2021 lawsuit against Steam's 30% cut and its alleged antitrust behavior now classified as class action
A long-running lawsuit against Steam’s 30% cut and its alleged antitrust behavior has been granted a class action status. The plaintiffs are now calling on other game developers to join in.
- Judge Jamal N. Whitehead granted a motion filed by Wolfire Games and Dark Catt Studios, according to a new court document viewed by GamesIndustry.biz. The studios will be class representatives for the action.
- Any developer, publisher, or individual who paid the 30% commission Valve takes on game sales on or after January 28, 2017 will be able to join the lawsuit.
- As spotted by GameDiscoverCo’s Simon Carless, the person wishing to join the case must be based in the US and its territories, and the game on which Steam took its 30% fee must be purchased by a US-based customer.
- Wolfire originally filed its lawsuit in April 2021, claiming that Steam’s 30% cut “imposes a massive tax on the PC Desktop Gaming industry” and forces publishers to “raise their prices to consumers” instead of investing more resources in innovation and creation.
- It was dismissed a few months after, but the studio refiled in 2022, with the court eventually combining the case with a similar lawsuit filed by VR developer Dark Catt Studios.
Since 2021, Wolfire’s lawsuit against Steam has revealed a lot of internal documents and witness testimonies. For example, we’ve learned that Valve employed 336 people in 2021, with just 79 workers being involved in the development of Steam.
There was also an interesting email conversation between Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney and three Valve executives. In one of the unredacted texts, Sweeney went on a rant about Steam’s 30% cut and its decision to only lower commissions for the most successful games, saying that “right now, you assholes are telling the world that the strong and powerful get special terms, while 30% is for the little people.”
Since the Wolfire v. Valve case is now a class action, we may expect more data to emerge during the next phases of the trial.