Emails in Valve Antitrust Case Show Threat to Pull Rainbow Six Siege From Steam, Bloomberg Reports

Bloomberg reported Sunday that emails disclosed in the U.S. antitrust case against Valve allegedly show the company threatened to remove Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege from Steam after Ubisoft offered a cheaper $15 starter pack on its own store, a newly public example of the conduct at the center of the lawsuit.

According to Bloomberg’s review of discovery materials in the case, Valve employees warned that all editions of the game could be taken off Steam “by end of day tomorrow” unless the pricing issue was addressed. The allegation matters because the long-running lawsuit is focused on whether Valve, which operates the dominant PC game storefront Steam, used that position to pressure game publishers and developers not to sell titles for less elsewhere.

The litigation began in 2021 with Wolfire Games LLC et al. v. Valve Corporation in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, case no. 2:21-cv-00563. Plaintiffs have challenged Valve’s practices around pricing parity — the idea that games should not be sold more cheaply on competing storefronts — and the commission Valve charges on Steam sales. The newly reported Rainbow Six Siege exchange gives the case a concrete, publisher-specific allegation involving one of the industry’s biggest companies.

The details, however, come from Bloomberg’s reporting on emails and deposition excerpts produced in discovery, the pretrial evidence-gathering phase of a lawsuit. The underlying email exhibit described in Bloomberg’s story was not independently reviewed in the publicly available court records cited in the research for this article. And the reporting concerns allegations in an active case, not findings adopted by a judge or proven at trial.

Bloomberg reported a second example from the same set of disclosures involving Warner Bros. and the 2017 release of Middle-earth: Shadow of War. In that exchange, Bloomberg said, Valve business-team member Kassidy Gerber told the publisher that preorders had been removed from Steam because the game’s price was “significantly higher than what was available at other retailers for the same version of the game.”

Bloomberg also reported that Gerber later pushed back during deposition questioning on the idea that Steam had a formal pricing-parity rule. “I don’t really know what you mean by ‘policy,’” Gerber said, according to Bloomberg. Gerber added: “In general, I don’t feel like we have a lot of policies. That sounds kind of bureaucratic to me.”

Those reported exchanges add to a case that has increasingly turned on how Valve communicated with publishers about pricing outside Steam. Plaintiffs argue Valve used Steam’s market position to discourage lower prices elsewhere, while Valve has denied that it dictates what publishers charge on other storefronts.

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell made that point in 2023 deposition testimony previously reported by PC Gamer. “Customers have enormous choice… whether they buy the game on an Xbox, whether they buy it on Steam, whether they buy it on Epic Games Store, or whether they buy it directly from software developers,” Newell said. The assignment’s research also says Newell denied that Valve dictates prices on other storefronts.

As of June 1-2, no public Valve statement directly confirming or denying the specific Rainbow Six Siege email described by Bloomberg had been identified in the reporting reviewed for this article. That leaves Bloomberg’s account of the discovery record as the freshest public window into evidence the plaintiffs say supports their claims — and into Valve’s dealings with publishers now being scrutinized in federal court.