Epic – As the Apple case was about to go to court, news of a lawsuit came from the Steam front. Wolfire Games, the creator of humble bundle, as well as an indie game developer, sued Valve for uncompetitive practices with Steam.

In the petition “Valve abuses its market share, leaving game publishers with no choice but to sell their games on the Steam Store, where Valve also cuts by 30%.”

Wolfire says Steam holds about 75% of the PC gaming market and generates about $6 billion in annual revenue through its 30% outage, listing examples of Valve’s abuse of monopoly status.

Attempts by other companies to compete with Steam have failed to open a notch on Steam, even if they offer developers a higher share, as in the case of the Epic Games Store reducing its dividend to 12%.
Steam doesn’t allow publishers to sell PC games and game codes for less elsewhere. This prevents rival gaming platforms from competing in price.
Most rival game stores have given up, with examples such as EA and Microsoft bringing their games back to Steam
Steam guarantees to be the dominant platform because rival companies instead feed the Steam engine with new games and game codes

Wolfire said Valve’s practices also caused great damage to the Humble Bundle; that’s why publishers are now reluctant to participate in Humble Bundle events, which is why humble bundle has indicated a decrease in the number and quality of games they offer their customers. That’s a really accurate finding, because humble bundle is like a shadow of its former self right now. In the past, really high-quality games came up with very attractively priced packages. Now both the number and quality of packages have dropped noticeably.

It’s not known what the outcome of this case will be, or whether it will yield any results, but it’s true that at some point Valve has to give up the market a little bit. Especially the “you can’t compete in price” part is not good at all.