Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Steam’s COO, Scott Lynch, said ‘you’re mad’ to CEO, Tim Sweeney, After Steam’s president received an angry email from Epic Games’ CEO.
For context, the lawsuit in question wasn’t filed by Epic – it was by indie game studio Wolfire Games, and it began in 2021. At the time, Wolfire hoped to insist “that Valve stop interfering with pricing on other stores” after allegedly being told that its game, Overgrowth, would be removed from Steam if offered for a lower price elsewhere.
Now, as reported and shared in the GameDiscoverCo newsletter, new documents have been uncovered as part of the lawsuit, including some partially redacted email interactions between Sweeney, Newell, Erik Johnson and Scott Lynch.
Sweeney replies to Newell and Valve’s Erik Johnson saying he’s not annoyed “and I’ve never heard of Sean Jenkins” (poor Sean). Then Sweeney adjusts his flight goggles and gets ready for takeoff on one of his pet peeves: the 30% platform fee on Steam. “There was a good case for [such fees] in the early days,” writes Sweeney, “but the scale is now high and operating costs have been driven down, while the churn of new game releases is so fast that the brief marketing or UA value the storefront provides is far disproportionate to the fee.”
“Right now, you assholes are telling the world that the strong and powerful get special terms, while 30% is for the little people,” Sweeney wrote. “We’re all in for a prolonged battle if Apple tries to keep their monopoly and 30% by cutting backroom deals with big publishers to keep them quiet. Why not give ALL developers a better deal? What better way is there to convince Apple quickly that their model is now totally untenable?”
On August 12, 2017, Gabe Newell emails Tim Sweeney: “Anything we doing to annoy you? We’re guessing Sean Jenkins’ public dumbness might be part of it.”