Valve Exec Asks Tim Sweeney "You Mad Bro?" After Angry Email

15.03.2024 - 03:11 / thegamer.com / Gabe Newell / Tim Sweeney

Valve is currently in the middle of an ongoing antitrust lawsuit against small indie developer Wolfire, which was originally filed way back in 2021 due to Steam's control over game prices and attempts to such out rivals. Despite Valve's best efforts to have the lawsuit dismissed, it actually went ahead in 2022, and the whole situation is now getting spicy as internal documents and previously private email exchanges are making their way to the public eye.

One of these exchanges has drawn a lot more attention than others though, and involves Valve CEO Gabe Newell and COO Scott Lynch, who were contacted by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney way back in 2017. First spotted by Simon Carless for the GameDiscoverCo newsletter (thanks PCGamer), Sweeney contacted Valve specifically regarding the 30 percent commission that Steam takes from sales, something that Sweeney has fought against for years.

In this email exchange, Sweeney argues that while Valve could make "a good case" for its high commission in the early days, he implied that it should be lowered due to the reduction of operating costs over the years. He also argued that Valve is making more profit from games than their own developers, once server costs and marketing are also taken into account.

"The system takes 75% and that leaves 25% for actually creating the game, worse than the retail distribution economics of the 1990s."

We don't know what Valve's response was, as it wasn't included in this email exchange, but it shows that Sweeney has been annoyed about the platform's commission rates for at least seven years. It also explains why Sweeney was so ticked off in a follow-up email in 2018 to the same group, after Valve announced that its commission would be lowered to 20 percent for the most successful games on the platform.

Sweeney immediately takes a swing at everyone in the email by calling them all a rather rude name, calling out Valve's top brass for giving the already powerful developers and publishers "special terms", while the "little people" are stuck with high commission rates. He goes on to ask Valve why it hasn't given every developer a better deal and that it could have helped in the case against the monopoly that Apple enjoys.

"Right now, you a**holes are telling the world that the strong and powerful get special terms, while 30% is for the little people."

Clearly, Sweeney's words didn't really get through to Newell or Lynch, the latter of whom shared the email with Newell and project manager Erik Johnson a day later with the sentence "You mad bro?", which is quite possibly the least professional thing you could do in that scenario. Yes, he was probably quite mad at you.

To be fair to Valve, Sweeney probably shouldn't have come swinging at