Image: Valve
Valve is being sued for $843 million in the UK for abusing Steam's 'dominant position'.
Valve has been hit with a hefty £656 million ($843 million) lawsuit in the UK, over claims that it’s been abusing Steam’s dominant position within the PC marketplace to overcharge millions of PC gamers. According to the BBC, the lawsuit was filed by a law firm called Milberg London, on behalf of a children’s digital rights campaigner named Vicki Shotbolt.
Milberg claims that Valve has been, “"overcharging 14 million PC gamers and abusing its dominant position in the UK,” in the lawsuit’s dedicated website.
Valve gets hit with $843 million lawsuit for overcharging PC gamers
Valve’s $843 million lawsuit largely concerns its ownership of Steam, which claimant Vicki Shotbolt argues has been to the detriment of millions of PC gamers. In the lawsuit’s website, Vicki shares more information on the compensation claim, saying that, “Companies who hold a dominant position in a market are not allowed to charge excessive or anti-competitive prices. They also cannot impose other unfair trading conditions that prevent or hinder others from competing with them.”
Shotbolt continues, “We believe Valve Corporation has been unfairly shutting out competition for PC games and in-game content, which has meant that UK customers have paid too much for these products.” According to the claim, Valve has also shut out competition in the PC gaming marketplace by forcing game publishers to sign up for, “pricing restrictions that dictate the lowest price games can be sold for on rival platforms.”
This has caused PC gamers in the UK to pay too much for their games and add-on content on Steam, while Valve continues to charge an ‘excessive commission’ of up to 30% to publishers. To simplify Shotbolt’s claims: Valve has prevented publishers from offering lower prices for their games on other platforms, made it so that all add-on content for Steam games must be purchased on Steam, and driven up the pricing on games by taking up to a 30% cut of the sales.
This lawsuit is described as a ‘collective action claim’, which means that Shotbolt is filing the lawsuit in representation of the alleged 14 million overcharged PC gamers in the UK. The next step for Shotbolt is to get this lawsuit authorised by the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal, after which it can actually proceed to trial.
The law firm filing this claim, Milberg London, has experience dealing with issues like these in the games industry. The firm filed a similar lawsuit against Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2022, accusing the company of placing, “unfair terms and conditions on PlayStation game developers and publishers,” and thus inflating the prices of games on the PlayStation Store. The Competition Appeal Tribunal approved the lawsuit in November 2023, but it hasn’t been resolved yet.
As the claim’s website notes, it can take many years for a dispute of this scale to be resolved. Valve has yet to respond to the lawsuit.