Recently, game industry analysis professional Simon Carless published a report, sharing a lot of information obtained during an antitrust lawsuit against the operation of the Steam game sales platform and the game development company Valve.
Previously, small game developer Wolfire filed a lawsuit against V agency in 2021, but it was subsequently dismissed in May 2022. The lawsuit mainly targets the limit on the number of Steam developer keys announced by the Steam platform at the time (in order to prevent the sale of third-party keys from harming profits) and the 30% commission. The two sides effectively entered a "discovery phase," whereby attorneys for both sides were allowed to call other companies to testify.
This included a lot of back-and-forth over whether the commission set by Valve was reasonable and whether the company was in a monopoly position. But the most interesting one is a series of emails sent by Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney to Valve boss Gabe Newell (G Fat).
The first email started in 2017. First, G Fat sent an email to ask Sweeney, "Have we done anything to annoy you?" This seemed to be about a post by Valve about restricting the provision of Steam keys to developers. It seemed that after that, Sweeney's approach of bombarding Valve on social networks made G Fat have questions.
Sweeney responded that this is not the point. The point is still the 30% share. He said that although this is the norm in the market, Steam has become very large and operating costs have dropped. "If you remove the top 25 games on Steam, I bet that Valve will make more profits from the next 1,000 games than the developers themselves."
In the second email from Sweeney in December 2018, he was obviously even more angry. This was because Valve had just announced a strategy to reduce the commission for high-income games to 25% or even 20%. At that time, the antitrust court confrontation between Epic and Apple was gradually heating up.
In the email, Sweeney set aside Valve, G Fat, and Apple, saying: "Now you assholes are telling the world that the strong have special treatment, and 30% (share) is imposed on the nobodies. If Apple tries to cut ties with large publishers, Behind the scenes deals to keep a 30% monopoly and shut them up, so why not give all developers a better deal? What better way to convince Apple that their current model is completely untenable?"
We don’t know how Fatty G responded to this anger. But Epic Games obviously has its own plans - they launched their own game retail platform Epic Game Mall in the same month of the same year (December 2018). However, the platform also has some problems of its own, including the fact that it is "platform exclusive" on PC, which has been criticized by many players.
During the lawsuit, Valve employees also roughly gave some of the company's profit data. It is said that per capita profit margin and employee net income per hour even surpassed the then technology tycoon Facebook (now renamed Meta) in the company rankings.
Simon Carless stated in the article that Valve’s high profits are not illegal in the capital-first United States. In his view, the reason why Steam occupies an almost monopoly position in the PC game sales platform is "because players like to use it, not because they have done shameful things."