Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney throws shade at Valve / Gabe Newell for Steam Deck pricing

Tinfoil hat time, but I'd wager Tim has PR people on standby to smear Valve at any opportunity. This has been the nearest thing to a "bad move" Tim's people could latch on to, so I reckon all the memes pitching this as a "Valve L" are professional propagandists. I'm no big money sympathizer, but these memes are stretching big time. Stinks of PR firm shenanigans.

As always, Tim Sweeny has an advantage in criticizing Valve's products and services by simply not attempting to make anything at all.
"Guess what Ford, my company DOESN'T sell overpriced SUVs! Jim Farley? More like Jim Fartley, am I right gamers?"
Yeah Tim, we know. Now go back to giving out free games that people don't play and laying off people who might've caused your products and services to improve someday when you realize you're losing money for some reason.

You can tell he came up with this dis himself, because it's even worse than usual LLM droppings.

u mad bro? 😆 Sweeny's upset he doesn't have a megayacht?

I don't need to defend Gabe for being a rich guy with a ton of swanky yachts. He does it because he can, and I'd rather he not be able to just because no one person should have that much cash. The only reason I don't wish the worst for him is because his death will be bad for Valve's not-terrible consumer practices and investments (and I'm selfish).

Sweeney could be kinda worse and pretty jealous though fwiw. Anybody still on X is asking for their brain to get irradiated and he seems no different.

Epic Games rap sheet

Handheld gaming PCs: None
PC gaming consoles: None
VR headsets: None
Gaming controllers: None

Thank goodness that Valve are the ones setting these device standards because that means those which do actually exist support Linux. Can you imagine how awful things would be if Sweeney/Epic were the ones steering the industry?

If I had a twitter account I'd be like "This you, lil bro? https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/epic-devs-discuss-shock-mass-131024804.html "

Eat the rich. Whether they are whining moron or a super yacht owner.

Epic Games as a whole and Ti. Sweeney personally are one more tweet, one more game giveaway, one more pathetic lawsuit, one more paid shill away from finally overthrowing Valve, destroying Linux from every computer and mind on this planet, and securing the beautiful world of low-effort slop for the big AI and Chinese data-loving overlords Tim so adores.

Life truly imitates arts when you see people like this. Just an ego-lead contrarian in charge of a big business that, if managed properly, could probably be very beloved and viewed as a viable, profitable, worthy alternative with at least something of its own to offer.

Past years have been so disechanting about leaders of all kinds, often mostly thanks to their own unyielding desire to show themselves to the world and have its attention, only to reveal their unbelievable incompetence and teenage mindset. I can't help but think that the leaders of before were the same kind of petty idiots that will do anything in their power to try and make everyone love them, or fear them, or respect them, so much so that they're willing to make total fools of themselves through nonsensical arguments and proofs and accusations, so many time they start to belive whatever they've been telling others, in the end losing their identity to this twisted version of a human being that is only repulsing and toxic and best put into some most non-leading, unharmful role with no power at all.

Billionaires are the enemy.
Yes, even Gabe. Sorry fanboys...

Victim-complex meganerd retweets pro-piracy conspiracy-peddling anti-woke grifter, to push multi-billionaire video game CEO interpersonal beef, about average people being priced out of personal computing devices, due to probably the biggest cultiest scam in history.

🫡

I don't get mad about Sweeney's hot takes, and you wouldn't too, if you'd knew he has "crazy scientist" mindset. It doesn't justifies his statements on twitter, but you will just understand that he is a bit out of touch when he gets distracted from math/programming stuff and jumps to discussing current trends.

And as he doesn't go deep in the trends, his hot takes and predictions often, if not always become true in the opposite way of what he thought was to happen. I'd prefer it to stay this way.

Regarding Steam Deck prices, it looks painful indeed, but it still has an additional value that other consoles simply can't give you: it is a general purpose PC without vendor locking. You can run applications on it, you can dock it into a setup with a big display and full sized keyboard. You can even take it to a conference as a backup device for your presentation in case if your laptop gets stolen or lost.

Even if Steam Machine will cost $1500 on launch day, so will do other PCs with similar specs.

Last edited by vic-bay on 30 May 2026 at 10:46 am UTC

Quoting: ArehandoroEat the rich. Whether they are whining moron or a super yacht owner.

[Although there's historical precedent for that solution,](https://allthatsinteresting.com/johan-de-witt) [the french method seems to be generally dominant.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror)

Quoting: ExplosiveDiarrheaBillionaires are the enemy.
Yes, even Gabe. Sorry fanboys...

Two things can be true at the same time.

We can (and do) critizise Gabe and Valve for some of their business practices, while also supporting other practices.

Quoting: ArehandoroEat the rich. Whether they are whining moron or a super yacht owner.

I never understood the "eat the rich" sentiment. I do think corruption, fraud, or unethical business practices need to be called out and held accountable to the law when necessary - however, I don't think that's what we're talking about here, is it?

GabeN got wealthy by:

• Working at Microsoft


• Founding Valve


• Creating Half Life 1 & 2


• Creating Steam


• Creating the Steam Deck\Steam Machine\Proton

At what point between getting a job at Microsoft and being wealthy enough to buy a yacht did he suddenly become immoral? From my point of view, he got wealthy by founding the company that created one of the best games I've ever played in my life (Half-Life 2), and by supporting the Linux gaming community by getting Valve to create Proton and open-sourcing it. Furthermore, through Valve he has also employed 100s of people and enabled them to have a living. GabeN is not my friend, but my life would definitely be just a little worse if Half-Life never existed - and I reckon yours would probably be too. If you made a cultural landmark of a game, and developed a game distribution platform/community that revolutionized the way people buy games, you'd be rich too - should I hate you then for having done so? Or should I reward you with my money in exchange for the awesome thing that you created?

Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: ArehandoroEat the rich. Whether they are whining moron or a super yacht owner.

[Although there's historical precedent for that solution,](https://allthatsinteresting.com/johan-de-witt) [the french method seems to be generally dominant.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror)

An interesting thing that's not widely recognized is that the Terror did not represent a net increase in executions for France. The thing is that pre-Revolution France had a very punitive justice system, which saw peasants executed in large numbers for trivial crimes, often by methods that included extensive torture. Executing the same number of aristocrats and politicians instead seems like a much bigger deal because they're people that mattered, and because there were far fewer aristocrats so it represented a much bigger proportion of the whole. But they weren't actually killing more people.

To a fair extent the crowds hanging out at the executions, often seen in modern times as a weird morbid expression of the Revolution, were actually the same crowds that already hung out at executions before in France and continued to throughout the same period in England and elsewhere.

sweeney has a point. the deck is way to expensive now
and i do NOT care that it is sold out... wooooowwww rich people can buy stuff. great. F the poor, who can't afford it anymore!
same with nintendo and the waaayyy too expensive swtich 2 and games!

Quoting: Slaxer

Quoting: ArehandoroEat the rich. Whether they are whining moron or a super yacht owner.

I never understood the "eat the rich" sentiment. I do think corruption, fraud, or unethical business practices need to be called out and held accountable to the law when necessary - however, I don't think that's what we're talking about here, is it?

GabeN got wealthy by:

• Working at Microsoft


• Founding Valve


• Creating Half Life 1 & 2


• Creating Steam


• Creating the Steam Deck\Steam Machine\Proton

At what point between getting a job at Microsoft and being wealthy enough to buy a yacht did he suddenly become immoral? From my point of view, he got wealthy by founding the company that created one of the best games I've ever played in my life (Half-Life 2), and by supporting the Linux gaming community by getting Valve to create Proton and open-sourcing it. Furthermore, through Valve he has also employed 100s of people and enabled them to have a living. GabeN is not my friend, but my life would definitely be just a little worse if Half-Life never existed - and I reckon yours would probably be too. If you made a cultural landmark of a game, and developed a game distribution platform/community that revolutionized the way people buy games, you'd be rich too - should I hate you then for having done so? Or should I reward you with my money in exchange for the awesome thing that you created?

You might disagree, as people tend to do when ethics and morals are in question, but if you could give away 99% of your wealth to literally feed the starving and still be extremely rich, but you choose not to, many of us think you are immoral. He'd still have more than a hundred million and his lifestyle wouldn't be affected in any way.

He's got the dragon sickness just like the rest of the ultra-rich. Well, you'd never get past "wealthy" if you didn't, I suppose, unless you inherit the hoard.

In the end, a billion dollars (or in his case, multiple billions) is just a ridiculous and frankly pointless amount of money for an individual to have, when it could—and ethically should—be used to help those less fortunate. He'd be no worse off. In fact, he'd be better off in a healthier society and a safer world that he helped create.

I don't hate him and I definitely don't want to eat him, but we'd all live in a much healthier and happier world if people like him weren't so damned greedy and individualistic.

Quoting: SlaxerAt what point between getting a job at Microsoft and being wealthy enough to buy a yacht did he suddenly become immoral? From my point of view, he got wealthy by founding the company that created one of the best games I've ever played in my life (Half-Life 2), and by supporting the Linux gaming community by getting Valve to create Proton and open-sourcing it. Furthermore, through Valve he has also employed 100s of people and enabled them to have a living. GabeN is not my friend, but my life would definitely be just a little worse if Half-Life never existed - and I reckon yours would probably be too. If you made a cultural landmark of a game, and developed a game distribution platform/community that revolutionized the way people buy games, you'd be rich too - should I hate you then for having done so? Or should I reward you with my money in exchange for the awesome thing that you created?

At the moment someone becomes rich that person becomes immoral. Easy as that. Being rich means many people has to become poor in reverse. If every work would get payed fair, nobody could ever become rich. Also rich people have the power to do their own society decisions ... decisions the society should make themself.

And Steam has made my life a little bit worse introducing DRM as a standardized model and taking away the control where I can install my games on my system (my management is different to Valves forced install folder, it also makes backups unnecessary hard to exclude stupid cache files etc). The platform also became some kind of single point of failure. You losing access to your account, you also losing all your games. Good luck getting it back when Steam may enshittificates one day (GabeN does not live forever, other people have to take over at some point).

Game developers also have to give 30% of the income to Valve. 30% for just delivering a download platform. They could take half of it and would become rich. Many indie studios have a hard time just to survive, but 30% makes it much harder. Valve also has very little employees for a company of this size - every employee could be a multi-millionaire so much money Valve gets.

I kinda understand why people are not too upset against him. A lot of stuff the company does is actually good and somehow an exception to the rest of capitalists. But it is definitely not as positive as you and many others want to make him look like. He is still a capitalist with all its cons per default and decisions as supporting Linux are made to save his wealth (because Microsoft could lock him out over time).

And yes, if I would become rich, it would be totally fine to hate me for that, because I would have made others poor in return and would use the power to do society decision, society should do in first place, not me. I am saying this as someone who would even make more progressive decisions as creating open hardware and free software for all products and not just open CAD files for the controller. Not making everything open source also means SteamOS is probably required to build in age verification stuff (unlike other Linux distros).

The truth is, it is not black or white. Being rich itself is an issue, but he also could just abuse the power and creating dirt campaigns on political level and do much worse anti-consumer stuff (DRM or Valves KLAC is anti-consumer, but family share is pro-consumer etc).