Epic games legal battle against Apple for App Store fees it continues to move towards increasingly strange and esoteric fronts. The latest development? Apple has been actively trying for years to cite detailed sales information from Valve about all the games listed on Steam, to show that Epic has many other places to Fortnite goods.
“Apple and Valve have engaged in several meetings and conferences, but Valve has refused to produce information that meets requests 2 and 32,” it reads. a new joint letter of discovery spotted by PC Gamer which was filed earlier this week. Application 2 includes complete annual data, such as sales, revenue and other financial information from “total annual sales of applications and products in the application”. Request 32 is a complete list of each application on Steam, the years it was available, and at what price. You know, just a quick look at the blood of Valve’s business life.
The main issue in the ongoing dispute between Epic and Apple is whether the latter has a monopoly-like position in the world of smartphone application distribution and, as a result, abuses this position to charge unfair and unreasonable commissions for all applications sold through the platform. . To try to prove that the App Store isn’t monolithic and that Epic has other options, Apple wants to collect data from other competitors to show that Fortnite maker can do well elsewhere.
“Valve admits that the requested information exists in an undisclosed, easily accessible format, but generally claims that it will not produce the information because it is confidential or too burdensome to be collected in the manner in which Apple requested it,” from Apple’s joint statement. Valve has already provided Apple with some information, but the iPhone manufacturer has decided that it is insufficient. He is now asking the court to force the digital game showcase to comply, as it had previously done with Samsung.
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As the Court has acknowledged regarding Samsung, this information is “relevant to show the degree of competition” between the digital distribution platforms available for distribution. Fortnite, including the Apple App Store, ”says Apple. However, the Samsung Galaxy Store is by no means as big a market as the App Store or Steam.
For its part, Valve claims that getting all this information to Apple would mean a lot of work, because, unlike Samsung, it is a private company and does not engage in the same detailed level of record keeping and also that Steam has nothing to do with the bigger pissing contest. “In a way, in a dispute over mobile applications, a computer game maker that does not compete in the mobile market or does not sell ‘applications’ is described as a key figure,” it said. “Is not.” (Valve seems to have forgotten that launched the self-combatant Dota Underlords last year on both iOS and Android).
I don’t necessarily buy this argument that Valve is just a secondary player in these ongoing market discussions monopolies, but it’s also extremely fun to watch virtual hat seller get snipy with the ninth largest company in the world. We’ll see what the court decides in the end.