Steam's U.S. antitrust lawsuits fail to get dismissed - now what?

gamedeveloper.com:

[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Welcome to the week as we see it, folks. And it’s another busy one, headed by some interesting new filings in a couple of U.S. lawsuits targeting Steam creator Valve. Where could those be going? We don’t know, but we’ll speculate..

So, the path to ‘justice’ is slow and tortuous. And as of late last week, the ‘motion to dismiss’ in two U.S. antitrust cases involving Valve and Steam have been denied. This mean that the suits may continue to the next stage, discovery.

Specifically, if you look at the latest filings in Wolfire Games vs. Valve Corporation, you’ll discover the May 6th filing [.PDF], with 81-year old (!) Washington State District Judge Coughenour ruling that Valve’s attempt to get the case thrown out is only partially successful.

This may be confusing to some of you, because there were headlines back in November 2021 that Wolfire’s case had failed. But as Ars Technica noted, Wolfire “had 30 days to amend its complaint to address the criticisms and absences of facts brought up in this dismissal.” Which they did, and managed to get some of its claims to the next stage.

The original lawsuit brought by Overgrowth dev Wolfire was explained by David Rosen as follows: “Once a company reaches a certain level of power over an entire market, the antitrust laws forbid those companies from distorting competition. I believe that Valve is taking away gamers' freedom to choose how much extra they are willing to pay to use their platform. I believe they are taking away competing stores' freedom to compete by taking advantage of