The Cake Is a Lie: Tim Sweeney Discovers Openness

Part of the Big Tech's War on Users series and the Insert Coin gaming arc. Tim Sweeney gave an interview to PC Gamer last week pitching a grand unified theory of gaming he's calling "Team Open." Sounds great. Also sounds familiar. The pitch is that platforms should connect their social graphs, economies should interoperate, and everyone benefits. He says he'd love to work with Valve. He says nobody's going to end up with an absolute monopoly over gaming. He says the industry is in enough pain that cooperation makes more sense now than competition. He's right about all of that. He's also only saying it now because Epic is losing. This is the oldest move in the big tech playbook. When you're winning, you build walls. You sue people. You weaponize exclusives. You try to drain the moat around the incumbent. When that stops working — when the layoffs hit, when the store you burned money on still can't beat the one you were trying to kill, when your flagship game has a rough couple of…