Epic Games lawsuit against Apple over fees for the App Store continues to continue in increasingly alien and esoteric fronts. The latest development? Apple is actively trying to sue Valve’s years of in-depth sales information about all the games listed on Steam to show that Epic has many other places to go. Fortnite True.
“Apple and Valve have held several meetings and hosted them, but Valve declined to provide information in response to requests 2 and 32,” reads a new joint discovery letter spotted by PC player which was submitted earlier this week. Request 2 contains complete annual data such as sales, revenue and other financial information of ‘total annual sales of programs and in-app products’. Request 32 is a complete list of each app on Steam, the years it was available and for which it was priced. You know, just take a quick look at the lifeblood of Valve’s business.
The land issue in the ongoing dispute between Epic and Apple is whether the latter has a monopolistic position within the world of smartphone app distribution, and as a result abuses the position to charge unfair and unreasonable commissions on all the apps launched by the platform. To try to prove that the App Store is not monolithic and Epic has other options, Apple wants to collect data from other competitors to show that the Fortnite manufacturer can only do good elsewhere.
“Valve admits that the requested information exists in some unknown, easily accessible format, but generally claims that it will not provide the information because it is confidential or too heavy to collect in the manner requested by Apple. , ”Reads Apple’s side of the joint statement. Valve did provide Apple with information, but the iPhone maker decided it was inadequate. It is appealing to the court to force the digital gaming store window, as was done earlier with Samsung.
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“As this court has acknowledged with respect to Samsung, this information is ‘relevant to demonstrate the extent of competition’ between digital distribution platforms available for distribution. Fortnite, including the Apple App Store, ”claims Apple. However, the Samsung Galaxy Store is nowhere near as big a market as the App Store or Steam.
In turn, Valve claims that all this information to Apple would both be a lot of work, since unlike Samsung it is a private company and does not keep the same detailed record keeping, and that Steam has nothing to do. do with the bigger piss contest. “Somehow a computer game maker that does not compete in the mobile market or sell ‘apps’ is portrayed as a key figure in a dispute over mobile applications,” it said. “It’s not.” (Valve seems to have forgotten this it released the car fighter Dota Underlords last year on both iOS and Android).
I’m not necessarily buying the argument that Valve is just a sidekick in these ongoing discussions about the market monopolies, but it is also very entertaining to go to the virtual hat seller get snippy with the ninth largest company in the world. We will see what the court ultimately decides.