Valve still has to provide data for 436 Steam games in Epic lawsuit against Apple

Valve still has to hand over sales data in the context of the lawsuit between Epic Games and Apple. The iPhone maker recently claimed sales of about 30,000 Steam games from the past six years. That ended up being 436 games and three years.

Apple’s demand earlier this month already attracted a lot of attention because of its size. Valve declined to cooperate, saying the data is, in short, “irrelevant, confidential and extremely difficult to collect.” Apple wants the information from Valve because it can estimate how much power Epic has in the digital game distribution market. The fact that Steam operates on PCs and the dispute with Epic revolves around a mobile platform does not bother Apple.

In the course of the discussion between Valve and Apple, the latter at one point did add water to the wine; the request was revised down to 436 games. Valve still considered that an ‘abundant request’, but the judge has now agreed. Kotaku now writes that. It is unknown which games they are. There are at least 305 games on Steam with the tag ‘Battle Royale’, the genre that also includes Fortnite. Valve has until mid-March to hand over the data to the court. In addition, Samsung must hand over data from the Galaxy Store in the context of the same case.

Valve is officially not a party to the lawsuit; it is being fought between Epic Games and Apple. At the heart of the issue is Fortnite and the percentage of sales from that game that Epic has to pay to Apple for making the game available. Epic does not agree with the thirty percent that it has to pay because, for example, Amazon has to deal with a rate of 15 percent.

Epic therefore added its own payment system to the iOS and Android versions of the game, so that it did not have to pay a share of revenue from microtransactions. Google and Apple then removed the game from their stores. Then Epic decided to take the two to court again. The case against Apple will start in July this year.