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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/03/you-a-holes-court-docs-reveal-epic-ceos-anger-at-steams-30-fees/ [arstechnica.com]

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has long [twitter.com] been an outspoken opponent [arstechnica.com] of what he sees as Valve's unreasonable platform fees for listing games on Steam, which start at 30 percent of the total sale price. Now, though, new emails from before the launch of the competing Epic Games Store [arstechnica.com] in 2018 show just how angry Sweeney was with the "assholes" at companies like Valve and Apple for squeezing "the little guy" with what he saw as inflated fees.

The emails, which came out this week as part of Wolfire's price-fixing case against Valve [arstechnica.com] (as noticed by the GameDiscoverCo newsletter [gamediscover.co]), confront Valve managers directly for platform fees Sweeney says are "no longer justifiable."
[...]
The first mostly unredacted email chain from the court documents, from August 2017 [arstechnica.net], starts with Valve co-founder Gabe Newell asking Sweeney if there is "anything we [are] doing to annoy you?" That query was likely prompted by Sweeney's public tweets [twitter.com] at the time questioning "why Steam is still taking 30% of gross [when] MasterCard and Visa charge 2-5% per transaction, and CDN bandwidth is around $0.002/GB." Later in the same thread [twitter.com], he laments that "the internet was supposed to obsolete the rent-seeking software distribution middlemen, but here's Facebook, Google, Apple, Valve, etc."
[...]
The second email chain revealed in the lawsuit [arstechnica.net] started in November 2018, with Sweeney offering Valve a heads-up on the impending launch of the Epic Games Store that would come just weeks later. While that move was focused on PC and Mac games, Sweeney quickly pivots to a discussion of Apple's total control over iOS, the subject at the time of a lawsuit whose technicalities were being considered by the Supreme Court [arstechnica.com].
[...]
In a follow-up email on December 3, just days before the Epic Games Store launch, Sweeney took Valve to task more directly for its policy of offering lower platform fees for the largest developers on Steam [arstechnica.com].
[...]
After being forwarded the message by Valve's Erik Johnson, Valve COO Scott Lynch simply offered up a sardonic "You mad bro?"

GameDiscoverCo provides a good summary [gamediscover.co] of other legal tidbits offered in the (often heavily redacted) documents published in the case file this week. Wolfire is now seeking a class-action designation in the suit with arguments that largely rehash those that we covered [arstechnica.com] when the case was originally filed in 2021 [arstechnica.com] (and revived in 2022 [arstechnica.com]). While Epic Games isn't directly involved in those legal arguments, it seems Sweeney's long-standing position against Valve's monopoly might continue to factor into the case anyway.

Previously on SoylentNews:
Judge Brings Dismissed Steam Antitrust Lawsuit Back From the Dead [soylentnews.org] - 20220513

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