“Treating Players Like They’re Stupid”: Former Valve Dev Fires Back at Tim Sweeney, Dares Him to Put Alan Wake 2 on Steam

Earlier this week we covered Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney’s latest run at Valve — including his claim that Valve has held gaming back for years by locking PC games into Steamworks. Now somebody who actually worked at Valve has answered him, and he did not hold back.

Chet Faliszek — a writer on Portal, Half-Life, and Left 4 Dead during his years at Valve — posted a video to his YouTube channel taking Sweeney’s arguments apart one by one. His review of the CEO’s recent posting streak is blunt: some of it, he says, “is AI psychosis,” and beyond that, “you’re kinda crashing out, dude.”

The AI disclosure fight

Most of the video targets Sweeney’s other big complaint: Steam’s requirement that developers disclose AI-generated content on their store pages. In a series of posts from October 23 to 25, Sweeney called the policy abhorrent, arguing it forces developers to write a political statement that a “hate mob” will use against them, and comparing the label to forcing developers to list their political affiliation or voting history.

Faliszek’s response: nobody is actually asking for any of that. He says Sweeney is inventing arguments that simply don’t exist to knock down, when the real policy is much simpler — it tells players what they’re buying. Players are just making informed choices, he argues. “Why are you treating all the players like children? You’re just treating players like they’re stupid.” His suggestion: think like a player for a moment and ask what you would want to know about a game before spending money on it. He also concedes Sweeney genuinely doesn’t care whether a game used AI — comparing it to his own indifference to frame rates — but says not caring about a detail is no reason to hide it from the people who do.

The Fab problem

Then there is the contradiction Faliszek keeps circling back to. Fab, Epic’s own digital asset marketplace, uses AI disclosures too — and Sweeney has said he would keep them there even if Steam dropped its own, because it makes business sense. Sweeney’s defense is that Fab is a business-to-business marketplace whose buyers need to know the provenance of assets for contractual reasons.

Faliszek is not buying the distinction. If disclosure is useful information when a developer is buying assets, he argues, it is useful information when a player is buying a game — you can’t have it both ways. “Business is political,” he adds. “Come on. You can’t have it both ways, bro.”

The monopoly boomerang

On Sweeney’s Steamworks complaint, Faliszek points out that Valve deliberately does not try to build everything. If Valve solved every problem a developer has — engine, tools, all of it — Sweeney would be the first person screaming about a monopoly. Instead, Valve leaves gaps, and those gaps are where other companies, Epic included, get to exist.

The Alan Wake 2 dare

The video closes with a challenge. If Sweeney is such a champion of consumer choice, Faliszek says, he should “put your money where your mouth is” and release Alan Wake 2 on Steam — because keeping it locked to the Epic Games Store is its own walled garden, restricting choice for players and developers alike.

For context: Alan Wake 2 was published and funded by Epic, and developer Remedy has said plainly that the game would not exist without Epic’s backing. Fair enough — but the fact remains that more than three years after its October 2023 launch, the PC version is still only available on Epic’s store, and neither Epic nor Remedy has announced a Steam release.

Sweeney has not responded to Faliszek’s video, and Valve — true to form — has said nothing at all.

Team Sweeney or Team Faliszek? And should Alan Wake 2 finally come to Steam? Let us know in the comments.

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Sources: GamesRadar, GamingOnLinux, PCGamesN