Epic's boss reckons Steam's "social walled garden" has held gaming back for years. This from the company that pulled Rocket League and Fall Guys off Steam and still can't get people to stick around its own store.
Tim Sweeney posted on X that "Valve has held gaming back for years" by locking PC games into Steamworks' "social walled garden".
A Community Note pushed back, and Sweeney reportedly called it "fake". Valve hasn't responded.
Steam games can and do have crossplay. Rocket League had it on Steam until Epic bought it and pulled it from sale there.
Epic's own 2025 numbers: US$1.16B spent (+6%), monthly users down 1%, playtime down 14%, and free Epic games boost Steam player counts by 40%.
Sweeney has a fair point on Steam's 30% cut. Claiming Valve held gaming back isn't that point.
Tim Sweeney has had another crack at Valve, and this one is a belter. The Epic Games boss posted on X this week that “Valve has held gaming back for years” by locking PC games into what he called Steamworks’ “social walled garden”. This from the man whose store gives away a hundred free games a year and still can’t get people to stay.
Let’s call it what it is. Epic has spent seven years and a mountain of Fortnite money trying to crack PC gaming’s biggest store, and it hasn’t worked. So now the problem is Valve. Of course it is.
Nothing about Steam stops a developer from adding crossplay. Heaps of Steam games already let you play with mates on Xbox, PlayStation and Switch. Developers can roll their own friends and party systems, or plug in a third-party one, and the one Epic most wants them to use is its own: Epic Online Services, a free cross-platform toolkit Epic hands out precisely so games on any store can talk to each other. So Sweeney’s complaint about Steam is also, conveniently, an ad for an Epic product.
Want the best example? Rocket League. In January 2019, Steam players were in full crossplay with Xbox, PlayStation and Switch. Steamworks didn’t stop a thing. Then Epic bought Psyonix, made Rocket League free-to-play in 2020, and pulled it from sale on Steam. It did the same with Fall Guys in 2022. So when Sweeney talks about walled gardens, he’s speaking from experience. He builds them.
And let’s not forget how the Epic Games Store got started: by buying up timed exclusives. Metro Exodus vanished from Steam pre-orders a few weeks before launch. Borderlands 3 was locked to Epic on PC for six months. Nothing says “we’re the open, player-friendly option” like paying publishers to make sure you can’t buy their game where you want to.
Epic’s own 2025 Year in Review doesn’t exactly scream “Valve is the problem”. Players spent US$1.16 billion on the store, up 6 per cent. Average monthly users slipped 1 per cent to 67 million, and total hours played dropped 14 per cent. Epic gave away 100 games, claimed 662 million times, and its own report says games got a 40 per cent bump in players on Steam while they were free on Epic.
Read that again. Epic’s free games are good marketing for Steam. People grab the freebie, try it, and go and play it with their mates on Valve’s platform. Steam, meanwhile, hit a record 43.5 million people online at the same time on 11 October, according to SteamDB. Nobody is being forced to use Steam. They just prefer it.
Timing is everything, and Sweeney’s is rough. Two weeks before this post, Epic released a preview of its rebuilt launcher and openly said it was “vibe coded” with AI because “programming is hard”. It landed after Epic’s layoffs earlier this year, and Epic itself warned it may be buggy. This is a store that took nearly two years to add a shopping cart and still doesn’t have proper written user reviews. Epic paid for testing that it says shows the new launcher opens faster than Steam, and fair enough. But fast doesn’t help much when nobody wants to open it.
Then there’s Linux. Valve built Proton and the Steam Deck and turned Linux into a legit gaming platform almost by itself. Epic only got its launcher onto Linux, in preview, this month, and Fortnite still isn’t officially playable on the Steam Deck. Some “holding gaming back” that is.
There is a real argument buried in here, and Sweeney keeps burying it. Valve’s 30 per cent cut is steep, and most developers would love it lower. Epic genuinely does better: devs keep everything on their first million US dollars a year, then Epic takes 12 per cent. Unreal Engine is one of the best things that ever happened to game development, and Sweeney has earned his place in gaming history.
But that isn’t what he posted. He didn’t say “30 per cent is too much”. He said Valve held gaming back, and that’s just not true.
Tim, mate. Steam isn’t winning because it trapped anyone. It’s winning because it’s been the best place to buy and play PC games for 20 years: reviews, workshop, refunds, Proton, the Deck, and a friends list nearly everyone is already on. You can’t buy loyalty with free games and exclusives, and you definitely can’t vibe code it.
If Epic wants people to switch, the answer is simple: build a better store. Until then, every “Valve is holding gaming back” post just reads as the bloke who lost the race complaining about the track. And blaming Steam for walled gardens, after pulling Rocket League and Fall Guys off it, takes real cheek.
Team Steam or Team Epic? Come and fight about it in the comments or in the GetRekt Discord. We’ll be the ones loading in from Steam.
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