Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney spent the weekend doubling down on his severe criticism of Valve, calling Steam’s AI content disclosure a “political act.”
The controversial majority owner of Epic is all in on AI, having recently triggered a “huge pivot” of the company to retool it for “maximum AI acceleration,” Sweeney said. Epic is a long-standing rival of Gabe Newell’s Valve, with the Epic Games Store struggling to make a dent in Steam’s dominance over the PC gaming market even as it offers developers more financially beneficial terms.
Sweeney is particularly upset with Steam’s AI content disclosure policy, which requires developers to disclose the use of AI in “creating content that ships with your game, and is consumed by players.” This includes content such as artwork, sound, narrative, and localization. It does not include “efficiency gains” through the use of AI tools.
On Friday, Sweeney hit out at Valve’s policy, saying “forcing developers to write a political statement to be used against them by the hate mob they’re helping organize is abhorrent.” This statement sparked a backlash online, with a number of people — developers included — confused by the suggestion that an AI disclosure was political in any way, and insisting that Valve was only providing clarity its customers wanted.
“Customers have a right to know what they’re buying,” David Goldfarb, founder of Metal Hellsinger developer The Outsiders and former Battlefield developer, replied. “They still bought Arc Raiders, they will definitely buy games they want to buy, AI use or no. Does it disadvantage small teams who need to leverage AI to survive? Jury’s out. Calling it a hate mob is far-fetched.”
Undeterred, Sweeney issued a number of social media posts defending his position, saying AI disclosures are “just as partisan as mandatory political essays or forcing developers to list their voting history to drive cancel campaigns and public struggle sessions.”
When one person challenged Sweeney on this, accusing him of being “anti-consumer” for forcing something consumers don’t like on them, the Fortnite boss compared Steam’s AI disclosures to Valve forcing developers to list their political affiliations.
“Say there is a large contingent of gamers that don’t like democrats or, equivalently, republicans. Should Valve force developers to list their political affiliation? Is that pro-consumer? Do you think that policy would have a positive effect on gaming?” he said. As you can imagine, this statement was ridiculed in the replies, with one person saying “equating AI to how a person votes is pure cope gymnastics.”
Again, undeterred, Sweeney claimed that Valve is hitting developer revenue by “undermining their business with these AI hate campaigns,” insisting on “a real economic cost to Valve’s foray into forced political disclosures.”
He continued: “a substantial number of users would love to have mandatory political opinion disclosures for developers, with several saying they take it upon themselves to surface this info in reviews since it’s not disclosed on product pages.
“The primary use of both categories of disclosures is to drive cancel campaigns against games and deprive them of revenue and livelihood unless they get onboard with the movement’s political goals. Yes, blocking free choice to adopt productive technology is a political act.”
Earlier this month, Epic revealed a newly refreshed version of the Epic Games Launcher, its Steam-like platform that provides access to the Epic Games Store, your games library, social features, and a developer’s hub. And, in keeping with the company’s push for AI-assisted development, this new version of the launcher was created using generative artificial intelligence. “Programming is hard,” wrote Epic in a new blog post. “So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher that’s way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look.”
Epic then launched an Unreal Engine vibe coding contest with an image of a six-fingered hand, presumably as a joke about poor quality AI images.
Vibe your way to 50K.
The 2026 Epic AI MegaJam begins Nov 12: https://t.co/aAXEqj7zmE https://t.co/h3Kgs9Y5zH
— Unreal Engine (@UnrealEngine) October 22, 2026
Through it all, Valve has done what it does best: remain quiet. The long-running joke that Gabe Newell simply sits back and waits for his competitors to make mistakes seems particularly relevant here, as Tim Sweeney continues to tweet his outrage over Valve and Steam. Meanwhile, earlier this month Steam broke its all-time record for concurrent users yet again, with 43.5 million people logged in at the same time.
Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images