Apple subpoenas Valve as part of its legal battle with Epic: Valve fights back
A new court filing has revealed that, as part of the ongoing legal battle between Apple and Epic Games, Apple subpoenaed Valve Software in November 2020, demanding it provide huge amounts of commercial data about Steam sales and operations going over multiple years.
Apple is demanding Valve - who is not a party to this lawsuit in any way, shape, or form - provide Apple with detailed data and information about, initially, every single game sold on Steam, including names, prices, configurations and dates of every product on Steam, as well as detailed accounts of exactly how much money Steam makes and how it is all divvied-up". Apple later scaled this down to just the top 600 games on Steam.
Valve is not having any of it, of course.
Valve's argument goes on to explain to the court that it is not a competitor in the mobile space (this is, after all, a dispute that began with Fortnite on iOS), and makes the point that Valve is not Epic, and Fortnite is not available on Steam." It further says that Apple is using Valve as a shortcut to a huge amount of third party data that rightfully belongs to those third parties.
The conclusion of Valve's argument calls for the court to throw Apple's subpoena out. Somehow, 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 figure. It's not. The extensive and highly confidential information Apple demands 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 burdensome to pull together. Apple's demands for further production should be rejected."
This feels weird and wrong in so many ways, so much so that it almost feels as if Apple is trying to gain insight into a massive market - PC games - that it is not a part of - yet. The amount and detailed nature of the data Apple is requesting is so bizarre and over the top, that the only logical conclusion I can draw is that Apple wants this data for potential competitive purposes, and not for legal purposes at all.