A US magistrate has ordered Valve to provide sales data to Apple in response to a subpoena issued amid Apple’s ongoing legal battle with Epic Games.
In addition to some aggregated sales data for the entirety of Steam, Valve only needs to provide specific price and sales data per title for “436 specific apps available on both Steam and the Epic Games Store,” the order said. . That’s a significant drop from the more than 30,000 titles Apple originally requested data for.
In opposing 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 will make it more relevant to the mobile competition questions in the case, Judge Thomas Hixson writes in his order.
“Remember that in these related cases, [Epic] claim that Apple’s 30% commission on sales through the App Store is anti-competitive and that allowing iOS apps to be sold through other stores would force Apple to cut the commission to a more competitive level, “Hixson writes in the order.” … on 436 specific games sold on both the Steam and Epic store, Apple is trying to find out if the availability of other stores does indeed affect commissions [Epic] claim. “
Just hand it over
Valve attorney Gavin Skok also argued that responding to the subpoena would be overly taxing on the company, as multiple full-time employees have to work for hours to collect data from multiple sources for each game (as reported by Law360). In his warrant, Judge Hixson said the data collection “did not sound so burdensome.” That said, Hixson agreed to limit data response from 2017 (instead of 2015, as Apple requested) because the Epic Games Store only existed in 2018.
Hixson also rejected arguments that Apple should sue individual developers for their pricing and sales data, saying that potential efforts would place an “unnecessary burden” on Apple. The judge added that this sales information is not confidential to the developers involved and that “Valve runs a store and how much of its own it sells information.”
In 2018, Valve effectively decided to block services like Steam Spy or Ars’ own Steam Gauge from making 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 remain private means it avoids the company’s disclosure and reporting requirements, but it doesn’t immunize the company from [legal] discovery, “Hixson continued.” The protective orders in these actions allow Valve to mark its documents as confidential or highly confidential in order to eliminate competition issues, and that protection is sufficient. “
Valve has 30 days to provide the requested information to Apple.