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Against his will, Valve is dragged into the Epic against. Apple antitrust lawsuit, with new documents revealing Apple asked Valve to release financial data.
Various court documents have revealed that Valve has been subpoenaed by Apple over Steam trade data, with tech giant Tim Cook requesting years of detailed sales information from the owner of the Steam platform.
“Apple and Valve have engaged in several meetings and conferences, but Valve has refused to produce information responding to requests 2 and 32,” said the joint discovery letter.
Apple notes that “Epic’s various mobile and non-mobile distribution options are at the heart of controversial questions of market definition and market power.”
As such, Apple wants to dig into Valve’s data to prove its point – noting that Epic has a suite of options for releasing and distributing its titles.
Request 2 then asks Valve to provide complete annual data such as sales, revenue and other financial information from “total annual sales of apps and in-app products”. This data, Apple hopes, will confirm its statement and make it clear that Epic has a suite of other places to sell Fortnite.
Request 32, on the other hand, requests documents “sufficient to show: (a) the name of each application on Steam; (b) the date range that the application was available on Steam; and (c) the price of the application and any integrated product available on Steam. “
Valve, of course, does not want to provide this information to Apple.
“Apple’s requests would place an extraordinary burden on Valve to query, process and combine a massive amount of documents to create the documents that Apple is looking for – materials that Valve does not create or retain in the ordinary course of business – and with little or no value, Valve is not competing in the relevant mobile application market, ”the statement said.
This whole legal battle comes down to Epic’s insistence that Apple has a monopoly on smartphone distribution and that the company engages in unfair trade practices on the iOS platform (by charging tariffs unreasonable to developers who earn income through App Store publishing).
Epic’s battle with Apple has been building for some time now and exploded last summer when Fortnite was kicked from the App Store for trying to bypass the 30% platform fee for using this service.
The case between Apple and Epic is expected to go to trial later this year.