That lawsuit against Steam’s 30% cut of game sales is now a class action, meaning many other developers could benefit

rockpapershotgun.com:

An on-going lawsuit against Valve about Steam's "anti-competitive" practices and especially, its infamous 30% per-game revenue cut, has taken an interesting twist. According to a report, it's now a class action suit that could benefit any developer or publisher who has sold a game over the Steam store on or after 28th January 2017.

Here's the broad background: in April 2021, Overgrowth developers Wolfire Games filed an antitrust lawsuit against Valve in the USA, arguing that Steam uses its dominance of PC game sales to distort the market and bury the competition, and in particular that the company's base 30% cut of revenue from each video game sold on Steam keeps overall game prices artificially high, with Valve allegedly pressuring developers not to sell their games for lower prices on stores with smaller commissioning fees.

"I believe that Valve is taking away gamers' freedom to choose how much extra they are willing to pay to use their platform," Wolfire founder David Rosen said at the time, as preserved by the GameDiscoverCo newsletter. "I believe they are taking away competing stores' freedom to compete by taking advantage of their lower commission rates. I believe they are taking away developers' freedom to use different pricing models."

As you'd expect, Valve pushed back on all this. In July 2021, the company accused Wolfire of failing to supply evidence for their allegations, while describing the 30% basic revenue cut as an "industry standard" - a claim that, while not unfair, flies in the face of both growing developer discontent and competitors such as Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store lowering their commission fees in recent years.

Wolfire's lawsuit was eventually dismissed at Valve's request in November 2021, with the judge in the case arguing that Wolfire had not demonstrated that they or anybody else had been harmed by Valve's management of Steam. The judge also observed that the fact that competing stores like EGS have taken a smaller