Valve Faces Massive $904M Lawsuit Alleging Excessive Steam Commissions

Valve is being subjected to yet another multi-million dollar lawsuit, this time stemming from the UK and totaling £656 million British pounds, or roughly ~$904 million USD at current exchange rates. The lawsuit from children's welfare advocate Vicki Shotbolt alleges that Valve is preventing publishers from selling games earlier or at a lower price on rival platforms through its conditions, and that Valve requiring users to purchase DLC through Steam for Steam titles is unfairly "locking in" users to the platform. Valve's industry-standard commission of up to 30% on each sale (a number shared by Google's Play Store and Apple's App Store) is also characterized as "unfair and excessive" by the lawsuit, and the ordeal is proceeding to trial past early Valve arguments against the case, which we've previously covered.

While we at Hot Hardware are not lawyers, there is general agreement in the newsroom that this lawsuit sums up to "rent-seeking" behavior on the part of Vicki Shotbolt. While Steam arguably does hold monopoly status on PC, there are many reasons for that, not the least of which include having the most functional storefront and community services of any major PC platform. The competing Epic Games Store does have a sweet deal for developers in the form of a 0% commission on the first $1 million USD in sales, followed by 12% afterward, but most developers report Steam making them far more money than Epic thanks to exponentially larger sales numbers.


Additionally, some of the claims made in the lawsuit are just...strange. For example, Steam expecting you to buy DLC for games you own on Steam via Steam isn't some grand, exploitative practice. DLCs purchased on Xbox don't work on PlayStation, and DLCs purchased on other PC storefronts also don't carry over to Steam. There have also been several games with timed exclusivity for Epic Games Store later released on Steam, making the idea that Steam doesn't allow publishers to sell games earlier on other platforms outright false. There may be some credence to the Steam pricing argument, with past statements indicating that Valve does prefer Steam games to be priced in accordance with other platforms, but with storefronts like Humble Bundle and Fanatical, we've regularly seen publishers sell even Steam keys at lower prices than on the Steam Store. So, this point is also contentious at best.

Really, Steam as a platform seems to be run fairly above-board and according to industry standards. The launcher has built-in functionality for launching Non-Steam Games while still being able to use Steam Overlay and Steam Input, as well. In the hardware space, Steam Deck and SteamOS even allow for the installation of competing storefronts and the use of Valve's own Proton translation layer with those games, which would be unthinkable for current or past-generation consoles from the likes of Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony. With that information in mind, lawsuits like this one (with the to-trial development originally reported by Reuters) or the 2022 antitrust suit don't seem like they're being made in good faith.