Apple has cited Valve in its ongoing lawsuit with Epic Games, claiming to provide huge amounts of commercial data on Steam sales and operations dating back several years, the court files revealed (via PC Gamer).
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The citation was initiated by Apple in November 2020, under the argument that the information about Valve’s digital distribution service, Steam, would be crucial to build its case against Epic Games.
Apple has asked Valve to provide documents showing its total annual sales of apps and in-app products, annual advertising revenue, annual sales of external products, and annual revenue and revenue from Steam. There are also more detailed requests for the name of each application on Steam, the date range in which each application was available, and the price of all applications and in-app purchases.
It seems that this involved requesting information about over 30,000 games initially, but Apple has since reduced its focus to about 600 games. However, Apple still insists on receiving documents about each version of a particular product and a large amount of financial information about the Valve business.
Apple believes that Steam “is the dominant distributor of digital games on the PC platform and a direct competitor to the Epic Games Store,” so information about digital market sales and operations may show the size of the market that Epic Games Store competes with. Apple claims that Valve would it must provide this information as it is not available elsewhere and “does not increase the risk of any competitive harm”.
While Apple and Valve have apparently met several times to confer, Valve has refused to produce much of the information Apple is requesting in the subpoena. Valve says it has cooperated to a reasonable extent, providing revenue share documents, competition with Epic, Steam distribution contracts and more, but says the six-year demand for PC games and the sale of items to hundreds of third parties games and confidential information about these games and Valve’s revenue are unreasonable.
The company also asked Apple to request Valve’s involvement in this case, as Steam is not a competitor in the mobile space, saying that “Valve is not Epic, and Fortnite is not available on Steam.” Valve goes so far as to claim that Apple uses the application as a shortcut to a large amount of commercially sensitive third party data.
Somehow, in a dispute over mobile apps, a computer game maker that doesn’t compete in the mobile market or sell “apps” is described as a key figure. Is not. The extensive and highly confidential information that Apple requests about a subset of computer games available on Steam does not show the size or parameters of the relevant market and would be massively burdensome to put together. Apple’s requests for further production should be rejected.
Valve added that it does not even keep all the information that Apple is looking for, because it does not need it in the normal course of business and is now asking the court to reject Apple’s subpoena. Meanwhile, Apple’s lawsuit with Epic Games is underway.