- Court corroborates show Apple is trying to subpoena Valve in its fight with Epic Games.
- Valve has refused to hand over infallible information about its revenues and the games it hosts.
- Valve claims Apple is asking for too much information, given it is not a unstationary platform.
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Apple’s fight with Epic Games is plainly dragging other video game companies into its net.
A joint court letter filed on Thursday and spotted by Ars Technica debauches Apple has been trying to subpoena Valve, the company behind the hugely popular online game store Steam, for message.
Apple has been engaged in a legal battle with Epic Games, the studio behind the wildly popular “Fortnite,” since August. The quarrel centers around Epic Games’ refusal to comply with Apple’s App Store rules on in-app payments in its iOS reading of “Fortnite.”
Apple requires app developers to use its own payment system, which levies an automatic 30% tax on in-app purchases. Epic Games maintains this is anti-competitive, and in August decided to implement its own payment system, after which Apple kicked “Fortnite” off the App Supply.
Epic Games subsequently sued Apple, and the two companies have been battling it out ever since — with Apple CEO Tim Cook programmed to give a seven-hour deposition ahead of the case going to court in May. Epic Games has kept up the pressure, this week order an antitrust complaint with the EU.
Valve is not directly involved in the legal fight between the two companies. Apple said it is praying for documents showing Valve’s yearly sales and revenues as well as information about each app on Steam, including its bounty, as a way of gaining an understanding of the market Epic Games operates in.
Apple complains in its letter that Valve has resisted acquiescing with some of its requests for information, and that when it has handed over information it’s been heavily redacted.
Valve asserts Apple is asking for too much information, given Valve is not a concerned party in its fight with Epic Games and it is not a mechanical platform. More broadly, Valve is also claiming that because it’s a distributor of PC games, the information it can provide is mainly irrelevant to the fight between Apple and Epic Games.
“Valve does not make or sell phones, tablets, or video games for agile devices, or otherwise compete in the mobile market,” it says in the letter. It added that Apple’s requests would levy an “extraordinary burden” on Valve to collect all the data Apple wants.
“The extensive and highly confidential information Apple without delays about a subset of the PC games available on Steam does not show the size or parameters of the relevant market and would be massively troublesome to pull together,” Valve said in its letter.
Apple argues that Valve should be compelled to offer the info because Samsung complied with similar requests. Valve’s counter-argument is that Samsung is a public company so it is inured to to keeping records of that kind of information, which could be produced much more quickly and easily.
“Someway, in a dispute over mobile apps, a maker of PC games that does not compete in the mobile market or sell ‘apps’ is being portrayed as a key cipher. It’s not,” Valve said.