I really don't see how this guy has a leg to stand on in a legal sense.
Steam isn't a monopoly. No one is stopping the devs from going onto the EGS or even developing their own launcher like EA did with origin or the Bethesda launcher or Blizzard.
The fact Steam has a lions share of the market is from offering an objectively amazing product.
And its also worth keeping in mind what the court is looking for in this actual case. The court is not in the practice of determining what someone's business model should be. The court is however looking out for whether the practices in question are of significant detriment to the consumer. So there's two aspects here - Is it in the consumers best interest for the game to have general price parity across retailers? Sorta not, but its debatable - Its just as easy to say its against the consumers interest to be financially punished for using their preferred market platform as it is to say they're charged more for steam existing. Its a really weak argument, but it does lean in the favor of Wolfire marginally, and only marginally - Wolfire will have to answer why they insist on working with steam when they believe the fees and terms are unreasonable, and it'll be difficult for them to argue the court should let them have their cake and eat it too because they want it and little else. If consumers will not go to the epic game store for a game, even when its cheaper than it might be offered for on steam, then that implies consumers see value in steam, and therefore are more than willing to pay the 'steam tax'.
The other aspect is if its unreasonable for steam to have pricing terms in their business agreements. And as far as I'm aware, this is actually a fairly legal thing - There's nothing forbidding a retailer from having clauses generally forbidding their supplier from helping a competitor to undercut them. Price agreements that put unilateral floors on the pricing, or require fixed price points etc are highly illegal, but simply putting in contract that "your MSRP with us must be the same MSRP as with everyone else" doesn't meet the standards of any form of price fixing. Same thing exists in their sales policy - If you do a 50% sale somewhere else, all they ask is you do a 50% sale on steam at some point in the future as well.
So it comes down to whether the court believes its in the consumers best interest to forcibly change the business model of a business entity because a partner business doesn't like the fee structure associated with working with them, when the structure is generally legal, doesn't appear to be putting any explicit price floor on the consumer, and the collected fee percentage provides a number of services that on paper appear worth their value to the consumers who are presumably suffering under the premium on cost, based on the massive difference in sales between steam and competitor cheaper platforms.
Suffice to say, this probably won't win - There's not enough provable harm to the consumer, and the partner business can't argue that they have no option other than to use steam without explaining why its so good and justifying its terms and cut.
Can Gaben sue them if he gets coofid from going?
Also the no particular risk of illness is dead wrong, Gaben is fat as fuck and something like covid could probably take him out.
He's in he actual at risk categories for sure, obese and over 60 years old now. But no, there's no situation in which he could seek any compensation for secondary medical complications when travelling. Getting sick is a fact of life, Covids not a big pandemic of any special note anymore, and as far as the courts concerned, everyone else here and involved is taking the same risks. Gabe won't get special treatment there.
