Apple subpoenas Valve as part of its legal battle with Epic
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
I guess from their perspective there's no downside for them having it, but it's also not immediately clear to me what it would prove. So you have data on the release dates and prices of every game on Steam. Legally, is that useful? Does that reveal anything new about Epic's case?
I know Apple is making the argument that they're not anti-competitive because Steam charges the same rates, but I don't understand why they would need this granularity of data to make that argument. Is there something I'm missing? Maybe they're planning to also subpoena Epic Store's numbers and compare them?
From insider accounts Valve/Steam is basically a money-printing operation on Autopilot, with Gabe Newell checking into the office irregularly, and otherwise living in New Zealand.
Change the Steam commission to 15% to everybody, and Valve would still be clearing immense profits, developers would have higher revenues which would be invested back into better software and conditions for workers, and this whole competitive situation would become irrelevant.
My understanding was that people criticized Valve's rates in no small part because of Epic coming in and offering lower ones, and Valve responded by saying that they'd cut rates for big publishers.
Maybe I'm misremembering the story.
For all we know Valve could also have any kind of agreements for games of Rockstar or Bethesda. It's hard to believe that all top titles on Steam paid thr same 30% cut till recently.
Epics data is less useful because they're newer. They've always existed alongside Apples alleged monopoly, so any claims about harm from anti-competitive behavior are basically conjecture. "We would be making uhhh, let's call it 37% more money if it wasn't for Apple".
Steam has been around for forever. Apple can point to their sales volume and profit margins to attempt to demonstrate that those haven't changed, so Apple hasn't harmed Steam, and by extension, hasn't harmed Epic.
Realistically since the release of Half-Life 2, which was November 16, 2004. (Although it technically launched September 12, 2003).
The App Store launched with iOS 2 on July 10, 2008.
So Steam was a thing for almost 4 years by the time the App Store launched.
What I'm curious about is what games did Epic sell on Steam? I assume Apple will want to highlight those.
Stream isn't a platform owner, Apple is both the platform owner and the sold App Store on one of their most widely used platform. The two have absolutely nothing in common. And I have no idea what Apple is doing.
An unpopular opinion, something is very wrong with Tim Cook's Apple.
They could have stand up and might as well be rude and said, it is our store, we do whatever we want with it. Then at least we could agree to disagree with Apple. Current Apple is always trying to put themselves as the good guys and others are the bad guys. Which is very much 2000ish Google we do no evil mentality.
Assuming that the challenge to the subpoena is rejected, courts will generally require the litigant to reimburse the third party for costs incurred in responding to the subpoena. While federal courts technically require the responding party to shoulder the costs, as a practical matter only governmental third parties are still required to respond to subpoenas out of pocket.
In this case, Apple sought tons of confidential trade secret information (basically, sales, revenue, and traffic data for every product ever sold on the Steam store for the past 6 years, plus advertising and other revenue related to Steam, plus other side channel revenue), and is it likely that most of the subpoena will be quashed, considering that Valve did respond to the reasonable portion of Apple's subpoena.