Tim Sweeney supports a lawsuit against Valve?!?!

I'm shocked.

If you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it. You got your own store, Timmy.

This is about micro-transactions specifically. Tim Fortnite is arguing that games sold on Steam should be able to offer in-game purchases with payment options outside of Steam.

It’s very similar to Epic Games v. Apple, where Apple had required in-app purchases for iOS apps, notably Fortnite, to be handled through their app-store so they get a cut.

One big difference that I see here: On PC, a developer isn’t required to use Steam to distribute software. Players often prefer Steam because Valve has made Steam a great option and has lots of good-will with players. Still, Steam does dominate a massive portion of the PC market.

And a 30% cut is high. Especially for smaller games with less financial resources. As a developer, that’s a trade-off you’d have to choose. I think it’d be best to offer the game on multiple platforms.

For Steam-bought games, I think having an option to pay off-platform would be fair, but I think the option needs to remain available through Steam too. For many games, I don’t want to give my payment details to yet another developer, company or third-party.

Well Timmy that should make it pretty easy to make a platform that both users and content producers like more. If you actually try to compete you might accomplish something.

That's a funny way of asking people to uninstall Epic's game launcher & boycott their games.

Tim's opinion is clearly unbiased.

Tim, something, something about preventing games from being released on other storefronts...

Oh this is the same guy who said it was censorship when people said that maybe Grok shouldn't create pictures of children in bikinis?

Right, because managing, securing, updating, and operating steam is all black magic that costs valve nothing.

Listen, they need that revenue for their R&D for the steam deck 2 and steam machines and shit. Fuck off ya hoser, eh?

TIL that Tim Fortnite does not consider Sony or Nintendo to be 'major stores'.

TIL that the video game industry has never had nor currently has titles that are priced exclusively on certain platforms.

(Where 'its only available for purchase on one platform' is an effective price of infinity on other platforms)

Just... from the article:

"Steam’s rules do explicitly prohibit games from steering players to competing purchase methods, forcing everyone to pay 30% to Valve," he [Sweeney] recently tweeted. "Apple and Google did the same until the court explicitly found this practice to be unlawful. Now they don't!"

It's not clear exactly what rule Sweeney's referring to here, but Steam's own guidelines state that "it's OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time." Though Valve would also prefer that developers "don't give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam key purchasers."

It's almost like this guy is malding, crashing out even, and has just... departed from the realm of even trying to make sense.

What is happening here is that Tim is losing his mind because Unreal Engine 5 only runs on GPUs (mostly from Nvidia) that cost as much as an entire PC did 2 or 3 years ago, and so many AAA studios that used UE 5 to make a pretty but hollow and buggy game are now collapsing or seeing a dramatic consumer pullback.

See how this is all connected, and these idiots did this to themselves?

Nvidia decides that Real Time Ray Tracing is the new paradigm for gaming graphics, and Unreal is the primary way people will experience this, by having all the lighting be done 'auto-magically' by UE 5, from the perspective of game devs.

Fastforward 5 or so years, half of everything computer hardware is too expensive now, hugely funded AAA games are routinely failing and causing financial disasters for publishers, Unreal Engine 5 is a hugely stigmatized joke because its not any kind of optimized for hardware people actually have, and outside of AAA games, is notorious for low quality UE asset store flips and actual scam games...

...this paradigm doesn't work.

Compare that to Valve pretty close to singlehandedly developing its own VR hardware, and showcase AAA tier game for it... and well hey shucks, yeah, its too expensive for wide adoption, but that didn't ruin their entire business's financials.

They just actually properly accounted for the costs of trying that paradigm shift, and are today still iterating on and improving it, ala the upcoming SteamFrame and new software layer for translating ARM to x86 calls.

Timmy, if even charging a lower fee, devs prefer steam over your shithole, I'm gonna go ahead and say that maybe there is a reason: your store sucks. Big time.

I don't know much about in-game purchases, but as long as i can remember, it was possible to register cd keys from other stores or even the keys from hard copys of games. To me this looks like a totally different thing than what was going on with ios and android. Also a little wild for epic to complain about locking out competition when i am still waiting to purchase Allan wake 2 on any other store than epic....

Of course he does 🙃

Says who, the guy who is all-in on AI and is probably a TESCREAL-believing dipshit?

Steam is different from the Google or Apple stores, because they aren't the gatekeeper of a platform.

But yeah maybe 30% is a bit high for games that don't use any of the steam features, just the payment processing, review section and download servers.

that seems like an issue that the makers of games can decide. they are not under any gun to choose steam. if the devs don’t see value in steam then they can go elsewhere. for me as a buyer it’s steam, or it’s the developers own website. i will not buy from another store front

The price cut is the only thing Tim cares about.

Funny thing is I don't support Valve or Tim Sweeney. While by American standards, Valve are angels, that is a very low standard. Sweeney is your stereotypical American corporate degenerate:

But honestly Valve is no better. Europe (and other countries/regions) should either force Valve to have to de facto white label their store for Europe (where they are a junior partner and hold minimal control) or kick them out. And I am not saying there can't be collaboration on common goals; e.g. investing into Linux support and open platforms, but you can't have Americans in charge of major platforms. That ship has sailed.

There are many massive issues with Valve:

• They made a huge contribution to the rise of lootbox gambling schemes
• They initially attempted a fraudulent scheme on local consumer laws on refunds
• For most of Steam's life their TOS had mandatory arbitration requirements which is a local corruption scheme that is not too different from Soviet kangaroo courts. In their defence they did add that "as far as your country’s laws permit".

I will admit that the overall logic of the case doesn't make sense.

I miss old Epic games from 20 years ago. This greedy prick is an aggressive blight on PC gaming. Maybe he'll die soon.

Hilarious. Didn’t Epic just introduce microtransactions for user-created content in Fortnite with intention of taking 63% fee on that? All the while, trying to turn the said Fortnite in Roblox-like major store for games?