Valve COO on Epic's Tim Sweeney "you mad bro?" when launching the Epic Store

In the ongoing saga of the Wolfire versus Valve lawsuit, which is continuing, we've been able to see a funny little look behind the curtain and Tim Sweeney was not happy with Valve.

Thanks to the work from Simon Carless of GameDiscoverCo which has a great round-up of what's going on (definitely worth a read for some backstory here), we've managed to see some emails between Epic's Tim Sweeney to Valve's Gabe Newell and Scott Lynch.

Back in 2017 an email from Newell to Sweeney asked "Anything we doing to annoy you? We’re guessing Sean Jenkins public dumbness might be part of it.", which is in reference to a leaked post where a Valve's Jenkins talked about restricting Steam keys. Sweeney replied to mention they've "never heard of Sean Jenkins" and then goes off talking about the 30% platform fee Valve charges and how it's "no longer justifiable" but there was a "good case for them in the early days" but due to scale costs "have been driven down".

Sweeney's point here is that Valve make a lot of money from that 30% cut and goes on to say "If you subtract out the top 25 games on Steam, I bet Valve made more profit from most of the next 1000 than the developer themselves made" and complains that when you add together Valve's cut, marketing and so on that the cut for developers is small.

After that we don't see anything until November 2018 in the documents where Sweeney emailed Newell again and also Valve's Erik Johnson, notifying Valve about the plans to announce the Epic Games Store with their lower cut of sales from developers. Sweeney also mentions here about their issues with Apple, and how Sweeney wants Apple to open up, and hopes that Valve would make a "timely move" to change their rates taken from developers. Sweeney also notes the opposite, hoping Valve don't have any "unannounced revenue-sharing changes that favored big publishers over indies" as it would basically tell the likes of Apple that they "can keep their closed platforms and just pay off big publishers to stay silent".

It was only a few days later (quite cheekily then), that Valve suddenly publicly announced their plan to reduce their take for the top-selling Steam games. Naturally, this annoyed Sweeney rather a lot, as the next email confirmed the Epic Games Store announcement was going live the next day and Sweeney says to Valve "Right now, you assholes are telling the world that the strong and powerful get special terms, while 30% is for the little people. We're all in for a prolonged battle if Apple tries to keep their monopoly and 30% by cutting backroom deals with big publishers to keep them quiet. Why not give ALL developers a better deal? What better way is there to convince Apple quickly that their model is now totally untenable?".

The only reply to this we can see was from Valve COO (Chief Operating Officer) Scott Lynch sent internally at Valve to Johnson and Newell that simply says "You mad bro?".

You can only imagine how truly mad Sweeney would be if they saw that with Valve just basically laughing it off completely. Well, Sweeney can see it now.

As we know from Valve when they released their 2023 yearly report, they're continuing to print money and repeatedly break user records and so the Epic Games Store hasn't seemingly made much of a dent at all. While Epic Games continue to try to pull developers over to their store with various exclusivity deals and constant weekly free games.

Update note: Clarified the "You mad bro?" email was internal at Valve, not to Sweeney directly.