A giant took a jab against another giant, that is the headline.
Tim Sweeney taking a swing at Gabe Newell over the Steam Deck price increase is a near-perfect example of a CEO picking a fight with someone on another level. After Valve raised Steam Deck prices by hundreds of dollars this week, Sweeney posted a sarcastic jab about "severe disruptions in the component parts supply chain for megayachts," a pointed dig at Newell's taste for enormous boats, the largest being the roughly $500 million Leviathan with its submarine garage, and a basketball court. The problem is that Sweeney runs Epic Games, and the internet took about an hour to remind everyone what Epic did a few months ago.
The issue is the layoffs. When did Valve fired employees? People asked.
The answer is never, while Epic Games cut around 1,000 staff earlier this year, people Sweeney himself had previously described as so talented that any other company would be lucky to have them. That contrast is the whole story. Newell flaunting a half-billion-dollar yacht while raising hardware prices is not a great look, but it's a bad look about how one rich man spends money he's already made. Sweeney's bad look is about cutting a thousand jobs at a company widely seen as one of the most successful in modern gaming. Yeah of course, these things happen is their motto. The reality is Steam is doing much better with fewer heads.
The Layoff Detail That Makes It Worse
Roughly half of the laid-off staff ended up assembling themselves onto a public "Awesome People List," a self-organized directory built so game-industry recruiters could find them and reach out. Which is hard under the current job market. The workers Sweeney once praised as elite talent had to crowdsource their own job hunt after he let them go, and some of them described the cuts as blindsiding, telling interviewers they had only the faintest hint the company's revenue wasn't doing well. Epic still hasn't fully explained the financial trouble it cited, pointing vaguely to declining Fortnite engagement and the enormous cost of its legal war against Apple and Google. Which in the end they won.
Valve's Model Is the Quiet Point Underneath
Anyway, lets go back to the jab at hand. The reason Sweeney's attack rebounded so cleanly is structural. Valve is famously lean and absurdly profitable, reportedly generating something in the neighborhood of $50 million per employee, which is exactly the kind of efficiency that lets it avoid the boom-and-bust hiring cycles that produce mass layoffs. The genuinely defensible criticism buried in all this is that the AI-driven RAM shortage hit Valve harder than its rivals precisely because it doesn't operate at the manufacturing scale of a Sony or a Microsoft, so it had less room to absorb the component cost spike. Which Sweeeney knows, but instead he reached for the yacht, picked a fight about how the other guy spends his fortune, and reminded everyone that his own company's recent headline wasn't a luxury purchase but a thousand pink slips.
Honestly against Gabe's reputation, Sweeney does not have a chance.
Read
Source Editing
Visual Editing
Related news
