which was brought by digital rights campaigner Vicki Shotbolt, accuses Valve of shutting out competition in the PC gaming market by forcing publishers into signing price-parity obligations. According to the suit, these ensure Steam always has the best prices and prevent games from being sold cheaper on rival platforms.

Shotbolt says this has enabled Valve to continue charging publishers an "excessive" commission of up to 30% and led to UK consumers paying too much for their games and DLC. The company is accused of breaching UK competition law for at least six years, writes the BBC. The suit aims to stop Valve's conduct and help people reclaim "what they are owed."

"UK gamers spend billions every year and Valve has a stranglehold on the PC gaming market. Competition law is there to protect consumers and ensure that markets work properly," said Natasha Pearman, leading partner at Milberg London, which has backed the claim. "When they don't work properly and consumers are harmed, collective actions of this kind provide consumers with a voice and a way of holding big companies, like Valve, to account."

The case bears many similarities to a 2022 class-action lawsuit brought against Sony in the UK, which was also filed by Milberg. The Japanese gaming giant is being sued for $7.9 billion over claims it ripped people off by overcharging consumers for games and in-game purchases from its PlayStation Store. It says around nine million people have been affected.

Should the claim prove successful, each person in the Sony suit could receive between $80 and $663 in damages. Like Valve, Sony takes a 30% commission from sales. In November, a UK tribunal blocked Sony's attempt to dismiss the suit.

The size of the cut that platform owners take from developers has long been a contentious area, especially when it comes to Apple and its 30% slice. The fee was a big part of Cupertino's fight with Epic, which likes to point out that it charges devs just 12% commission.

Steam broke its concurrent user record, again, in March when 34,649,583 people were logged into the platform simultaneously. Its record-breaking game sales (over 580 million) in 2023 generated more than $9 billion of revenue globally.

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Valve faces $843 million lawsuit in UK for allegedly overcharging 14 million gamers

 
This will be really interesting. I think most games on Steam follow industry standard pricing; I'm not sure how that hurts consumers like the lawsuit suggests. Also, I'm most curious to see what evidence they have to suggest that Steam has a monopoly on the market. There are a lot of competitors, and we even see studios voluntarily putting their games on Steam at a later date to find more customers, like Diablo 4 and Overwatch. Those games were already successful on their own platform.
 
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I don't need to purchase the game through Steam, to use it on Steam, unlike Sony's ecosystem. A developer can give me a free key, that I enter into Steam and still get all the same benefits, without giving Steam a cent. I don't know what a "fair" cut is but given that Steam handles all the storage and bandwidth demands for games, for essentially forever, I'm sure developers are glad they don't have to try and go it alone and I'm glad becuase publishers/developers would probably stop letting you download it after a few years so they don't have to keep paying for bandwidth. This is without even touch on places like Epic, paying to lock in games, such as Alan Wake 2, when Steam doesn't do that. Steam isn't perfect but I know for a fact that if Steam dropped their commission to 0%, games wouldn't be cheaper.
 
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Additionally that 30% cut ends up funding things like Steam Mobile App, Steam link, Steam Deck, Steam Controller, Proton, and actual for real development of the actual Steam storefront itself.

Its not like the money is just being funneled into a black hole (although I doubt anyone at Valve is struggling to get by) it's being reinvested into the PC gaming ecosystem.

Epic Games Store might charge a 12% commish, but it also looks and opperates like it charges a 12% commish, like its the dollar general of digital storefronts.
 
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fadingfool said:
Hmm not sure I have ever felt ripped off by steam (I am UK based). Steam sales, humble bundles, CDkeys, greenman gaming - I have always got hold of games via steam with a significant discount against release price RRP.
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Doesn't matter what you feel. What's matter is developer can't sell a game on any other platform which could have a lower fee, basically killing any possible competition and a better pricing.
This is monopolistic tactic and bad for any competition. Steam does a lot of things right, but attacking competitiveness is not one of them.
 
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VaRmeNsI said:
Looks like this law firm is abusing competition law to make a quick buck.
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Isn't that true of 99 out of 100 of such suits? The ambulance-chasing tort attorneys here will receive tens of millions of dollars, the gamers themselves will receive -- if they file paperwork to ask for it -- about $1.89 -- and Steam will roll the costs of the lawsuit into higher prices for all subsequent customers.
 
Simple solution for Steam: drop the fee to 15% and the exclusivity language, and discontinue all steam sales, steam deck support, or other services in the UK. Games distribution only. See how long the UK holds out.
dangh said:
Doesn't matter what you feel. What's matter is developer can't sell a game on any other platform which could have a lower fee, basically killing any possible competition and a better pricing.
This is monopolistic tactic and bad for any competition. Steam does a lot of things right, but attacking competitiveness is not one of them.
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This is misinformation. They absolutely CAN sell on other platforms, they just cant sell them on other platforms AT A LOWER PRICE. Just sell it at the same price and make more money, what's the issue here?
I like foxes said:
Steam are greedy indeed . They deserve the law suit .
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Steam's sales regularly outdo any of the competition, and they're far more consumer friendly then, say, Ubisoft, EA, or other game selling platforms. I dont see how that's greedy?
 
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Who are they kidding. If Steam dropped their commission, it would go to the game publisher, not the consumer. And the game publisher and/or alternative store is not likely to provide the same level of service that Steam does, as I learned the hard way from buying an exclusive on Epic.

Also, hard to take this seriously when many of the games I've bought from Steam were in the $10, $5, or less category.
 
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Theinsanegamer , really !? Apparently you re stuck to Steam store page .Moreover they rip off the developers . Shame on it .
 
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Theinsanegamer said:
This is misinformation. They absolutely CAN sell on other platforms, they just cant sell them on other platforms AT A LOWER PRICE. Just sell it at the same price and make more money, what's the issue here?
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This is not a misinformation, and the issue exactly the price. This means Steam sets a price on all other platforms - Epic, GoG, Ubi, EA, possibly xbox and psn.
This means as well that any other platform trying to compete with Steam _can not_ compete with steam on games prices. They can't say 'You can buy product X in our store in a better price' because third party - Steam - is using their monopolistic position to block it.
What is even more funny, large publishers with own stores like EA, Ubi, Sony, can not reduce prices on their own stores for their own titles, if they want to publish on multiple platforms including steam.
This is a pure monopoly in action. And we, customers, are at loss here.
 
I'm sure Steam pulls in that much revenue just from the transaction fees off their marketplace in a year, if not more.

Steam won't sweat this fine if they have to pay it.
 
dangh said:
This is not a misinformation, and the issue exactly the price. This means Steam sets a price on all other platforms - Epic, GoG, Ubi, EA, possibly xbox and psn.
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I expect you're trying to be honest, but perhaps using language imprecisely. The facts are that the price is set by the publisher, not Steam, correct? As a consumer this seems obvious because there are lots of different titles on Steam with lots of different prices, so it's obviously not Steam setting that price.

As to Steam having a policy of not allowing you to choose one price on Steam, have Steam provide all your backend functionality, and then choose a different and lower price on another competing service, which isn't providing that functionality -- why on earth should Steam accept that proposal?

What publishers can choose to do is not sell on Steam at all, correct? After all, Steam has no special technical exclusivity for the Windows (or linux, or mac) audience. They are not the first party. Steam has no special privileges on these platforms. In fact I can think of few other platforms where a content store has less exclusivity or other ability to create a monopoly.

So if a publisher believed that Steam was not adding value, they could simply only sell at on other stores with lower commissions, and tell gamers to buy it there.

But the fact is that gamers value Steam's services. In my opinion the same game client is in fact worth less money when not backed by a full-service provider like Steam. Even though I can easily buy a game on multiple other platforms that I have at the ready, I generally only want it on Steam, or I don't want it at all. (*except for certain evergreen titles my top choice is GOG for the no-DRM / will work up until and after the apocalypse policy.)

Ultimately Steam's power comes not from any inherently uncompetitive special position, but simply from being the most attractive platform to consumers. They are worth whatever "extra" money they are adding to the cost (although I'd argue their service is often fundamental to the game experience, not "extra".) If they weren't consumers would shop elsewhere, but they don't.
 
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This isn't even news. It's just some people talking about things they don't understand. It will jus the be thrown out in court as fast as it gets started.
 
The case, which was brought by digital rights campaigner Vicki Shotbolt, accuses Valve of shutting out competition in the PC gaming market by forcing publishers into signing price-parity obligations. According to the suit, these ensure Steam always has the best prices and prevent games from being sold cheaper on rival platforms.
Click to expand...

- This is a weird allegation, because Steam is often not the cheapest place to get a game in my experience. I often find myself paying a smidge more for a game on Steam (even during sales) than on other platforms and I actively make that choice because of the ecosystem Steam provides and the fact that I have almost my entire library of games there.

Hell how would this even work when plenty of Steam available games are offered for *free* through EGS?

Maybe this is referring to not being allowed to sell STEAM KEYS on another storefront for less than those keys are being sold on Steam, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
 
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I have a feeling that MS brought is making this an issue because they ignored the PC as a platform when the original Xbox came out, and again when the 360 came out. Now people are pissed at windows, none of the other platforms can gain significant market share of steam and now Valve is dumping $10s of millions into Linux gaming.

Why am I not surprised that Valve could be getting fined for providing great service and cheap games to gamers while concurrently working on an alternative to Microsoft's monopoly on games(IE, DirectX whatever number we're on now).

Just look at Epic Game's store and Game Pass. It isn't that they failed to attract PC gamers, it is that they failed to gain significant market share while offering developers a better deal. You have multiple people trying to dismantle Valve's "monopoly' on the PC games market by means of paying developers to be exclusive to their respective platforms. It just isn't working.

It is because Valve provides gamers with a user focused service instead of a profit focused service. Valve/steam having a large market share and being extremely profitable is a result of a user focused service. Maybe EA, Epic, Microsoft and anyone else I'm forgetting could learn something about not trying to sell over priced garbage to people.

Me being a PC gamer is only partially related to my love of the mouse and keyboard, I actually like controllers for fighting and racing games. I've also started using controllers more for single player RPGs as I get older. It's about gaming how I want on my terms. I now use Linux to game so, if anything, getting a game to work now takes more work than it did to just buy the game on Windows.

I'm several tangents deep now and forgot what point I was originally trying to arrive at, have a nice day,
 
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In general seems the UK and EU have found ways to extort money from successful companies to fatten their budget. Their new scam will always be to use anti-competition laws. One day these two will find out it's very lonely out there.
 
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Lol, games costing 70 is not related to Steam at all. Look at the CEOs of every big gaming company. They all keep sayin how games need to get more expensive and fast. They recently started talking about games being 80 and even 90. So yeah, Steam can disappear tomorrow and games will still become 80 within a few years. You can count on that.
 
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It would be nice to be able to shop around to see where to get the cheapest copy of a game.

I just don’t think removing that parity clause would result in cheaper games.
 
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