Valve has just been hit with a lawsuit for violating UK competition law. Just like Microsoft and Sony, they are about to meet the CMA.
As reported by Insider Gaming, the lawsuit is worth £656 million, or $ 840 million. The BBC explains that the case has taken the form of a collective action claim. In UK law, this means that one person goes to court on behalf of a much larger group of people.
That person bringing this suit to the CMA is said digital rights campaigner Vicki Shotbolt. Shotbolt’s argument is that because Valve “forces” game publishers into price parity obligations, some video games aren’t allowed to be sold cheaper on other platforms, whether that’s PlayStation 5 or Epic Game Store.
Shotbolt then claims that Steam then charges an excessive commission for games sold on their platform, which goes as high as 30 %. Ultimately, this creates a situation where UK consumers pay more for their games, and she claims that Valve has been doing this for six years.
Shotbolt’s case is being supported by Milberg London LLP, a law firm specializing in bringing these kinds of cases, filed by a group of people, against big companies, like Sony. Millberg partner Natasha Pearman shared this statement about the case:
“Competition law is there to protect consumers and ensure that markets work properly. When they don’t work properly and consumers are harmed, collective actions of this kind provide consumers with a voice and a way of holding big companies, like Valve, to account.”
Now, the interesting thing with all this, of course, is we heard about the UK CMA for months because of their regulation of the Microsoft Activision deal. They famously ‘prevented’ the deal from going through, but where then pressured to find a position where Microsoft gave enough concessions for the CMA to sign off of it.
When we all thought that the Microsoft – Activision deal might not go through because of the CMA, that was real. There were certainly ways that Microsoft could have found loopholes to get around it, but the UK market had that much clout in gaming that it had an outsized influence on the deal.
We’re now about to see that same CMA take Valve to account, and this will certainly be an interesting situation overall. Many fans may certainly see Valve as the good guys among all the companies who run gaming platforms. But the fact that this lawsuit even exists should open us up to the reality that Valve’s monopoly-like control of PC gaming can actually harm PC gamers too. We certainly should consider what other things that we should take Valve to task for, even if we like them as a company and their services and business practices.
