6mo ago

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says tech leaders are 'pretending to be Republicans' to gain favor with Trump, skirt antitrust laws, and ultimately 'rip off consumers and crush competitors'

www.pcgamer.com

PC Gaming @lemmy.ca

alessandro @lemmy.ca

6mo ago

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says tech leaders are 'pretending to be Republicans' [also Dem] to gain favor with Trump, skirt antitrust laws, and ultimately 'rip off consumers and crush competitors'

www.pcgamer.com /gaming-industry/epic-ceo-tim-sweeney-says-tech-leaders-are-pretending-to-be-republicans-to-gain-favor-with-trump-skirt-antitrust-laws-and-ultimately-rip-off-consumers-and-crush-competitors/

82 comments

Ffs trump and his lackeys making even Sweeney look good
- Yeah, I don’t recall ever reading a Tim Sweeney quote and thinking, “that sounds about right.”
  
  Likewise, I now feel like I need to scrub clean my soul.
  
  Eh he once gave me an all you can drink pass at the after party for a gaming convention in Melbourne.
  So the quote is ‘get whatever you want, drinks are on me tonight’.
  Its still a complete mystery how I made it back to my hotel with no map, no local knowledge and on foot.
  
  I don't think he's able to afford to kiss the ring, otherwise he would.
- I'm just sitting here fingers crossed that Gabe doesn't "donate" to the orange dipshit....
  
  Won't happen.
- He's also swimming in Chinese money, so this might not be a purely altruistic statement.
- trump has opened the portal to Bizzaro World
For the first time in my life I'm actually agreeing with Tim Sweeney. I hate the guy but at least he has the balls to say it like it is. The rest of them are just cowards.
- I'm sorry but if someone is pretending to be a Republican
  to gain favor with Trump, skirt antitrust laws, and ultimately 'rip off consumers and crush competitors'
  doesn't that just make them… a Republican?
  
  Right? I feel like almost every 'Republican' is just an opportunist that likes to cherry pick the things Republicans supposedly stand for these days. I think any people out there who can say that they wholeheartedly agree with every talking point on the Republican agenda (the ones that don't shift constantly) then they are horrible, horrible, terrible soulless excuses for human beings.
  
  no-you-spiderman.jpg
  
  In case you hadn't noticed, the Democrats have been just as much into exactly the same thing by actively pushing deregulation and the rest of the Neoliberal mantra as the Republicans.
  Those parties differ in the Moral and Freedom planes but Economically they're very much the same (except right before an election when the Democrats will do a bit of loud but toothless pro-consumer announcements of intentions on things they had 4 years to fix but chose not to).
  If you have any doubts, just go check who overthrew the Glass-Steagal act, which ended up causing of the 2008 Crash and who was the President during that time who chose to unconditionally rescue some of the nastiest investment banks around - you'll find they're both Democrats.
- Saammee. He's an endless stream of bad takes, but I find myself in agreement with this
- heartbreaking: worst person you know made a great point
If you have to pretend to be bad to get your own way, maybe you are in fact bad after all?
- They're not pretending to be bad, they're pretending to care about what the Republicans care about. They're very openly bad people
They ain't pretending.
- Yeah, they may retain a different self-image, but their actions & goals are in line with Republican ideology.
That's rich coming from Tim Sweeney, but hey for once he accidently spoke the truth
- The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point
- You know what they say about broken clocks.
Well Tim you went from a -10 in my books to a -8 with this. Keep it up.
God damnit sweeny. You have had a visit from the ghost of Christmas past or something?
Don’t make me agree with you.
- Broken clocks
Doesn't that just make them republicans?
Thanks Capt. Obvious.
- Some people need it mister
So basically the morality of an opportunistic infection
- So.... Republican.
  
  The Democratic Party too is a big tent
If you want those things then you are a republican, there's no pretending.
- If the democrats would have given them those, they'd have continued their "woke capitalism" arc...
Yeah, I believe the word you’re looking for is capitalism. Unbridled late stage capitalism.
I'm not used to this kind of honesty from CEOs. This is epic
I've done nothing but trash talk this man, but I have to take this opportunity to praise and give him the respect he deserves for calling this out.
Trump/MAGA is a big corrupt scam. After election, CNBC had guests that you should go all in on smaller companies, because "deregulation will be magic for them". Truth is, only those buying Trump's favour will be granted exemptions from blanket tariffs, and will receive H1B worker allotments. Rest of economy will be destroyed. Tesla specifically gain gain significantly by destroying US/Canada big 3 auto production, and fast tracking FSD approval/deregulation. FB/Google will give enough to ensure tiktok ban.
even a broken clock...
If you're at a table with nine Nazis and you don't leave, then the table has ten Nazis at it. History won't care why you were at the table, just that you were there.
- I wanted to counter with a "what if I am there to kill the other nine Nazis?" but after reading the Wikipedia page for Assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler it seems there's still a >90% chance I would happen to, in fact, be a Nazi.
  That page is pretty wild; 2 that stood out to me were the following:
  In a last-ditch attempt, Fabian von Schlabrendorff gave a time bomb camouflaged as a package of two liqueur bottles to an officer in Hitler's entourage, as a supposed gift to a friend in Germany. The bomb was supposed to explode on the return flight over Poland. The package was placed in the hold of the aircraft, where it iced up, causing the detonator to fail. Realizing the failure, Schlabrendorff immediately flew to Germany and recovered the package before it was discovered.
  As an expert, Gersdorff was to guide Hitler on a tour of the exhibition. Moments after Hitler entered the museum, Gersdorff set off two ten-minute delayed fuses on explosive devices hidden in his coat pockets. His plan was to throw himself around Hitler in a death embrace. A detailed plan for a coup d'état had been worked out and was ready to go but, contrary to expectations, Hitler raced through the museum in less than ten minutes. After Hitler had left the building, Gersdorff was able to defuse the devices in a public bathroom "at the last second". After the attempt, he was transferred back to the Eastern Front, where he managed to evade suspicion.
  Imagine the sheer levels of stress these two people went through, starting at the precise moment of realizing their attempt wouldn't work.
  
  42 known plots?! That's way more than I suspected.
  And yeah, those must've been some massive amounts of stress!
I wouldn't call it pretending but... Yeah, no shit.
- Guys it was just a prank. I’m not really fascist, I was just pretending. I just gave money to the fascists as a joke, isn’t that funny?
Epic got so much bullshit for - reads annotation - making platform exclusives that were only temporary and helped developers with stable financing with better terms.
- After pulling those games off other stores, some of which refused to refund pre orders
- Epic halted development of UT4 for Fortnite. They are dead to me.
  
  Blame market demand. Quake was also halted. UT4 was halted 3 years before Fortnite was out. Fortnite wasn't even supposed to be a battle royale, it just coincided with the popularity of one. The original game mode Save the World that it implemented wouldn't even had had any crossover with the fps multiplayer deathmatch shooter genre. Even games with novel mechanics like Titanfall have struggled and failed to survive in it. I think the generation that never got into Minecraft and think of it as just as a joke kiddie game is still resentful of the types of games it encouraged and continues to do so.
- They didn’t even make things exclusive
  There were no clauses saying you couldn’t release on mac/linux/ps/xbox/switch
  They just only carry games for the Windows platform. They did buy EAC and make a Linux version as well as gave all devs the ability to implement crossplay regardless of engine
  
  Beyond a bit of annoyance about Borderlands 3 being temporarily exclusive, I think the only thing I minded about Epic Games Store was a lack of user reviews, but there's the metacritic embed now so I'm not sure was the issue should be.
- G*mers are too Stockholmed by Valve's monopoly.
  Introduction the Epic store to gamers was like introducing vegetables to meth addicts
  
  GOG gave them an opportunity to stand behind actual principles, they choose gifs presented as trading cards and legalized gambling in the form of the Counter Strike market. The one thing Valve does good is not acting like a complete asshole like most people in the publisher sector (EA, Ubisoft, etc.) but they've certainly spear-led some horrible consumer practices under an effective monopoly. While EGS isn't anything revolutionary and are basically better terms of those horrible consumer practices, they can't even tolerate competition in that regard. The critics can call me out when I can play Half Life 2 and Portal on the Epic Game Store. Valve didn't even consent to having accounts available as inheritance even though at that point anyone who's not a greedy asshole trying to squeeze out as much money as possible as quickly as possible would have realized that that would sell them more games in the long term.
One of the only CEOs speaking truth.
Eh? I think they're trying to prevent Musk from becoming an AI god.
- More like some kind of sad joke/curse god that thinks its all knowing but really sources all its knowledge from reddit meme threads.
  
  The "All-Knowing" Know-It-All, less rare than you'd think.
  
  While it may sound like I was making a joke, I'm actually not. I didn't mean to track Elon's movements prior to when he latched onto Trump like a tick, but I accidentally did. One of the most notable correspondences he had before buddying up with Donnie boy was Geoffrey Hinton (who wanted nothing to do with him). He also was also investigating a smaller AI company (there's more of a story there, but I am not at liberty to say). I believe his motivation for chumming up with Trump and other Authoritarians is because they are so damn easy to buy off. I believe he trying to get governments to allow him to do what he likes while restricting the other tech companies. He was very excited about the California laws that got shot down, and I believe that was because he knew his competition would do more than him to follow them while he got the upper hand breaking rules to gain power through super intelligence. It won't work indefinitely, but it will raise hell while he has control and afterwards (for other reasons).
Wild how many men are legit actually pro rape as a policy position (August COUGH)
If only they can focus on making good games instead
- Emphasis on games, plural. Make something other than Fortnite!
  
  Have you played it recently? It's not a single game anymore but basically a launcher containing many games of all kinds - quite a few of them from Epic. You may absolutely hate battle royale but find Rocket Racing or Lego Fortnite very enjoyable and different from Fortnite Battle Royale.
  
  other than all the spinoff titles you do realize that Fortnite is a platform right?
- zzt was pretty rad
any of the tech companies that sell hardware clearly does it to try to get favor to get exemptions from possible tariffs (e.g Nvidia)
Fascism and capitalism go hand-in-hand because their goals align almost exactly. I also read or heard that fascism is the enforcement arm of capitalism when the peasants become unruly (ergo regulating enterprise and the leverage of tax in the rich). I'll see if I can find the quote or video I saw about the comparisons between capitalism and fascism. It was a really interesting read.
- Do you have an example of a political system that can somehow handle "peasants" becoming unruly without turning into some sort of fascism?
yes
OK, let me write thus out: Trump = China tariffs; Tencent = 48.4% owner in epic games; Tencent = Chinese military corp; Tim Sweeney = chinas side.
- Tencent owns 35%.

82 comments