Valve will face that £656m UK lawsuit accusing them of overcharging Steam customers, as tribunal rule it can go ahead

Valve’s lawyers won’t be able to file away one of the legal legalings they’ve been dealing with for a little while now, at least not yet. A tribunal have ruled that the £656m lawsuit brought against the company by digital rights campaigner Vicki Shotbolt and law firm Milberg London LLP last year – the one that could net UK dwellers who’ve bought stuff on Steam since early June 2018 up to £44 in compensation – can go ahead.

As a result, Valve’s Lionel Hutzes will have to face the lawsuit’s accusations that the company have used Steam’s “dominant position” in the PC market to behave “anti-competitively”, with the end result that regular folks are “paying too much for PC games and in-game content and have lesser PC Game platform alternatives”.

As reported by the BBC, Valve had been arguing the case shouldn’t get the stamp of approval to proceed to trial. However, a competition appeal tribunal have ruled that the case will be allowed to continue.

Here’s the summary of the tribunal’s judgement, which begins by outlining three key cogs to Shotbolt’s accusations. The lawsuit claims that Valve impose platform parity obligations with Steam that stop publishers from selling games on rival stores with better terms. It also accuses Valve of using anti-steering provisions to lock in-game purchases made in Steam games into using the storefront’s “application programming interface”, wich means payments are subject to Valve’s commission charges. Finally, the lawsuit claims Valve are “imposing excessive commission charges which amount to an unfair price which is then passed on to consumers”.

Valve, meanwhile, argued at this tribunal that Shotbolt’s lawsuit hadn’t “put forward an adequate methodology for determining Valve’s effective commission charge” and failed to consider how Steam Keys factor in. The company also claimed the suit lacked “an adequate empirical method for determining the effect” of the alleged platform parity obligations. Valve also argued that the Shotbolt’s lawsuit lacked a “workable methodology” that Steam users, including minors, could use to identify themselves as being part of the group being claimed on behalf of by the lawsuit.

Evaluating those three arguments from Valve, the tribunal “accepted that the effect of Steam Keys is a slightly unusual feature in calculating Valve’s effective commission charge and could result in uncertainty in the price alleged to be unfair”, but judged that Shotbolt and co “would be able to make a sufficient estimate using data from a range of sources”. As far as the platform parity obligations went, the tribunal ruled that the lawsuit “would not simply rely on nebulous economic theory, as claimed by Valve, but rather on a mixture of evidence to support and evaluate a harm that competition law conventionally considers to occur”.

Last of all, the tribunal opted to reject Valve’s challenge about the methods of identifying which Steam users were being claimed on behalf of. Though, this came after Shotbolt and co outlined “revisions to the proposed class definition”, which “tied the class tightly to the party who has suffered the loss, reducing the potential concern of the record keeping of minors”.

So, on rumbles the case, no doubt feeling refreshed by virtue of having had a room full of people in suits shout big words at each other in relation to it.