Epic's Tim Sweeney declares Valve have "held gaming back for years" - He's half right

The ongoing one-sided feud between Valve (seemingly an impassive black monolith holding the soul of a bearded libertarian billionaire) and Epic Games' CEO Tim Sweeney enters a new round, with the monolith seemingly as disinterested as ever.

As reported by GamesRadar, the Epic CEO cannot stop himself from posting through it, joining the side of former Epic animation programmer Kiaran Ritchie (who claims that anyone could vibe-code an equally functional alternative to Steam) to fire a few shots of his own.

"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. - Tim Sweeney

And while Kiaran is right in that Valve really do offer little more than the power of their ubiquity and network for a 30% slice of the profits, and Sweeney is (half) right in that Steam's APIs are geared heavily towards the PC and offer no console or mobile-first alternatives, the question left unsaid here is 'What is Epic offering instead, then?'

Yes, the Epic multiplayer back-end is platform-agnostic. This is good, and something that should be applauded. But thanks to Epic's catastrophic PR efforts (I wonder who could be behind that?), seeing your game on Steam ask you to log in or pair with an Epic account frequently leaves people so upset and irritated that it leads to immediate refunds and review-bombing.

Yes, Epic's store does ask for a much fairer slice of the profits. 100% of revenue goes directly to developers for the first million US dollars, and then switches to a 12% cut for Epic. Again, good. But more and more developers are reporting that the Epic Store amounts to such a small fraction of total sales that it's barely worth the effort of maintaining the game on a second shop.

Yes, it's absurd that Valve seems to have the only truly multi-functional games storefront on PC. It SHOULD be a battleground where everyone's competing to be the best, but it took the Epic Store nearly two years from release before it even had a basic shopping cart feature. These are massive unforced errors that have polarized people against any new store now.

The unforced errors continue further. As well as being all-in on generative AI, Tim Sweeney has never met an ethically compromised tech base he doesn't love. Even as coldly libertarian as Valve can be, NFTs and Web3 games got punted off Steam with a quickness.

Being the grand contrarian he is, the Epic Store announced that it would be a haven for all things Blockchain, a move which seems to have resulted in nothing good whatsoever, and just more sketchy-looking games from cryptocurrency investment firms clogging up the storefront. Plus, despite being very adamant that everyone loves gen-AI, Sweeney doesn't think that developers should have to declare that they use it. Surely if it's so great and loved, nobody should be ashamed to mention it, right? Right?

https://x.com/UnrealEngine/status/2113347611080151105

I have always been critical of Valve since the day they launched Steam. I am, personally, a fan of no particular storefront. Even the gloriously indie Itch.io struggles to be coherently searchable, and the management's public-facing handling of the Payment Processor crackdown was clumsy at best.

I do not think that Valve offers enough to developers to justify the massive 30% cut of revenue. That much is right - they could probably drop to 10% and still make billions with little to no effort - and it's questionable where those enormous profits are going. Valve has just rolled out an expensive new VR headset in an era where most VR developers are on life support or shutting up shop because nobody is investing a penny in them.

Yes, the Proton software layer that allows the Linux-based Steam Deck and Steam Machine to run Windows games near-seamlessly now is excellent, and an unquestionably good use of Valve's resources, but it does not appear to be a billion-dollar project, let alone the multiple billions in profit that the company rakes in annually.

It's not like Epic is short on gigantic cash-cows (including the Unreal Engine, fundamental to much of the modern games industry, plus Fortnite), so some of that could surely go towards initiatives to improve things and maybe turn things around PR-wise. But instead, we see mass layoffs, plus Sweeney declares that programming is too hard and that they're just going to use a glorified chatbot to produce their new storefront, which still turned out to be a buggy, poorly designed mess.

In a better (though still regrettably capitalist) world, these billionaires and their corporate projects would be trying to outmaneuver each other and steal business away through superior products, using their massive resources to change things for the better. Instead, we've got one almost-unmoving industry monolith and petty weirdos like Sweeney yelling insults over the fence. The future is stupid and embarrassing.

Sweeney might have a point some of the time, but the games industry needs better than clowns like him.

The games industry deserves better, period.

Needless to say, Neither Valve, nor anyone at the company, appears to have responded to Sweeney's comments.