Valve wins in court: Steam monopoly lawsuit vanishes.
In late April, the developers of Overgrowth And Receiver, Wolfire Games, they filed one lawsuit against Valve a due to the anti-competitive practices of its platform, Steam. In summary, Steam is accused of exercising a monopoly through its platform, since 75% of PC titles are published on Steam making competition extremely difficult, and this would allow Gabe Newell’s company to be able to impose its 30% tax on all purchases made through its store.
In July, Valve asked the judge dealing with the lawsuit to dismiss the complaint as “does not meet the minimum requirements for an antitrust case”: yesterday, the judge agreed with Valve.
From what emerged, there are two points in which Wolfire Games’ complaint is labile: the first point, according to which Valve is trying to tie the Steam store to the platform by using the quasi-monopoly of Steam as a library, launcher and social media to force players to buy on Steam, has no solid foundation because the Steam platform and its own. digital showcase are recognized as “a single product within an integrated gaming platform and trading market”.
The second point instead it concerns the 30% tax of Steam, presumed result of the monopoly exercised by Valve, which is not recognized as such as the developers have freedom of choice on the market with which they prefer to interface – for example theEpic Games Store, which retains just 12% of the purchase price, leaving 88% to the developer. Furthermore, the percentage requested by Steam has never changed over the years, although there have been other platforms that imposed a lower taxation.
Source: PC Gamer
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