Valve / Oceanco
Valve CEO Gabe Newell got some unexpected, deeply sarcastic support this week after the Steam Deck OLED hit $949.
The price hike, announced May 27, pushed the 1TB model up $300 from its previous $649 MSRP, following months of supply warnings from Valve about global RAM and storage shortages. Newell has stayed characteristically silent on the whole thing, but not everyone did.
Tim Sweeney mocks Gabe Newell’s megayacht habit after Steam Deck OLED price hike
On May 28, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney posted what read as a defense of Valve on X, and it had all the warmth of a knife.
“Everyone’s being too harsh here,” he wrote. “There has been a significant rise in the cost of components that Steam customer spending ultimately funds, and economic trends have created severe disruptions in the component parts supply chain for megayachts.”
Everyone’s being too harsh here. There has been a significant rise in the cost of components that Steam customer spending ultimately funds, and economic trends have created severe disruptions in the component parts supply chain for megayachts. pic.twitter.com/w8iHVdSatK
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) May 28, 2026
The megayacht reference wasn’t a coincidence, as Newell is famously fond of nautical excess, and Sweeney’s beef with Valve runs deep.
Emails that surfaced in a 2018 lawsuit had Sweeney calling the company “*ssholes” over Steam’s revenue split with developers, and the Epic Games Store has lived in Steam’s shadow ever since. Newell, for his part, has largely stayed above the fray, which is either admirable restraint or very good PR, depending on how you look at it.
Sweeney is not exactly arriving here from the moral high ground. In March 2026, Epic laid off over 1,000 employees after Sweeney confirmed that declining Fortnite engagement had left the company “spending significantly more than we’re making.” The layoffs followed a V-Bucks price hike of up to 25%. Pointing fingers at another CEO’s hardware pricing, from that particular position, struck a lot of people as rich.
Valve, for its part, has attributed the Steam Deck price increases to supply constraints affecting memory and storage components, which the company flagged months in advance.
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For more context on the price increase, check out Valve’s full Steam Deck OLED restock announcement. The March layoffs and what led to them are covered in Dexerto’s Epic Games lays off over 1,000 staff as Fortnite revenue drops.
