Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. (credit:
Epic Games
)
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has
long
been an
outspoken opponent
of what he sees as Valve's unreasonable platform fees for listing games on Steam, which start at 30 percent of the total sale price. Now, though, new emails from before
the launch of the competing Epic Games Store
in 2018 show just how angry Sweeney was with the "assholes" at companies like Valve and Apple for squeezing "the little guy" with what he saw as inflated fees.
The emails, which came out this week as part of
Wolfire's price-fixing case against Valve
(as
noticed by the GameDiscoverCo newsletter
), confront Valve managers directly for platform fees Sweeney says are "no longer justifiable." They also offer a behind-the-scenes look at the fury Sweeney and Epic would unleash against Apple in court proceedings
starting years later
.
“I bet Valve made more profit... than the developer themselves...”
The first mostly unredacted email chain from the court documents,
from August 2017
, starts with Valve co-founder Gabe Newell asking Sweeney if there is "anything we [are] doing to annoy you?" That query was likely prompted by Sweeney's
public tweets
at the time questioning "why Steam is still taking 30% of gross [when] MasterCard and Visa charge 2-5% per transaction, and CDN bandwidth is around $0.002/GB."
Later in the same thread
, he laments that "the internet was supposed to obsolete the rent-seeking software distribution middlemen, but here's Facebook, Google, Apple, Valve, etc."