Steam in the eye of a storm over alleged manipulation of the PC gaming market

What Steam It’s the most important distribution platform for PC video games today, and there’s nothing new about it. But this does not mean that everyone likes the way he achieved this achievement. During these hours, Valve became news after it became known multi-million dollar lawsuit against him for allegedly manipulating the market and defrauding players.

Reportedly BBCIn the UK, a class action lawsuit was filed against Valve, in which it was accused of use Steam’s market dominance to overcharge 14 million UK gamers. The same, which was submitted to the Competition Appeal Tribunal, requires Gabe Newell’s company to pay £656 million; that is, 776 million euros or 842 million dollars.

Vicky Shotbolt, the digital rights activist leading the lawsuit, claims that Valve has violated UK competition laws for at least the last 6 years. In this way, he claims, he was able to manipulate the market and take advantage of the public through Steam.

The above ensures that with Steam, the American company has swept away its competitors in the PC video game segment. Which not only allows you to collect important commissions, but also force game publishers not to sell their games at lower prices on other distribution platforms. Thus, the applicant claims, Valve is pushing gamers Brits are having to pay far more than they should to access full games or expansions.

According to the lawsuit, Valve uses the power of Steam to manipulate the market

At this time, Valve is not publicly commenting on the lawsuit against it in the UK. What the next steps in this procedure will be has not yet been announced, although it is logical to assume that the company responsible for Steam will try to drop the charges against itself.

The multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Valve seems to have appeared now not by chance. As noted, Steam breaks revenue records in 2023, earning over $9 billion worldwideconsidering only game sales, not transactions in Game.

Over the past year alone, more than 14,000 new games have been added to Steam. Moreover, according to data collected Video games. Experts noted that much of these achievements were due to the launch of very popular games such as Baldur’s Gate 3 And Hogwarts Legacy. As well as a drop in commercial performance of consoles such as PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.

We will closely follow the continuation of the story. It is a fact that control over large technology companies has increased significantly in recent years. If we focus on the UK environment, the CMA’s intervention in the purchase Activision Blizzard And Giphy from Microsoft and Meta, respectively, are clear evidence of this.

This isn’t the first time Gabe Newell’s men have clashed such situation. Meanwhile, in the US, Steam and Valve became the subject of antitrust litigation in 2022. And in 2019, they came under scrutiny from the European Commission for limiting the purchase of games through regional blocks.