Epic Games' Sweeney calls Valve's Gabe Newell an asshole: the COO's response is classy

In an email exchange between the CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeneyand Valve CEO Gabe Newell and Valve COO Scott Lynch, the company's head of Fortnite called the head of Steam an asshole. Its COO, Lynch, however, replied with great class: “you mad bro?”, or “does it bother you?”. Considering that we are talking about the people at the head of some of the largest video game companies in the world, he makes you smile a little and worry a little about what happens behind the scenes.

But let's take a step back and see how we arrived at this information.

Valve is currently involved in one antitrust case in the United States with Wolfire, a developer who claims platform owner Steam uses its dominant position to unfairly exclude rivals and control game prices. Valve tried to have the lawsuit dismissed, but in May 2022 the court ruled it could proceed with some changes. All of this is relevant because the lawsuit forces Valve to reveal a lot of internal correspondence from the companies involved.

Among these documents there are a couple of exchanges between Tim Sweeney, Gabe Newell and Scott Lynch. The context of both exchanges is generally about store prices and specifically the commission Valve takes on Steam sales.

Sweeeny's words

More specifically, in 2018 Sweeney emailed Gabe Newell and Scott Lynch and began by laying out his problems with Apple, before telling them about the upcoming launch of the Epic Games Store, which is a direct competitor to Steam. Sweeney at that time wanted Valve to adapt to the rules of Epic's store which asks developers only 12% of revenues instead of 30% like Valve. Furthermore, Epic Games complains that large publishers can benefit from a cut of up to 20%, linked to earnings, which is however out of reach for smaller publishers and developers. Too bad, however, that his message is a little aggressive than necessary, considering that he only had to lose:

“Right now, you assholes you're telling the world that the strong and powerful get special deals, while 30% is for the little guys,” Sweeney writes. “We're in for a long battle if Apple tries to maintain its monopoly and 30% profits by making deals with the big guys publishers to keep them happy. Why not give ALL developers a better deal? What better way is there to quickly convince Apple that its model is now totally unsustainable?”. An excellent speech from the developers' point of view, a terrible reasoning for Valve who certainly wants to maintain the highest possible profits.

The next day Valve's Scott Lynch simply responded with: “You mad, bro?”like any internet user who responds on Reddit or Twitter.

We can assume that yes, it bothered Sweeney a lot.

At least Epic Games has managed to create its own store on iOS in Europe.