Epic Games chief Tim Sweeney claims ‘Valve has held gaming back for years’

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney dropped another hot take about Steam earlier this week, saying that Valve’s online storefront “has held gaming back for years” by locking developers into Steamworks.

Sweeney’s comment came amidst a conversation started by Kiaran Ritchie, a former principal animation programmer at Epic, who decried the 30% cut Valve takes from game sales on Steam. “You could vibe code a Steam alternative in a week,” Ritchie wrote on X. “Cloudflare egress is basically free. The industry is in desperate need of a distribution platform that allows developers to keep their revenue.

“Networks effects and the fanatic obsession with ‘muh Steam library’ will make this very difficult. But if devs could actually keep their earnings, we’d have a greater selection of better games and far more financial success stories.”

When another user called Ritchie’s analysis into question and pointed out that the recent “vibe coded” Epic Games Store launcher had met with mixed results, Ritchie replied, “The client is basically irrelevant in this day and age. Anyone could build one better than Steam and it wouldn’t even be hard. I only bring it up because it’s what everyone talks about when defending Steam. Like it’s still 2024 and these things are hard. Steam’s only remaining value is its network.”

Asking rhetorically why Valve doesn’t offer Steamworks services on an a la carte basis so developers only pay for what they use, he concluded, “They won’t. Because nobody would willingly pay anything close to 30% for it.”

Which is where Sweeney came in: “Exactly this,” he wrote in reply to Ritchie. “Valve has held gaming back for years by locking developers’ PC games into Steamworks’ social walled garden where players can’t talk to other players on iOS, Android, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, or even other PC stores.”

Sweeney’s message was appended with a community note stating that “a lot of games use Steamworks only for authentication to allow for crossplay and do the rest themselves.” Sweeney dismissed this as “fake,” writing that “Steam Datagram relay isn’t related to the things I cited: social, and players talking to each other across platforms.”

The next day, he added another response to the community note, agreeing that Valve”doesn’t kidnap you and force you to use Steamworks,” but suggesting that it is impractical for developers not to use it. Epic offers its own free social and matchmaking framework called Epic Online Services, which uses Epic’s account system, but can be used outside of the Epic Games Store.

There’s potential for an interesting conversation here, because Sweeney does make some valid points and I wholeheartedly agree that Steam’s 30% cut on many game sales—which has long been his number-one bugaboo—is extremely steep. But all of that runs headlong into the simple fact that Steam is tremendously successful, and while developers might grumble about its steep cut, they still choose to use it because it’s far and away the dominant platform and storefront in PC gaming.

It’s also interesting that Sweeney is arguing that Steam should change its ways while resolutely denouncing criticism of the AI-centric course he’s plotted for Epic. So, on one hand we get the market realist argument that AI is inevitable and we should accept it, but on the other are told we should not accept what Steam has done and continues to do even though it’s working well for Valve and has helped support a tidal wave of indie gaming over the past two decades—which, ironically, is now under threat by AI. It makes me wonder: Does he really believe Steam has held back gaming, or does he really just want it to do things his way?