Wolfire Games, the developer of Overgrowth has launched an anti-trust lawsuit against Valve, suggesting that it takes too great a cut of game sales, and uses its position as a major store owner to suppress the competition of its contemporary developers.
Steam doesn't have a monopoly on the industry like it did a decade ago, with contemporary stores like the Epic Games Store and GoG offering different places to buy games. There are also many smaller stores and self publishing sites which can help encourage sales, but Steam is still the big one that for many developers, they need, in order to make the most from all of their hard work.
And that means losing 30% of every sale just to Valve itself, let alone taxes, and fees involved with the publishing process.
The antitrust suit from Wolfire Games alleges that Valve prevents developers from encouraging sales elsewhere, by stopping them from lowering their prices below that of Steam. It cites how no other store, despite perhaps Epic Games Store, has been able to offer credible competition to Steam, with most of them half folding into Steam eventually anyway. Even Epic had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on exclusive game deals and having its own industry-dominating hit in Fortnite, to even be considered the number two store.
Epic itself has called for Valve to lower its share of game sale revenue to 12 percent, suggesting it would put its games on Steam if it did so. Microsoft lowered its revenue share to 12% in recent weeks too. Apple and Google are in the process of doing so too.
Wolfire's suit will take years to play out, but the pressure is mounting for Valve to reduce its cut.
