Valve and Sony sued for market monopolization

Valve and Sony were sued for monopolizing the market using digital stores, respectively Steam on PC and PlayStation Store on Sony consoles. Interestingly, the new litigation is taking place in the midst of Epic's ongoing lawsuit against Apple, where Epic is trying to prove that Apple is doing the same with its App Store.

Let's start with the class action lawsuit against Valve, which was filed by Wolfire Games on April 27 in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington. A couple of days ago, Wolfire CEO David Rosen wrote a detailed letter explaining why he was joining the lawsuit. In short, he believes Valve is using its dominant position to force game developers to sell their games for the same price on Steam and any other competing store, threatening to remove the game from Steam if the developer decides to sell it for a lower price, say, on the Epic Games store, or even on your own store.

The class action lawsuit against Sony, on the other hand, was filed directly by private individual Agustin Kachkari on May 5 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California (San Francisco division). In this case, the consumer claims that just over two years ago, Sony removed the ability to directly sell digital codes for PlayStation games from other retailers such as Amazon, GameStop or Best Buy, leading to an unprecedented increase in the price of PlayStation digital games as they now can only be purchased through the PlayStation Store.

Whether these stories will be continued is an open question. However, the situation seems to be turning against digital store monopolies, which should be a net bonus for consumers.