'No Amount of Competition Will Ever Unseat Steam' – Former Epic Games Engineer Rails Against Valve

Epic's rivalry with Valve isn't anything new, but while it's usually CEO Tim Sweeney taking shots at Valve, an ex-engineer posted a long list of problems Steam has caused in the industry.

Just last week, after posting about Valve's 30% cut that it takes off the top of game sales, ex-Epic Engineer Kiaran Ritchie wrote a long Twitter post detailing his critiques of the biggest PC games marketplace. And, really, it seems like he's throwing up his hands and accepting Valve's dominion over the ecosystem while blaming Steam users.

Ritchie says that, "even if an alternative were objectively better, by whatever metric you care about, it would still be of no interest to Steam users. They would in fact find it to be a problem and a threat to their investment." Specifically, he claims Steam users are hostile to other stores even existing, by saying, "Competition in this space is not only uninteresting to most Steam users, it's actively denigrated! The CONSEQUENCE of this situation, is that 30% of all gross revenue is siphoned out of the PC games industry into a black hole."

Epic Games has tried its hands at unseating Steam again recently, after Tim Sweeney bragged on Twitter about vibe coding a new version of the Epic Games Store that launches faster than Steam. But, while launching quickly and letting people access their library without waiting minutes is an improvement, even Ritchie doesn't feel like it'll make much of a difference.

Elsewhere in the post, Ritchie says, "The Steam client and infrastructure is somewhere between 'not that hard' and 'trivial.' It's a download service attached to a payment processor with a smattering of services on the side. Cloud providers handle all the infrastructure these days." But even if someone makes a 'better' client, he says, "Steam users love Steam and having their whole library in one place. It works. It's dependable. It has sales, and cards, and achievements, oh my!"

This all comes on top of Epic's years-long battle to lower the amount of cash marketplaces take from digital sales. Epic hasn't only fought Valve on this; the company has also taken on Apple and Google in its quest to get Fortnite on mobile devices – and then had to pay Apple $6 million, but won against Google.

But with Valve, Epic's problem seems to be that most gamers prefer Steam outright. After all, there are dozens of game stores on PC where people can buy games, but as Ritchie points out, Steam users are happy just sticking with Valve's store. And no matter what Epic does, that probably isn't going to change.