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Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

how can Steam possibly get hit with antitrust when Apple and Google are allowed to do whatever they want with their app stores while controlling the hardware/OS?

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Because any given suit doesn't require bigger fish to be addressed first. Steam is in court because two indie devs decided to file suit. Those indie devs weren't required to wait their turn for worse examples of antitrust behavior to get dealt with first.

Yes, but Epic did battle Apple over the store thing. Epic lost on all fronts except the anti-steering rule: Epic is allowed to advertise their off-platform web store where they will sell you in-app-purchases for Fortnight without the Apple tax. Not sure if they offer higher-price versions of same purchases through Apple's store or you must do your shopping for skins and other silliness through Epic.

However, AFAIK the final appeal battle at the US supreme court hasn't happened yet.

True, but if the Play Store and the iOS App Store are still going, what hope do these indie devs have?

The suit will almost certainly fail. In event that it doesn't it will almost certainly go to the supreme court. If the supreme court upholds this as an antitrust violation then that will certainly be true for iOS and Android as well as most likely PlayStation and Xbox.

Perhaps the indie-devs chose to sue Steam so they would have to fight Valve's smaller army of lawyers.

I mean the simple reply to that is: por que no los dos? Steam getting hit with an antitrust suit and losing could also pave the way for Apple and Google being forced to reduce their extortive rates.

because they aren't? Apple has been hit over the years and may be forced to allow alternative storefronts. Google is still being sued by Epic over these exact things that they pay for on IOS.

They just aren't as high proile as Epic v. Apple. Probably for good reason given the shitshow that courtroom was.

Apple lets you price differently elsewhere

Sort of? They don't let you sell stuff to run on iOS apps on alternate stores at all. Epic is going right to the supreme court over this. Epic has links in iOS FortNight to buy in-app-purchases on the Epic store (not Apple's store) so they don't have to pay the Apple tax.

Epic lost on every other anti-trust fight vs apple except this one - every appeals court has upheld Epic's freedom to direct iOS users who want to buy cosmetics for Fortnite into the Epic store, which violates their agreement with Apple.

The point is you can charge less in other avenues. The claim appears to be that steam does not let you do that, the equivalent would be apple saying you must pay the 15/30% cut on our store but you also can’t sell for a lower price on other platforms.

That said from other comments here I’m not sure how accurate/true that claim is.

As does Steam if you're not selling Steam keys, according to HideousKojima's comment upthread.

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