Epic’s Tim Sweeney Says Valve “Has Held Gaming Back for Years” — and Got Community Noted for It

Tim Sweeney is back on X taking swings at Steam — and this time, the fact-check followed him home.

The latest round started with Kiaran Ritchie, a former principal animation programmer at Epic Games, lamenting Valve’s 30% cut on X. Ritchie called it sad that the games industry is drained by a 30% tax on gross revenue, argued that a Steam alternative could be vibe-coded in a week, and said Steam’s only remaining value at this point is its network.

Sweeney — Epic’s founder and CEO, and Ritchie’s former boss — jumped in to agree, and aimed the shot squarely at Steamworks, Valve’s suite of tools for developers: “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.”

The community note that undercut the point

There is a problem with the walled-garden argument, and X’s Community Notes feature spelled it out under Sweeney’s post, citing Valve’s own Steamworks documentation: Steam Datagram Relay — Valve’s networking tech, which it describes as its virtual private gaming network — can be used on other platforms, as long as the game ships on Steam. In other words, the networking piece Sweeney singled out as locked in is one Valve explicitly lets developers carry elsewhere.

That does not settle the wider argument about Steam’s 30% cut or its dominance of PC gaming — plenty of developers share Ritchie’s frustration on both points, and Epic built its entire store pitch around a 12% cut instead of 30%. But the specific claim that Steamworks traps players inside one social garden ran into Valve’s own documentation within hours.

The counterpoint writes itself

“Held gaming back” is also a tough sell against Valve’s recent record. As GamesRadar pointed out in its coverage, the Steam Deck and the upcoming Steam Machine have spearheaded gaming on Linux thanks to Proton, Valve’s compatibility layer — and Valve was among the most significant drivers of digital game distribution in the first place. You can argue about the 30% all day; the company that made PC gaming’s biggest storefront, its most popular handheld, and its Linux compatibility layer is a strange pick for the industry’s brake pedal.

Valve, for its part, has not responded to Sweeney’s post.

A feud that never actually cools down

None of this is new territory for Sweeney. He has backed a lawsuit against Valve, attacked Steam’s AI disclosure labels as irresponsible, and taken shots at Gabe Newell after the Steam Deck price hike. Just under two weeks ago, Epic relaunched its launcher after what it called a huge pivot into maximum AI acceleration, proudly claiming it had vibe-coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than “the other guy” — though Steam had shipped its own faster update the day before.

The pattern is consistent: Sweeney’s real target is the 30% cut and Steam’s grip on PC gaming, and every few months another post restarts the argument. This time, though, the argument came with a correction attached — and the correction came from Valve’s own paperwork.

Whose side are you on — is Steam’s 30% a tax on the industry, or the price of the best storefront PC gaming has? Let us know in the comments.

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Sources: GamesRadar, TheGamer