A US magistrate judge has ordered Valve to provide sales data to Apple in response to a subpoena issued amid Apple’s continuing legal fight with Epic Games.
In addition to some aggregate sales data for the entirety of Steam, Valve will only have to provide specific, per-title pricing and sales data for “436 specific apps that are available on both Steam and the Epic Games Store,” according to the order. That’s a significant decrease from the 30,000+ titles Apple for which Apple originally requested data.
In resisting the subpoena, Valve argued that its Steam sales data was irrelevant to questions about the purely mobile app marketplaces at issue in the case. Refocusing the request only on games available on both Steam and the Epic Games Store makes it more directly relevant to the questions of mobile competition in the case, Judge Thomas Hixson writes in his order.
“Recall that in these related cases, [Epic] allege that Apple’s 30% commission on sales through its App Store is anti-competitive and that allowing iOS apps to be sold through other stores would force Apple to reduce its commission to a more competitive level,” Hixson writes in the order. “By focusing… on 436 specific games that are sold in both Steam and Epic’s store, Apple seeks to take discovery into whether the availability of other stores does in fact affect commissions in the way [Epic] allege.”
Just hand it over
Valve lawyer Gavin Skok also argued that responding to the subpoena would be overly burdensome to the company, requiring multiple full-time employees performing hours of work to compile data from multiple sources for each game (as reported by Law360). In his order, Judge Hixson said that the data collection “did not sound that burdensome.” That said, Hixson did agree to limit the response to data starting in 2017 (rather than 2015, as Apple requested) because the Epic Games Store didn’t exist until 2018.
Hixson also rejected arguments that Apple should subpoena individual developers for their pricing and sales data, saying that potential effort would represent an “undue burden” on Apple. The judge added that this sales information is not confidential to the developers involved and that “Valve is running a store, and how much it sells of what is its own information.”
Back in 2018, Valve decided to effectively block services like Steam Spy or Ars’ own Steam Gauge from creating public estimates of Steam game sales based on samples of individual public user account data. Valve said in July 2018 that it was working on a “more accurate” replacement for that Steam Spy data but has only released sporadic and incomplete summaries of the Steam marketplace in the years since.
“Valve’s decision to stay private means that it avoids the public company disclosure and reporting requirements, but it does not immunize the company from [legal] discovery,” Hixson continued. “The protective orders in these actions allow Valve to designate its documents confidential or highly confidential to address competitive concerns, and that protection is sufficient.”
Valve will have 30 days to provide the requested data to Apple.
