Valve Threatened to Delist Rainbow Six Siege Unless Ubisoft Matched Steam Pricing, Court Documents Show
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Valve has long defended Steam as a platform where gamers “have enormous choice,” but newly unearthed court filings paint a starkly different picture of the company’s dealings with major publishers. According to a report from Bloomberg based on emails uncovered during the discovery phase of a class action antitrust lawsuit, Valve threatened to remove all editions of Rainbow Six Siege from its store unless Ubisoft stopped offering a cheaper bundle exclusively on its own Uplay storefront. The alleged ultimatum came with a deadline: “end of day tomorrow.”
The report, which draws on documents from an ongoing legal battle over whether Steam constitutes an illegal monopoly, suggests that Valve’s response to perceived competition has been far from hands-off. While Steam’s 30% revenue cut has long been a sore point for developers, the case highlights how Valve may have used the threat of delisting to keep pricing aligned across platforms, effectively discouraging publishers from offering discounts on rival storefronts like Ubisoft’s Uplay or Epic Games Store.
This is not the first time Valve has been accused of strong-arming publishers. The same lawsuit, filed on behalf of consumers and developers, also cites an incident from 2017 involving Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment (now Warner Bros. Games). According to the report, Steam’s business development team contacted Warner Bros. after noticing that pre-orders for Middle-earth: Shadow of War were priced significantly lower at other retailers. The company was told that the game had been pulled from Steam because the price disparity violated Valve’s expectations — even though Valve’s own representatives have denied the existence of a formal pricing policy.
Kassidy Gerber, a former member of Steam’s business development team, reportedly testified in a deposition that Valve does not have “a lot of policies,” calling the idea “kind of bureaucratic.” Yet the plaintiffs’ lawyer pointed to a prior email in which Gerber allegedly told a developer: “Steam’s policy has always been to require material parity for things we sell on the Steam Store.” Gerber later said she could not recall making that statement.
The contrasting narratives — Valve as a laissez-faire platform vs. an iron-fisted gatekeeper — have become central to the antitrust case. With 72% of game developers in a recent survey describing Steam as a monopoly, the industry’s anxiety over Valve’s market power is hard to ignore. If the court finds that Valve’s pricing-enforcement tactics unfairly stifle competition, the ruling could reshape how PC games are sold and priced for years to come.
We’ve reached out to Valve for comment and will update this article if we hear back.
In the meantime, here are the best PC games you can play right now.