Epic Games’ legal battle against Apple over App Store fees it continues to drag on increasingly strange and esoteric fronts. The latest development? Apple is actively trying to summon up years of detailed Valve sales information about all games listed on Steam, in order to show that Epic has many other places to play Fifteen days goods.
“Apple and Valve have been involved in several meetings and conferences, but Valve has refused to produce information that meets requests 2 and 32,” says a new joint discovery card spotted by PC Gamer which was filed earlier this week. Request 2 includes complete annual data, such as sales, revenue and other financial information for “total annual sales of apps and in-app products”. Request 32 is a complete list of all applications on Steam, the years it was available and what it was priced. You know, just take a quick look at the lifeblood of Valve’s business.
The root question in the ongoing dispute between Epic and Apple is whether the latter has a position similar to a monopoly within the world of application distribution for smartphones and, as a result, is abusing that position to charge unjust and irrational commissions on everyone the applications sold through your platform. To try to prove that the App Store is not monolithic and that Epic has other options, Apple wants to collect data from other competitors to show that the Fifteen days the manufacturer can do very well elsewhere.
“Valve admits that the requested information exists in some undisclosed and readily accessible format, but generally states that it will not produce the information because it is confidential or very difficult to collect in the manner requested by Apple,” says the side of Apple in the joint statement. Valve has already provided Apple with some information, but the iPhone manufacturer decided it was insufficient. Now, he is asking the court to force the digital games window to obey, as it had previously done with Samsung.
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“As this Court has acknowledged in relation to Samsung, this information is ‘relevant to show the extent of competition’ between the digital distribution platforms available for distribution Fifteen days, including the Apple App Store, ”argues Apple. However, the Samsung Galaxy Store is far from being as big a market as the App Store or Steam.
For its part, Valve says that sending all this information to Apple would be a lot of work, since, unlike Samsung, it is a private company and does not engage in the same detailed record-keeping level, and also that Steam does not has nothing to do with the bigger urine contest. “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,” says the excerpt. “It is not.” (Valve seems to have forgotten that launched the automatic battler Dota Underlords last year on iOS and Android).
I do not necessarily believe in this argument that Valve is only a secondary player in these ongoing discussions about the market monopolies, but it’s also extremely fun to watch virtual hat seller be aggressive with the ninth largest company in the world. We will see what the court will ultimately decide.