For the last five years, Valve has been at the center of an ongoing class action lawsuit in which a number of developers are alleging that Valve is a monopoly using its chokehold on the industry to fend off competition and overcharge developers for use of its service. Among the many ways plaintiffs allege Valve is doing this is by, as court documents suggest, penalizing developers for selling their games at lower prices on other storefronts.
The lawsuit, which has been ongoing since 2021 in the U.S. and which was recently extensively reported on by Bloomberg, is a class action suit originally filed by Humble Bundle and Wolfire Games co-founder David Rosen and since taken up by several other developers in subsequent amended complaints. The current complaint alleges that Valve maintains an “unlawful monopoly” that allows it to capture “a disproportionate share” of the growth of the PC gaming industry, giving publishers little choice but to use its store and thus allowing them to take a “supracompetitive” 30-percent commission on each sale. The complaint specifically outlines that Valve maintains a “Platform Most Favored Nation” clause it imposes on developers and publishers it works with, forbidding them from offering games on other platforms for cheaper prices or with better features. An additional case currently ongoing in the UK covers similar ground.
Bloomberg has gone through documents from throughout the progress of the suits and covered a number of allegations and examples of Valve enforcing this clause. A few highlights include Rosen himself testifying in a blog post that he reached out to Valve to see what it would do if he sold one of his games at a discount on Humble Bundle’s store, to which Valve apparently told him the game would be removed from Steam. Evidence also includes various emails wherein Valve employees threaten to delist games like Rainbow Six Siege or Middle-earth: Shadow of War due to their respective publishers offering discounts or better deals on other storefronts, with one business development employee allegedly telling Warner Bros. in the latter case, “Steam’s policy has always been to require material parity for things we sell on the Steam Store.”
However, both Valve and Newell have vehemently, repeatedly denied that the company has such a rule or clause. The aforementioned business development employee testified that Steam didn’t really have such a thing as “policies,” a reference to Valve’s notoriety for having a very, very loose corporate structure and no real chain of command, then claimed she didn’t remember saying the above quote when presented with her own email by lawyers. A number of emails from Valve staff citing such a rule or policy with very similar language have surfaced over the course of the trial, as well as an internal message found by Bloomberg in one of the case’s many motions in which a staffer jokes that he’s going to get the policy language “tattooed on my back like it’s the Declaration of Independence.”
Of note is that Bloomberg states Epic Games declined to comment for its report and that the company is absent from the suit against Valve, despite itself suing both Apple and Google over similar issues and despite being cited in the report for its struggles to compete against Steam with its own PC storefront. However, following the publication of Bloomberg‘s report, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney took to X to comment specifically on the Shadow of War anecdote, saying, “Is this the ‘fair competition’ praised by recent articles? If a store with dominant market share taking a 30% cut can bully developers into not passing on savings to customers on competing stores with lower fees, then competition doesn’t stand a chance.”
Is this the “fair competition” praised by recent articles?
If a store with dominant market share taking a 30% cut can bully developers into not passing on savings to customers on competing stores with lower fees, then competition doesn’t stand a chance. https://t.co/LKq53nWqIJ pic.twitter.com/1j8DKqU6kB
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) June 2, 2026
If Valve loses its UK case, it could face a penalty of up to $900 million paid to members of the class action, which includes UK-based players who have purchased games both on Steam and other storefronts. In the U.S., the prayer for relief asks for Valve to cease its “abusive, unlawful, and anticompetitive practices” such as its 30-percent take and its alleged Platform Most Favored Nation policy, as well as an unspecified amount of monetary restitution and damages to members of the class. The most recent updates to the case mostly involve a lot of worrying over confidentiality and sealing of documents, which suggests to me that whatever happens to Valve and Steam as a result of this, if anything, it’s not going to be done anytime soon.