Apple would like Valve to provide a lot of information about how much money they make. Valve prefers not to. This is my two-sentence summary of a joint discovery letter filed yesterday as part of Apple’s ongoing legal dispute with Epic Games over Fortnite and Apple’s app store fees.
What does Valve have to do with this struggle between Apple and Epic? Not much, says Valve.
Epic and Apple have been preparing to fight each other in court since last August, when Epic added a payment method to Fortnite on iOS that bypassed Apple’s normal 30% cut in all sales of its service. Apple immediately removed Fortnite from the app store; Epic immediately released an ironic animated short film and filed the lawsuit; and the two companies have been preparing for the court and criticizing each other ever since.
As part of these preparations, Apple would like Valve to share information about its business. Apple intends to demonstrate “the total market size for Epic’s available digital distribution channels” and argues that data for Steam – as a digital distribution channel for games like Fortnite (but not Fortnite) – is essential in this quest. The discovery letter says that Apple and Valve spoke on the phone several times and that Valve was helpful, but there are two specific requests that Valve refuses to answer. They are Request 2 and Request 32.
Request 2, Apple argues, “is very restricted”. Specifically, it states that Apple wants Valve to provide “(a) total annual sales of apps and in-app products; (b) annual Steam advertising revenue; (c) annual sales of external products attributable to Steam; (d) annual Steam earnings; and (e) annual earnings (gross or net) from Steam. ”
Request 32 asks for documents “sufficient to show: (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 application and any product on application available on Steam. “
“Valve chose to remain private in part to avoid the burden of disclosing the public company”
Valve, for its part, claims that “Apple’s demands would impose an extraordinary burden on Valve to consult, process and combine an enormous amount of documents to create the documents that Apple seeks – materials that Valve does not create or maintain in the course normal business – and with little or no value, as Valve does not compete in the mobile app market in question. “
Apple apparently initially wanted information about “all more than 30,000 games on Steam in ten years”, but reduced it to “436 games in six years”, but Valve argues that it just “makes an impossible task a little less impossible.”
There is another dispute over the “production of Volume 5”, the content of which was provided by Valve to Apple in a partially edited form. Apple wants it not to be edited and argues that if “competitive sensitivity is the real problem” in not providing an unedited version, then the court’s “protective order” regarding the materials provided for the case should take care of that.
Valve says competition is part of its concern. “Valve chose to remain private in part to avoid the burden of public company disclosure and reporting requirements to which companies like Samsung or Google are subject. Valve does not disclose its sales and revenue information and projections, and Valve obtains significant value and the confidentiality of such information, including keeping it out of the reach of companies like Epic, which also sell PC games. ”
The case between Apple and Epic is expected to go to trial this summer.