Overgrowth developer Wolfire Games are coming after Valve with a class-action antitrust lawsuit. According to the lawsuit, Steam is responsible for using its dominance in the digital gaming market and gets heavy commission out of developers and publishers. The case was originally filed on April 28th in the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Washington, and it is currently being backed by two other people.
According to the source, William Herbert from Florida, and Daniel Escobar from New York have joined the lawsuit because they believe that they have been harmed by Steam’s practices. The lawsuit is mainly looking at Steam’s commissions and use of its monopolistic powers, and how these have cost gamers to spend more money.
Wolfire’s CEO David Rosen has said,
I felt that I had no choice because I believe gamers and game developers are being harmed by Valve’s conduct
If you read the blog by Rosen, you see how he took the step to file the lawsuit because of the actions that were taken by Steam. According to him, when he wanted to bring Overgrowth to other storefronts for a lower price due to their lower commission rates, Steam stepped in. According to Rosen, Steam said if Overgrowth was sold on any other price at a lower price, or even on Wolfire’s website, without Steam keys or Steam’s DRM, the service would remove the game from Steam altogether.
Speaking to other developers, Rosen realized that there is a monopoly going on that has rendered other developers helpless. This is the reason why this class-action lawsuit was filed, in the first place.
According to the lawsuit, the reason why these practices are here is to make sure that Steam gets its 30% commission from games sold. It also talks about how 75% of all the PC game sales go through Steam, and Steam getting a 30% cut ends up netting valve $6 billion in annual revenue.
