Apple may position itself as the champion of privacy when it comes to personal data, but court records showed that the company required extremely confidential data from the Steam game distribution service to help battle Epic Games.
The reason? Epic had previously criticized Steam’s offer to game developers, accusing the owner of the Valve platform of “sucking up a huge fraction of the profits from games”. Apple wanted to understand more about Valve’s business model with Steam to help it make its own case for the App Store. The data that Apple required from Valve – which is not even part of the case – was pretty insane …
PC Gamer reports that Valve has rejected Apple’s demand, and now a court needs to rule on the matter. Here are the data that Apple wanted, which its lawyers somehow described as a “very restricted” request:
Valve: (a) total annual sales of apps and in-app products; (b) Steam’s annual advertising revenue; (c) annual sales of external products attributable to Steam; (d) annual Steam revenues; and (e) annual earnings (gross or net) from Steam.
And, in an additional request:
“(A) the name of each Application on Steam; (b) the date range when the Application was available on Steam; and (c) the price of the App and any in-app products available on Steam. “
That is, Apple wants Valve to provide the names, prices, settings and dates of each product on Steam, as well as detailed accounts of how much money exactly Steam earns and how everything is divided […]
Apple apparently demanded data on more than 30,000 games initially, before narrowing its focus to around 600. Request 32 is incredibly granular, explains Valve: Apple is demanding information about each version of a particular product, all digital content and items, sales dates and all prices change from 2015 to the present day, the gross revenue of each version, broken down individually, and all resulting Valve revenues.
Valve says not only that the data is incredibly valuable business information, but that it doesn’t even record the level of detail that Apple wants – and in any case, it is not remotely involved in the dispute between Apple and Epic.
Valve says it does not “keep the information Apple seeks in the normal course of business for a simple reason: Valve doesn’t need it.”
Valve’s argument goes on to explain to the court that it is not a competitor in the mobile space (this is, after all, a dispute that started with Fortnite on iOS), and states that “Valve is not epic, and Fortnite is not available on Steam. ”Furthermore, it says that Apple is using Valve as a shortcut to a large amount of data from third parties that rightfully belong to those third parties.
The conclusion of Valve’s argument calls for the court to reject Apple’s subpoena. “Somehow, in a dispute over mobile apps, a PC game maker that doesn’t compete in the mobile market or sell ‘apps’ is being portrayed as a key figure. It is not. The extensive and highly confidential information that Apple requires about a subset of PC games available on Steam does not show the size or parameters of the relevant market and would be very difficult to gather. Apple’s demands for more production must be rejected. “
It seems very difficult to imagine that Apple could succeed here, but the legal world and common sense do not always align.
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