Lawyering intensifies
“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, aspreserved 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.”
The judge further rejected Wolfire’s somewhat bizarre assertion that Valve has illegally tethered the Steam store (which sells the games) to the Steam platform (which encompasses social networking features, achievement tracking, game library management, and so forth). The judge found that the Steam store and platform are, on the contrary, a single product, with game sales funding the platform’s various ‘free’ features.
Fast forward to today, and GamesIndustry.bizreportsthat the combined suit has been recategorised as a class action suit. A class action suit is, broadly, one brought on behalf of a group of absent people, going beyond those actually in court. In the event that the plaintiffs win, everybody in that group of people stands to benefit. There is an absolute world of finickity legal detail within that hazy definition, mind you, even if you confine your attention to the laws of a particular country.
All of these legal wrangles form part of the larger, existential industry wrangle about Valve and Steam’s centrality to PC gaming. My extremely Baby’s First Monopoly take is that whatever your feelings about specific aspects of Steam’s service, or Valve in general, no individual company should exert this much power over the fortunes and overall culture of an artform. As such, I welcome efforts such as Wolfire’s to challenge Valve and Steam, even if I may not agree with the detail of the suit in question.
What happens if Wolfire and Dark Catt win? According to my “PhD in Googling” grasp of class action law, it potentially means that Valve might have to compensate a large number of parties, adding up to far more than if they’d had to compensate Wolfire and Dark Catt alone. In turn, this might lead to a larger policy change at Valve, which would have dramatic ramifications for PC game publishing as a whole.
If you’d like to dive into the nitty-gritty of the legal proceedings, theGameDiscoverConewsletter is worth signing up to. One question it raises is where, exactly, Wolfire and Dark Catt are getting the money for their legal expenses, given the vast expense of discovering and amassing evidence for a case like this.
