Valve has to provide some Steam sales data to Apple, judge says

EvilRoy

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So, this is kind of interesting.

The short version, for anyone who isn't following this court case, is Apple is suing and being sued by Epic over the whole shebang about Fortnite getting pulled from the Apple store. Epic got pissed that Fortnite and Unreal was pulled from the Apple store for having in game purchases, Epic sued to get back on, and Apple sued back because they say there was a breach of contract.

Now, I don't really find the above all that interesting, just sort of been watching it unfold. It would be cool if Apple lost because they take a huge cut and kind of run amok of their own app store, but its not like Epic has a clean ass here either.

What really got my attention is when Apple subpoenaed Valve, demanding that they share sales data, pricing, profit, cuts blah blah for 30,000 games over the last five years on Steam. The justification here is that Apple figures Steam is the closest thing they have to an equal in terms of selling games online, and they want to prove that the Apple store isn't the only show in town, and isn't fucking people over any more than is industry standard.

Valve said fuck no because that's a lot of work, and startlingly enough the judge disagreed and stated that they had to do it but only for four hundred some games that Valve sells in common with Epic, and only for the last three years. This is kind of intriguing because the purpose is supposed to be comparing Apple Store to Steam, but this implies that we're about to compare all three. Judges don't specifically have to bow to the original intent of supeonas - Apple intended to get a huge chunk of data to presumably find as many commonalities with themselves as possible and benefit their own argument exclusively, but the judge made a choice that will let both Epic and Apple perform comparisons on equal lowest-common-denominator grounds.

Bonus intrigue: Valve has historically been extremely tight lipped about their sales data. I don't know why to be honest, but it looks like we get a little bit of a brass tacks comparison. We won't ever get to see the book of hard data that gets passed over, but we will likely get to see all the juicy arguments based on this data which will probably be quite interesting.
 

crimson5pheonix

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Now this is a fun distraction from politics, the kind of high end cloak-and-dagger plays and corruption revealing stakes but with only potentially dangerous metadata.
 
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Trunkage

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I dont like Steam because of the way they treat their consumers


But this is nonsense. They also do provided user data on how many people use each game. Surely that's gotta be enough
 

EvilRoy

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I dont like Steam because of the way they treat their consumers


But this is nonsense. They also do provided user data on how many people use each game. Surely that's gotta be enough
In this situation its not specifically what they're looking for. Basically they want to prove that Steam shifts as much money and as much product as Apple Store, which is more or less how you prove that two vendors are comparable. Limiting the information gathered to games that Epic Store also sells basically means that the judge accepts that there may be reason for them to do a three way comparison to show the state of the market through three major players.
 

SilentPony

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Wow I didn't even know there were 400 games on the Epic store. Every time I look at it its barebones paid for exclusives and shitty free-to-play mobile ports.