Yes - lawsuits have tremendous overhead, and class actions average out everything.
In this case, it would have been hard to recover more overall as a class in a finite period of time - the values were calculated based on each individuals wages and expected earnings lost at various levels or something like that (it's been a while, sorry).
The judge initially rejected the first settlement (which was 320 million i believe), and considered the final one to be much more reasonable (450 million or something).
This was in front of Judge Koh, who is no slouch and has dealt with lots of complex tech litigation. She is also not viewed as "industry-friendly" in any way, shape, or form (look at the fight over her appointment to the 9th circuit for more details)
If they fought it out in front of a jury, taken it through appeals, etc it would have taken 7-10 years to finalize it, for a max expected improvement of probably 3-5x.
That probably would not be worth it to most people, so settlement seems reasonable.
A particularly injured person may have been able to make out better in arbitration or something, but as a class, no.
This kind of very large, complex case is also just incredibly expensive to litigate.
Instead of looking at the plaintiff side, i'll look at the defendant side (since you don't have to deal with arguing about what reasonable profit margins are). This is just the cost of litigation itself.
The average litigation cost for "major companies" - 50 of the fortune 200's, was 150 million a year each in 2010. It was doubling every 5 years or less before that (it was 60 million in 2005).
It's at least doubled since then. This isn't just tech companies.
On average, "major" (again, fortune X00) corporations in the US spend 0.3% of their revenue on litigation costs. So your 100 billion revenue a year tech company is probably spending 300+ million in litigation costs.
A suit like this is a very large portion of those costs.
The plaintiff lawyers in this particular case were also very good, well regarded complex antitrust lawsuit lawyers. Not the typical "file a thousand class action lawsuits against everything" type firms that you see.