Valve boss Gabe Newell defended the openness of PC gaming and denied punishments the company allegedly levied against studios selling games cheaper on non-Steam platforms, according to new comments from a lawsuit claiming the company commands an illegal monopoly.

Bloomberg unearthed new deposition from the US lawsuit – a class action mirror to a $900 million UK suit which likewise accuses Valve of abusing its market position.

The US suit heavily skewers a purported unwritten rule that games receiving discounts at stores competing with Steam faced action from Valve. Newell denied the practice entirely in his deposition, apparently reiterating this point, "at times verbatim, again and again," according to Bloomberg.

"Valve does not have a policy or practice of dictating prices to third-party software developers on other platforms," Newell said.

Asked how Valve would respond to a developer selling their game on Steam but cheaper on another store, Newell apparently responded, "I'm confused by your question," and later said, "Many of our partners and many of our customers are quite happy with the service that we're providing."

This tone returns in Newell's comments regarding Valve's alleged monopoly. Essentially, the company says it's done nothing illegal and has won the PC gaming store wars through innovation and by adding new features that draw players in.

"Customers have enormous choice," Newell testified, adding that gamers can choose "where they purchase their products, whether they buy the game on an Xbox, whether they buy it on Steam, whether they buy it on Epic Games Store or whether they buy it directly from software developers."

Steam's dominance in PC gaming has been a hot topic for years, and discussion only intensified following a November 2025 survey, published by game distribution platform Rokky, which reported that 72% of respondents – 306 "managers in the games industry", with 67% from the US and 33% from the UK – "see Steam as a monopoly."

US analyst Mat Piscatella pushed back on the verbiage, agreeing that Steam is a dominant presence but arguing that "market share isn't what defines a monopoly, folks." Rather, Piscatella said at the time, "A monopoly is where there's a single seller for a particular service or good with no substitutes and the ability to charge excessively high rates because of this."

The aforementioned lawsuits essentially reason that Steam holds enough of a monopoly to enforce the unfair fees and pricing restrictions associated with illegal monopolies, which Valve has repeatedly denied. The case against Steam in the US suit is that it is "not economically feasible" for PC game devs to skip the store, leaving them "forced to comply" with whatever Valve says. Valve's 30% base cut of Steam sales is, unsurprisingly, also a major sticking point.

With a straight face, Valve insists Counter-Strike 2 cases are fine and "people enjoy surprises" in move to dismiss New York lawsuit.

Like a hyena on an injured lion, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney is jumping Valve co-founder Gabe Newell while he's down in the immediate aftermath of this week's Steam Deck price hike that took the handheld's top OLED model all the way up to $950.

It's a rare sight to see an industry leader forgo the usual business formalities that typically mask long-simmering rivalries between top-level competitors, but on Thursday, May 28, just a day after Valve revealed its new Steam Deck pricing, Sweeney sent out a blistering tweet obviously, but not explicitly, aimed at Newell. In the tweet, Sweeney sarcastically feigns sympathy for Valve as it faces widespread backlash against the price increase – just before going for the throat with a jab at Newell's notorious affinity for luxury yachts and other outrageously expensive naval vessels.

"Everyone's being too harsh here," reads Sweeney's tweet. "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."

Sweeney's beef with Newell goes back years to at least 2018 when emails emerged out of a lawsuit in which he slammed the "assholes" at Valve for Steam's controversial revenue split with developers. Naturally, the Epic Games Store living in Steam's shadow since its release likely has a compounding effect on Sweeney's animosity, which mostly seems to lean one way, with Newell largely remaining silent on the whole matter. For all we know, Newell is either asleep or scuba diving as we speak.

It's also worth noting that Sweeney himself isn't exactly a PR darling at the moment, with Epic having recently laid off more than 1,000 employees shortly after raising prices on Fortnite V-Bucks considerably. In this seemingly one-sided quarrel between billionaire CEOs, it seems no one comes out on top.

Valve allegedly had higher Steam Machine prices in mind before the Steam Deck hike, but I need you not to assume the worst

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Oh Gabe my Gabe, Valve's overlord, our Steam Summer Sale wallet ripper. There's no shortage of memes, parodies, and myths surrounding his online presence, but I'm taking things a step further this weekend, kitting out in full Newell. I'm talking wall to wall Gabe, and I'm taking you on the sweep with me.

Understandably, there isn't a lot of official Gabe Newell merch floating around, so I've turned to the realm of community art. I'm talking stickers, t-shirts, cushions, duvet covers - all sporting the face of our lord Gaben.

You'll find all my top picks below, running the full gamut of strange and strangely vibey.

Nobody does sales like Steam. Pretty much all PC and console storefronts do similar themed, seasonal, and genuinely compelling sales, but for many gamers, nothing hits quite like a big Steam sale. Over a decade ago, Valve boss Gabe Newell articulated why, and it's arguably truer today.

In an old chat with PC Gamer, Newell examined how Valve's storefront, and PC gaming in general, could stand out in the broader gaming landscape, then competing for visibility and dollars with the PS3 and Xbox 360.

"The thing that we've been successful with are the Steam sales," he said. "The sales have done a really good job of creating a huge amount of support, for customers getting huge numbers of games, and for the developers. The thing that we tried in the last summer sale was to build a story and make the sale itself have entertainment value."

Over a decade ago, Steam sales were a little less codified. Valve has experimented with various ways to gamify and punch up sales over the years, from fancy store portals and Steam points to various feeds and algorithms to spotlight different games. Between the big seasonal events like the summer sale, Valve also supports tighter sales often promoting games in a specific genre. Additionally, it enables publishers to throw weekend sales on all or most of their catalog. Developers can dip into daily deals, weekend deals, discount bundles, or just-because discounts perhaps marking release milestones.

The culture of Steam has reached the point that, seemingly because of the frequency of sales and the volume of choices available, relatively few people buy games when they aren't on sale. I've become more aware of just how influential the structure and culture of Steam purchases can be through interactions with many indie developers and publishers, and by speaking to folks like Steam researcher and indie marketer Chris Zukowski, who describes the "breath of Steam" as inhaling Steam wishlists through promotions and exhaling money during sales.

Newel added: "I think you'll see us do more of that in the future because it helps get people excited to try stuff that they haven't tried before. In other words, the revenue being generated by all games developers goes up when the vehicle that you're doing it by is in and of itself entertaining."

This touches on something else that Steam does better than arguably any other digital store: it actively encourages you to treat it as a digital shelf where you can store all your collectibles. Your Steam wishlist is probably filled with more than just games you want to keep an eye on; it's a set of imagined experiences, fun you might have one day. Much the same is likely true of your library. It's definitely true for mine.

Sometimes planning or fantasizing about things feels almost as satisfying as doing them, and Valve has monetized that by rewarding gamers whose eyes are bigger than their stomach – or whose Steam carts far outpace their free time. This is reflected in the zeitgeist around Steam sales – all the gags depicting Newell as the patron saint of discounts and reaper of wallets – which has notably leveled out over the years as sales have become more normalized and gaming has become wider, with more time and money concentrated in evergreen live service games.

Zukowski put it this way in an analysis last year: "You get access to a bunch of drunken sailors who spend money irresponsibly," and all you have to do is put up with Valve's 30% base cut of Steam sales. Newell comes at it from a more PR-palatable angle, but I think everyone's talking about the same thing. Valve wants the act of buying games, and finding new games to buy, to be fun on its own, not just functional, and Steam was built to suit that.

Valve commits to a reservation system for today's new batch of Steam Controller stock, which gives me a lot more hope for the launch of the Steam Machine and Steam Frame.

Valve boss and Steam billionaire Gabe Newell makes a few brief appearances, and even receives a hand-drawn thank-you portrait, in a new advertisement for yacht company Oceanco, which Newell invested in last year.

Newell can briefly be seen gearing up for a scuba dive – part of his daily routine, apparently – at 1:35, and again at 2:58 laughing along with his fellow yacht enthusiasts. At 2:43, we see a drawing of him and a dragon which seems quite grateful judging by the caption: "Thank you Gabe!!"

Even short and informal cameos from Newell attract the internet's attention, and Steam gamers were quick to latch onto this video, whatever their interest in buying or boarding a Leviathan yacht. The promo has considerably more views on YouTube than almost all of Oceanco's recent uploads – and by recent, I mean going back several years – and the comments are amusingly stuffed with Valve-adjacent chatter.

"Another 10 yachts to Gabe," reads one top comment.

"Suspiciously pattern-recognizable profile of Gabe Newell on the thumbnail," observes another, and Oceanco did indeed seem to know what it's doing here.

There's also some talk of Newell's own mega-ship, which got its very own announcement last year, set to combine deep sea mapping tech with submersibles and a helideck. I was thrilled to get a new stainless steel skillet recently.

"So that's the Mega Yacht with 15 Gaming PCs Gabe Newell talked about," another YouTube viewer writes.

The video, of course, is not about the patron saint of Steam sales. "Enter the World of Leviathan," entreats Oceanco's promotion, showing off the mega-yacht's "revolutionary layout" and "ergonomic design," which seem to have compressed the attractions of a cruiseliner into something that's somehow more excessive.

WIth massage chairs, extravagant buffets, instrument collections, basketball courts, scuba rigs, and more LED panels than your average LAN party, the Leviathan ship is certainly stuffed with extravagances. We even get some proper PC gaming action around two minutes into the video, with several people grouping up to play Counter-Strike 2. It almost sounds like a wind and headset-muffled Newell says, "Stick together team. All right, let's move out," on comms during this section, but that might be a longshot.

Gamers obsess over Valve boss Gabe Newell telling critically ill Half-Life and Portal writer Erik Wolpaw to "get better" instead of resigning, but the full story is even better.

Few people love Valve's games more than Valve employees. Even semi-retired founder Gabe Newell said last year that he still plays Dota 2, the studio's evergreen MOBA, "every day" as he enters his 60s. Which is quite a long time to dive headfirst into a MOBA on a daily basis, given that Newell also said he was "obsessed" with the game as early as 2011.

In an old interview with PC Gamer, Newell examined his Dota 2 obsession and sized up the MOBA genre's popularity. His comments stand out to me even today amid Newell's continued presence at The International, the biggest annual Dota tournament. At The International 2025, Newell said he plays the game daily despite the people who "talk shit at me in chat."

"About once a week people say, hey noob, uninstall the game and [censor blip]," Newell added. "But that's really about their enthusiasm, and the energy that they bring, and that's why, after all these years, I still play Dota every day."

Even over a decade ago, Newell seemed unable to escape Dota's grasp, and considered himself a "noob."

"I've played Dota 2 for about 800 hours," he said in 2011. "The cool thing about Dota 2 is that it's probably the game we've made that we're most obsessed with playing. As a games developer you tend to get pretty tired of the thing you're developing because you have to experience all the flaws and the difficulties. Dota 2? Every day after we're done working on the game, everyone goes home and plays it till two or three in the morning.

"So yeah, I love playing the game. I'm not even on the same plane as the guys who are playing here, so it's certainly exciting to see them play. After 800 hours I'm still pretty much a noob player when it comes to playing DotA games!"

Newell has said something to this effect in multiple International appearances. In his 2024 welcome, he reverently described his experience watching the first Dota 2 champions claim their throne. "The crowds may have grown bigger, the players and teams may have changed, but one thing hasn't: the joy we all take in watching the best players in the world play Dota 2," he said.

Past-Newell, then, was bang-on: MOBAs are uniquely compelling as PvP sandboxes go, capable of electrifying moments and memorable snap decisions. In 2011, Newell put on his designer cap – which he's rarely gotten a chance to wear since – and said, "The thing that really struck me when I played Dota 2 was that you're constantly creating and destroying plans in your head. You have a lot of expectations, but whether or not you're going to stay on that pathway is changing every five seconds."

In some ways, Dota 2 was Valve's RPG. "You go through this complete RPG arc in 40 minutes," Newell said, seemingly riffing on the progression and territory wars baked into each match. He also touched on the almost Pavlovian response learned by MOBA diehards: re-queue.

"The first thing you want to do after you've had a great game is play another game, and the first thing you want to do after you've had a bad game of Dota 2 is play another game," he reasoned. This cuts to a rare quality that's perhaps strongest in PvP games, something that Blizzard veteran Chris Kaleiki described as how "sticky" a game is: once you're hooked, you are hooked deep, always hungry to find out what the next match holds.

"I think there are a lot of lessons for game designers in it that are very complementary to the lessons from other genres," Newell continued. "If you play a lot of MMOs, there's stuff you can learn that's in Dota 2. If you play first-person shooters, there's a lot of stuff you can learn, so it's a nice arrow in the quiver for game designers."

And designers did learn from MOBAs. In the past decade, MOBAs have not only maintained a huge audience – League of Legends spawned some remarkably good spinoffs, and I pray for Valve to make something else in Dota's world – but their DNA has also been spliced into many other genres. The obvious one is Valve's Deadlock, a MOBA-shooter hybrid that had been swirling for years and is now, sort of, out in the wild, albeit in early development. Newell was on the money: if you play shooters, there's stuff you can learn from Dota.

Also top of my mind is Shape of Dreams, which is essentially a PvE MOBA built using the roguelike package. I spoke to the Korean makers of Shape of Dreams – mostly a bunch of college kids – about their inspirations, and they stressed that the dominance of MOBAs in Korean esports culture was a huge factor. So, Lies of P maker Neowiz was a match made in heaven as publisher.

Newell has been playing games longer than he's been making them, and has a history of minimizing his own player skill, as it happens. On the original Half-Life, he stressed that he was "not even close" to the best player at Valve. "I used to think I was pretty hot stuff when I was just playing against other people at Microsoft, but nowadays I just get crushed," he said all the way back in 1998. "We may have to do a strategy game just so I can regain my self esteem." Frankly, I just hope to still be MOBA-ready at Newell's age.

Metal Gear Solid creator and "real visionary in our field" Hideo Kojima "was talking about how much he wants to go into space," so Valve boss Gabe Newell set him up with a SpaceX tour.

Hideo Kojima wants to go to space. He's made this very known, and frankly, I'm not sure the world would be ready for whatever game he'd come up with after escaping the planet for a while. But Valve boss Gabe Newell was clearly eager to help the Metal Gear mastermind make the right connections, as emails have now been released showing Newell asking Elon Musk to give Kojima a tour of SpaceX.

As spotted by PC Gamer, the newly revealed emails have appeared as part of the Musk v Altman lawsuit, listed in the "amended joint exhibit list" filed on April 24. For some background, Musk is suing the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman (who's also one of the co-founders alongside Musk), and the company itself, with the first complaint filed in August 2024 alleging that "Altman assured Musk that the non-profit structure" of OpenAI "guaranteed neutrality and a focus on safety and openness for the benefit of humanity, not shareholder value. But as it turns out, this was all hot-air philanthropy – the hook for Altman's long con."

Anyway, this email from Newell dates back to October 2018, and he gets right to the point. Kojima - "Metal Gear series, a real visionary in our field" - had just visited Valve, "talking about his new game," he says – which we can infer was the first Death Stranding, given the timing of his visit (and resulted in a delightful photo of the pair). Newell says Kojima "mentioned the importance he places on future work in AI."

This part isn't too surprising – more recently, the Death Stranding mastermind has stated that he'd "like AI to handle the tedious tasks that would lower cost and cut down on time," but "would lead the creative part" himself. However, while he can see uses for the technology, he's also expressed concerns that "humans would become spoiled" if they became too reliant on it.

Emailing Musk, Newell says he told Kojima that he'd be "happy to introduce him to the people at OpenAI," but that's not all. "The second thing is he was talking about how much he wants to go into space, and I offered to introduce him to you," Newell writes. "He'd love to get a SpaceX tour."

Responding to Newell's email, Musk seems enthusiastic about the idea. "Sure, it would be great to meet Hideo Kojima and he's welcome to see the rocket factory," Musk writes, telling the Valve boss to "send him my email."

Sadly, this plan still hadn't come to fruition by 2020, when Kojima seemingly made reference to some of these details in an interview with The Game Awards host Geoff Keighley. Mentioning that he visited Valve "maybe four, five years ago" (which would place this well before Newell's 2018 email, so the timeline isn't entirely clear here), Kojima explains: "Gabe said, 'Since we love space so much, let's go visit SpaceX because I know Elon Musk, and I'll contact him, and let's go.'" Poor Kojima seemed slightly disappointed, however, when he added: "Actually, I was really anticipating really going together, but we haven't done that yet."

That didn't lead to Kojima giving up on his dream, though. In 2023, he explained that "I want to go to outer space and create a game you can play in space," pleading: "Please someone send me up to space." Then, last year, he told The Guardian that he wants to "go to the International Space Station and stay there for a few months," adding: "I could probably make games in space. I want to be the first."

At the very least, an image of Kojima appears in the night sky in Death Stranding 2, so he's made it up there in some form. But who knows, perhaps one day we'll see him and Newell set off to the moon together.

Valve chief Gabe Newell saw today's consoles coming a long time ago: "All the consoles are using PC graphics hardware now."

In the same year that Valve is planning a console-like PC with Steam Machine, Microsoft has announced Xbox Project Helix, a PC-like console, as its next-generation gaming system. These two facts roll around my skull like glass marbles as I reread comments from Valve boss Gabe Newell, who, in 2011, accurately summed up the trajectory of consoles: they're just going to become more like PCs.

For generations of x86 and AMD-consolidated architecture, this has been basically true on a hardware level. Newell touched on this trend as well, saying (to PC Gamer many years ago), "It wouldn't be possible to move this quickly if it weren't for the existence of an open internet client and an open hardware client like we have. It's why all the consoles are using PC graphics hardware now."

Consoles have always been computers in the same sense that your phone is a tiny computer, but the gap between a conventional gaming PC and new consoles has closed dramatically in recent generations. That goes for software to some extent, too, with console UX folding in more and more apps and features beyond games. Shoutout to the launch PS3 and its $600 shotgun blast of ports and plug-ins and 60 of god's own gigabytes. You were just ahead of your time.

It's worth noting as well that this 2011 interview coincided with Valve's brief embrace of console gaming. That same year marked the launch of Portal 2, which featured notable Steam integration on PS3, a fact which Newell even appeared on Sony's E3 stage to promote. The partnership between Valve and Sony ultimately didn't amount to much, but it does help explain why Newell was so keenly interested in the intersection of console and PC at the time.

I'd also point to the PS5 Pro and its PSSR super sampling tech. Sony stands on the shoulders of Nvidia's DLSS, which has worked wonders for some games on PC (even if frame gen can poison the well at other times).

This console trend comes with the arguable exception of Nintendo, whose Switch 2 sacrifices sheer processing power in its custom Nvidia chip and repeats the bespoke handheld experience that helped make the Switch such a success. This, in turn, helped shape Valve's similarly portable Steam Deck and the modern handheld PC boom. Nintendo is almost always running its own race, and retains the truest expression of what consoles were in the '80s. But the Switch 2 also wants to be more than a classical console – it even has its own Discord now.

What really strikes me about Newell's comments is his view of the idea of Steam or Valve as standard bearers or proponents for PC as a platform. "It's a lot easier for me to think of it as having a responsibility to gamers and game developers," he said. "It's hard to test being the flagbearer for the PC. It's a lot easier to go out to customers and find out, 'Do you like this? What do you dislike about this? How can we make this better?' So we tend to be a little narrower in terms of how we try to think about what problems it needs to solve."

Newell added: "Obviously we love the PC, we love the openness of the PC, we value the hardware innovation." And I think this is where every gaming platform has essentially been orbiting the same star in slightly different planes. Every year, those orbits seem to link up just a little bit more.

Again, Xbox is a close parallel, though PlayStation has very literally dabbled in once-unthinkable PC ports – and seemingly pulled back amid fears of diluting its console brand. Xbox and PC, however, remain more inextricably linked, and not just via Windows. The brand's new leaders – CEO Asha Sharma and CCO Matt Booty – have even singled out PC presence as a weakness for Xbox.

At the same time, Sharma and Booty are deliberately pivoting away from Microsoft Gaming. This branding emerged alongside the now-dead "this is an Xbox" messaging at a time when Microsoft seemed hungry to release games for everything that wasn't its own console. We are purportedly back to Xbox proper, with Microsoft narrowing its own focus with a rebrand looking to shore up the home front instead of spending almost all of its time abroad.

Under the hood, consoles are more like gaming PCs than ever, with Project Helix promising to play your favorite PC games, too. And in practice, consoles have become more open, with both PlayStation and Xbox publishing on multiple platforms. Freedom of choice has always been a core appeal of PC gaming, and that's increasingly bleeding into console gaming. But while it's always good to see hardware become more flexible and more capable, the route to openness for these once-walled console gardens hasn't always been smooth.

The PC gaming ecosystem was explicitly built around endless options and emerging technologies. So, as Newell suggested, adapting to changes in the wind came more naturally to PC gamers. But Microsoft's "this is an Xbox" campaign perhaps reveals what happens when you go too far and obscure identity and purpose in pursuit of an audience that your platform can't sustain yet, which is maybe the most generous possible read of what I guess I'm calling the Microsoft Gaming era.

Valve boss Gabe Newell set up Hideo Kojima with a SpaceX tour after Death Stranding showcase because "he was talking about how much he wants to go into space."

There was a time, in the not too distant past, where Steam wasn't the primo place to buy PC games. Although Valve's storefront always garnered an audience, not even Gabe Newell thought it would evolve the way it has.

No, seriously. In resurfaced quotes from 2011 (thanks, PC Gamer), the co-founder and now main man behind Valve stated he simply didn't think Steam was going to be a defining pillar of games commerce. "There's always this temptation to assume that the way things are today is the way things are going to be," he explained to PC Gamer at the time.

"And having been through this long enough in the games industry, I think I and everyone at Valve know that you're only as successful as what you've done lately," he said. "So the idea that Steam is somehow the answer to digital distribution ignores the fact that every two or three years, something is going to change dramatically."

He pointed to the Wii as a prime example, a console predicated on motion controls that became wildly popular despite many other instances of such tech falling flat on their face, and "social gaming" as another, which I'm taking to mean the likes of Farmville and Mafia Wars on Facebook. Might be even harder to believe, but for a while there, those games were hugely popular and didn't seem like they'd be going anywhere any time soon. How naive we were.

"If you stand still and you're not doing the things that you need to do to be valuable in the future, you're going to be left behind really rapidly," Newell added.

Steam had some competition in those days. EA's Origin seemed a potential player due to the publisher's size, Games for Windows offered a few bigger releases, and GOG was gaining traction as a decent alternative for older projects.

Alas, none could offer the variety and functionality of Steam, and soon Valve's platform would be the biggest in the PC space by some distance. And it seems Newell may have been among the most shocked by that.

Gamers obsess over Valve boss Gabe Newell telling critically ill Half-Life and Portal writer Erik Wolpaw to "get better" instead of resigning, but the full story is even better.

The story of Valve founder Gabe Newell telling Erik Wolpaw, key writer on studio-defining hits like Half-Life 2 and the Portal duology, not to resign but instead to focus on recovering from serious health complications has been making the rounds online. Tens of thousands of likes, upvotes, shares, and comments have been hurled at what certainly appears to be a very successful Reddit karma farm today, in case we needed more evidence that the internet loves Newell and Valve (until it briefly doesn't). But in the process, a key part of this old story has gotten lost, not to mention citation.

Newell and Wolpaw's interaction stems from Portal 2 - The Final Hours (or The Final Hours of Portal 2), a digital book by The Game Awards host and former game journalist Geoff Keighley. No, really, after 15 years it's still on Steam for $2, and its developer and publisher are both listed as Keighley. It has also been widely archived online.

The new-again viral post puts the story this way: "In 2004, Valve writer Erik Wolpaw was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and was preparing to resign. Instead, Gabe Newell told Wolpaw that his new job description is to 'get better,' and provided him with extended leave with full pay."

In his book (pages 32 and 33), Keighley shares a 2004 account from Wolpaw, who confided in fellow Valve veteran Chet Faliszek about his declining health. Around the end of November, Wolpaw and Faliszek, both new to Valve at the time, secretly agreed to give working at the company a 30-day trial. If they didn't like what they saw, they'd leave and get back to the lives they'd uprooted to make Valve's offer work. Even at this point, Wolpaw "wasn't feeling well."

Come Christmas Eve, Wolpaw really wasn't feeling well. "He thought he might be dying," Keighley wrote. He dragged himself to the emergency room and spent Christmas in the hospital to recover from ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammatory bowel disease that can cause intermittent, but severe and painful ulcers in the large intestine, as well as bleeding from the colon.

Keighley wrote that Wolpaw "had lost more than half his blood and would require an immediate transfusion to stabilize his body," which reads to me like some degree of exaggeration given that Wolpaw arrived at the hospital alive.

Struggling with his health, Wolpaw told Faliszek that he'd have to speak to Newell and quit his job. But Newell "wouldn't have any of it," Keighley wrote. Instead, Newell told Wolpaw that, "Your job is to get better. That is your job description at Valve. So go home to your wife and come back when you are better."

After this meeting with Newell, Wolpaw spoke to Faliszek about their 30-day trial, saying, "Well, I guess we know where we're working for the rest of our lives." Faliszek did end up leaving Valve, but seems to hold a lot of respect for the company and the people there to this day. Wolpaw still occasionally talks about the goings-on at Valve.

Later in the book (page 201), it's noted that Wolpaw "successfully completed a series of three surgeries that dramatically improved his health," allowing him to return to the writing shop at Valve. On Portal 2, during a time when the game's writing was seriously lagging behind other disciplines in production, this led to him confronting a tidal wave of feedback complaining that central Portal antagonist GLaDOS was "too mean" and even "extreme". At one point, Wolpaw made a large note on the whiteboard at his desk for everyone to see: "Act 2 - Less 'Mean' GLaDOS".

"Gabe really had a great vision": Steam became a PC gaming cornerstone because Valve built a community with "stickiness," says Nightdive chief who worked on GameStop's Steam competitor.

Original Xbox designer and co-creator Seamus Blackley is looking forward to whatever Valve and Nintendo are cooking up, much more than Microsoft's next-gen console hybrid, Project Helix, in fact.

Microsoft has yet to properly spill the beans on its upcoming console, simply codenamed Project Helix for now, but Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma did soft-confirm rumors that the hardware would straddle the line between traditional console and gaming PC.

"I don't know as a developer what I'm excited about, and I don't know as a gamer what I'm excited about," Blackley says of the console's starting pitch, per an interview with Expansion Pass. "I am vastly more excited about Steam than about [Project Helix] as a gamer from a content standpoint as, I think, everybody would be or, you know, what's Switch 3 going to be?"

With Valve, Blackley has confidence in the company's plans because "those guys are relentlessly focused on cool games and, you know, they f*** up business and they do weird stuff and Gabe's crazy - I love Gabe," but "fundamentally, they have put games first and they've funded people and funded games."

Steam, in general, is admittedly a very no-nonsense, games-first platform between Steam Next Fest events that platforms countless under-the-radar indies and the never-ending sales focused on specific genres, subgenres, and barely even genres. Valve's also preparing to release the Steam Machine, another mini PC that seemingly caters to console likers, too.

When it comes to a hypothetical Switch 3 or whatever name Nintendo's next console generation ends up with, Blackley explains that "everything that comes out of Nintendo's design department is, at least, really interesting and cool, even when it fails." He then points to the "mess" that was the Wii U, which was still "really cool" even in its failure. But Nintendo only released the Switch 2 last summer, so we won't be hearing about their next next-gen machine until Project Helix has been in the wild for years already.

Father of Xbox says PC gamers used to throw drinks at him for daring to suggest "Halo might be a good game" before the FPS console boom

Once upon a time, Gabe Newell was just a former Microsoft employee who had founded a small game studio and was helping build a new sci-fi FPS. That game, Half-Life, would soon become an industry-shaking success story and launch the true legacy of Steam god GabeN, but it didn't pop up out of nowhere. No, Half-Life had a notable list of influences that Newell revealed back in 1998, including the one and only Super Mario 64.

"The three games that had the biggest impact on Half-Life were Ultima Underworld, Mario 64, and Resident Evil 2," Newell said in an interview for the December 1998 issue of Next Generation magazine. "Ultima Underworld was so much more of an immersive experience than the other first-person shooters. Resident Evil 2 really inspired us to take the creepiness and horror in Half-Life seriously, without giving in to the temptation to be campy about it."

Ultima Underworld is perhaps the least well-remembered of those games, if only because its own franchise hasn't continued into the modern day. But its open-ended approach to player agency would serve as the blueprint for the immersive sim genre, building the formula for everything from Deus Ex to BioShock. And, of course, Resident Evil 2's influence on horror gaming is impossible to overstate.

As for Super Mario 64? Well, on top of being one of the best N64 games ever made, Newell said that's "just a great inspiration on so many levels from things like having spaces that can be traversed multiple times and still be fun to a much less punitive method of handling player failure."

I'm very curious what Newell meant about that "less punitive" penalty for failure, but alas, he didn't go into any more detail. Super Mario 64 still has lives, as in older Mario games, but the fact that you can constantly save your progress means you're never in danger of losing much when those lives run out. Maybe you could draw a parallel between that system and the generous quick saves Half-Life allows you to make use of.

While Half-Life is primarily remembered for its excellent single-player campaign, it also has a deathmatch mode – and it seems Newell was not very good at it. Asked by Next Generation if he was the best Half-Life player at Valve, Newell responded: "Not even close."

"Several of the people at Valve have won international competitions," Newell added. "I used to think I was pretty hot stuff when I was just playing against other people at Microsoft, but nowadays I just get crushed. We may have to do a strategy game just so I can regain my self esteem. Either that or add a deathmatch mode to Mario 64."

I'm pretty sure there's some sort of romhack out there that could cater to that demand these days, but either way, it's amusing to see Newell apparently so much more confident in his skills with Nintendo's platformer than the FPS game he helped to make. But GabeN's love of Super Mario 64 has been consistent throughout his career.

Years later, in a 2011 interview with CVG, Newell would say that Super Mario 64 is "still my favourite game of all time. I still have vivid memories of all the different levels. The control is still pretty much unrivalled. It convinced me that games were art." Maybe we should've been thanking Shigeru Miyamoto for indirectly creating Steam this whole time.

Gabe Newell "stepped back" from making games at Valve after Portal 2 because everyone kept agreeing with him when he wanted "to be part of the team and come up with ideas."

Gabe Newell's a true rarity in the game industry, having found massive success both creatively and in business through Valve. But a drawback of such accomplishments is that it's hard for him to find people to honestly collaborate with in developing projects, resulting in his stepping back from actively making games.

That's according to Josh Weier, the project lead designer on Portal 2, who told Kiwi Talkz about how Newell realized he was surrounded by yes people. "He always wanted to be part of the team, but being Gabe and being in his position, that never really worked," he recalls.

"Because people would be like, 'Whatever you say', and he was more like, 'No no no, I want to be part of the team and come up with ideas,'" Weier states. "That was really hard for people, so I think there was a period where he stepped back and was like, 'Alright I guess I'm just not going to be able to interact with everyone that way.'"

This would've been in the late 2000s, when Valve was riding high on Half-Life 2 and Steam had become a dominant force in PC games distribution. Even if he was adamant about collaboration, I can imagine the reluctance to argue with Newell on just about anything, because he's a guy who led several industry-shaping releases.

The danger here is becoming like George Lucas on the Star Wars prequels, where nobody challenges Newell, and the result is something more divisive than intended. Part of the reason making things stops being fun is that people start idolizing you or placing particular weight on your perspective, when you want to be just another creative in the room trying to make the best thing.

Newell is credited as a producer on the second Portal, and for the most part, his participation on Valve releases afterward is reduced to thanks or generic credits as part of Valve as a whole. He seems to just oversee things now, and likely offers his insight on occasion, but from the sounds of Weier's comments, it's rare he'll really get his hands dirty. Anyway, he's too busy getting Half-Life 3 ready for the Steam Machine, right? I'm on to you, Gabe.

Garry's Mod creator partners with Valve in deal that ensures games made in his sandbox gem's new successor can be sold royalty-free on Steam: "It's just waiting for us now"

You can find many thoughts around Epic Games recently laying off 1,000 people strewn across the internet, and someone who hasn't minced their words is Chet Faliszek, a former writer at Valve. In an impassioned video, he tears through CEO Tim Sweeney and Epic itself, calling out the scale of the cutbacks and pondering about morale at the corporation.

"Can someone explain this to me, why anybody who works at Epic should work hard?" Faliszek says (spotted by PC Gamer). "'Cause Epic just laid off 1,000 people. And it's gonna shut down Fortnite Rocket Racing, Ballistic, and Festival Battle stage, whatever that is. Who knows?"

It's a fair response. Epic's one of the biggest video game companies in the world. Fortnite is a cultural juggernaut. If, despite all of that, people's jobs are still at risk, what motivation is there to keep pushing?

Faliszek, who was involved in such games as Portal and its sequel, Team Fortress 2, the Half-Life 2 episodes, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, continues. "It's not like they're a publicly traded company," he states. "It's not like there's some need to hit the stock market thing. This is Tim Sweeney. This is Tim. A thousand people is more than [the amount] who work at Valve."

That's a pretty damning comparison, especially as Valve operates Steam, which Faliszek then brings up, albeit indirectly. "Tim has gone from making games to making one game," he says. "Spending all his time doing that and trying to make as much money as possible. And I guess well, hey, Tim, Gabe's better at that than you. I don't know what to tell you, man, because you stopped caring about making things."

He brings up that generally while at work, he's "gonna work my ass off," but then wonders if he'd have that kind of motivation at Epic, or any other major publisher right now. "Would I do that at Epic if they're gonna treat me like that and just have layoffs like that and just act the same way [as EA]?" he ponders. "Like, hey, 'great job, made Battlefield 6, we dethroned Call of Duty: here's a pink slip.'"

Staying on Valve, he points out a considerable amount of devs have been there for years, making great money, and he himself benefited from excellent financial benefits, implying that Epic is doing the opposite when it comes to retaining talent. "I could retire, I worked my ass off at Valve, and I could retire today," he explains. "I made more money than I'll ever make. And the money I made is dwarfed by the people who were there longer than me or before me."

The difference here is, "Valve understood that," Faliszek points out. "That's how you get this thing where people cared, people worked hard, people stayed because they felt they were improving," he continues. "What they were building on was something that they had agency over and owned."

The whole recording is seven-and-a-half minutes long, and it goes around and around like this. Knowing Sweeney, we might get a reply, since he's particularly susceptible to being trolled by Valve. We'll keep our eyes peeled.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says latest layoffs will result in "a stream of resumes of once-in-a-lifetime quality folks" because the downsizing "wasn't a performance-based 'rightsizing.'"

Steam baron Valve owes much of its current, enviably profitable position to products and policies that were ahead of their time, and the leadership of founder Gabe Newell played a major part in the company's vision. A particularly timeless comment from Newell has, rather amusingly, resurfaced after 16 years in glorious 180p resolution thanks to a YouTube channel with 750 subscribers and, suddenly, over 244,000 views on its latest upload: Newell tidily explaining why piracy is, and always will be, a service issue.

This clip comes from Newell's comments on a 2009 ABC Good Game segment (Season 5, Episode 24, it appears). The snippet uploaded on January 2, 2026 is already poised to become the most-viewed variant on Youtube. "This is the un-abridged, web-exclusive [Australian] version of ABC Good Game's interview with Gabe Newell," uploader PostScript says in the video description.

Newell's argument held up in 2009, and deep in the enshittification that we're only seeing more of in 2026, it's arguably more relevant than ever. "We don't really worry about piracy," Newell said at the time, adding that piracy as a topic is "almost never" even going to crack the top 10 issues discussed at Valve.

"The reason that we think that we don't have issues with piracy is that there's misconceptions in the industry about what piracy is, right?" he says. "There's this assumption. What is piracy? Piracy is about people wanting to steal stuff from you, right? They don't want to pay any money and they wanna get your content. But when you look at the fact that these people have $2,000 PCs and they're spending 50 dollars US a month or more on their internet connections, clearly, they're willing to spend money."

Oh, to pay just $2,000 for a premium PC and spend just $50 a month on good internet. Here in 2026, that might get you a top-of-the-line GPU alone, or if you're lucky, a photograph of 64GB of RAM.

Newell continues: "What we saw more and more is that piracy was a result of bad service on the part of game companies." He points to the Russian games market as one example, dismissing the assertion that the Russia market is unviable because it's full of pirates. Instead, he argues that Russian pirates were simply doing a better job with game distribution than actual paid storefronts, so users flocked to them. If you could beat the quality bar of pirates, which shouldn't be hard for companies with incomparably more resources available to them, you could win players over.

"If I wanted the product, and I didn't want to wait six months to get the product, and if I wanted it in Russian, I was gonna have to go to a pirate simply because I couldn't get it any other way," Newell offers as a hypothetical. And so, in this example, "as soon as the product became available at the same time as it was available in Australia or the UK or the United States, and it was localized in Russia, all of the sudden our piracy problems in Russia disappeared."

Summing up his stance, which can still fairly be described as a pillar of Steam, Newell says evaluating piracy is "a question of offering or viewing yourself as, 'How can you provide the best possible service to your customers?'" Newell and several other faces of Valve say some version of this line regularly even today, and it's among the most palatable corporate lip service around because Steam, by and large, bears it out.

Pricing is obviously relevant, but, 2009 Newell says, it's actually one of the "less important" factors with piracy. "People are happy to pay money if they're getting what they perceive as a great product delivered on their terms," he explains. I do want to linger on the stipulation "on their terms" for a moment. In the increasingly fractured digital market – saddled with vestigial apps and launchers, and not just in games – terms of use and licensing (because true ownership has, broadly, gone the way of the dodo, or perhaps more charitably the way of the American buffalo) are only getting uglier.

Newell offers several examples of what buying a game on your terms might look like – accessing purchased content on a range of devices, while traveling, at a friend's house, after changing PCs, or after "I reinstall my operating system." Some of these are artifacts of the 2000s PC market, but there are plenty of parallels to Valve's ongoing multiplatform efforts, not just in literal portable platforms a la Steam Deck and, soon, the highly totable Steam Machine, but also in its vision for a one-stop PC gaming platform with myriad entry points and player-friendly features (which can also be developer-friendly in the form of peerless game discoverability).

2009 Newell concludes, in this cut of the video, by reiterating that, "By focusing on the customer and doing useful things for the customer, piracy really becomes sort of a non-issue for us." It goes without saying that Steam is not flawless and Valve is not exempt from criticism (though, really, sometimes it feels like this does need to be said aloud), but on this point – the usefulness of Steam and how it sits on the scales opposite piracy – the oligarchical state of PC gaming speaks for itself.

Valve billionaire Gabe Newell says "people talk s*** at me in chat, and about once a week people say, hey noob, uninstall the game" but "that's really about their enthusiasm" so he still plays Dota 2 "every day."

You don't have to look very hard to find a gaming executive who's just taken a big hit of generative AI and is ready to preach its benefits to the masses, but not all AI sermons are created equal. Some folks are, at least notionally, cooler on the tech's role and impact (and, of course, plenty of other people oppose all or many applications of it). Then you have folks like Valve billionaire Gabe Newell, who's called AI and machine learning systems a "cheat code" technological transition comparable to the pre- and post-internet era. Newell's comments came to mind as I listened to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, who we can add to the list of AI enthusiasts since he expects gen AI to be "as big a revolution for our industry as the shift to 3D."

Guillemot discussed gen AI in the company's latest earnings call, which was abruptly delayed from its usual timing for unclear reasons. Not unrelatedly, Ubisoft says Tencent's $1.3 billion investment in its new Assassin's Creed shepherd Vantage Studios is "imminent."

On the topic of "innovation," Guillemot begins by assuring investors "we are making great strides in applying gen AI to high-value use cases that bring tangible benefits to our players and teams. It's as big a revolution for our industry as the shift to 3D, and we have everything to lead on this front.

"On the player experience side, we are continuing to make progress on groundbreaking, player-facing generative AI applications," he adds, "building on our new NPC announcements in 2024."

Guillemot seems to be alluding to a presentation on generative AI-powered NPCs from March 2024, in which Ubisoft showed off – in essence – a chatbot with a character model. But the whole point of the initiative was to take these dynamic NPCs beyond the abilities of a mere chatbot to enable reactive, convincing interactions while keeping actual writers at the wheel in some capacity. The results were a little odd, particularly when Ubisoft reached the point of giving each character a "soul" and reprogramming one character who ended up too "flirtatious and seductive."

"The model's task becomes: I must impersonate this character," data scientist Mélanie Lopez Malet said at the time. "It is really important to us that it behaves like the character Virginie created. So, while we're talking to it, we ask ourselves: 'Is this Lisa? Would Lisa say this?' and if the answer is no, we need to go back and find out what happened within the model to make it stray from the vision Virginie had."

At the time, Project NEO NPC was still very early in development. As of Ubisoft's latest earnings call, Guillemot says, "We've already advanced from prototyping to player reality, and we are looking forward to sharing more before the end of the year." December 31 is a-coming, so I suppose we're due for a new NPC blog any day now.

Guillemot also confirms, "We now have teams in all our studios and offices embracing this new technology, and constantly exploring new use cases in programming, art, and overall game quality." This seemingly puts Ubisoft right alongside EA in company-wide AI integration, though the exact level of AI use is murky.

This comes as Arc Raiders faces backlash for its use of AI voices, in one of the first high-profile cases of a hugely successful game leaning on AI in a very obvious, widespread way. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has also caught flak for gen AI use, but in more isolated ways. Defending Arc Raiders, CCO and co-founder Stefan Strandberg of developer Embark Studios told us "we don't use generative AI in other domains across the game."

"Gen Z loves AI slop," says former Square Enix exec, which means that Arc Raiders' controversial AI usage is just "the tip of the spear."

Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford recalled a time where he was envisioning a Half-Life based idea and out of nowhere received an unrelated call from Valve boss Gabe Newell.

After leaving 3D Realms Randy Pitchford joined Rebel Boat Rocker with fellow ex employees, "It was very difficult. We were taking every risk building a new game, creating a new engine, building a new IP, and building a company all at the same time," Pitchford explained in the Shacknews documentary 24 'Til Launch: The Making of Borderlands 4. However, if you don't recognise the studio, that's because its debut game was cancelled by EA and the staffers all jumped ship, with a number of them founding Borderlands 4 developer Gearbox, as Pitchford explains " I called up some of the folks that I'd respected the most that I'd been working with and asked them if they wanted to kind of come along and let's get this thing going."

After the previous studio folded while making its own IP and engine, Pitchford wasn't keen to repeat that in case Gearbox faced the same fate "Half-Life had just launched, and so I had this idea," with Pitchford describing "we have a parallel story going on simultaneously that we know must have took place because we played Half-Life, but we didn't see that experience, the point of view of one of the soldiers in Black Mesa, and everybody loved it." And it turns out that would come to fruition far quicker than expected.

Pitchford recalled, "I don't believe in manifestation – I believe in coincidence – literally that afternoon, with no action on my part, Gabe Newell calls me because he had heard that we had left Rebel Boat Rocker and that I was starting a new thing, and he wanted to see if we would be interested in working on Half-Life." He "immediately got on a plane" and pitched the game that would eventually become Half-Life: Opposing Force. However, since Valve didn't own Half-Life at that point, with publisher Sierra owning the IP.

Pitchford added, "they said, 'Sorry, we don't actually own Half-Life. You gotta drive down the street to Sierra On-Line and talk to the publisher. We're going to call them and tell them you're coming, and tell them we think what you've got is cool, but you gotta sell them, they're the ones that are going to have to pay for anything and agree to do it.'" This resulted in Opposing Force releasing just over nine months after Gearbox opened its doors and the rest was history.

Borderlands boss Randy Pitchford says the games industry is "just getting started": "We haven't even had our Citizen Kane yet, let alone Jurassic Park or Star Wars. We're just figuring this s**t out"

Valve founder and boat-loving billionaire Gabe Newell might get flamed in Dota 2, but he reckons that's just the "enthusiasm" of those angry gamers coming through, so he still loves the game and its community, and somehow has the stamina to play it "every day."

Newell released a short message to kick off The International 2025, the MOBA's latest massive Dota 2 tournament. You can scrub back to the snippet in this English live stream, a bit over an hour in, if you want to watch it for yourself.

"Hi, I'm Gabe Newell," he begins. "14 years ago, we held the first International in Cologne, Germany. For me, that first International was awesome. It was awesome to see the skill of the players and the enthusiasm of the community. Before that first International, I really enjoyed the game. But after The International, I loved the game.

"It's not just the game I love, but the community," he continues. "Sure, people talk shit at me in chat, and about once a week people say, hey noob, uninstall the game and [censor blip]. But that's really about their enthusiasm, and the energy that they bring, and that's why, after all these years, I still play Dota every day. Now we're back in Germany once more to cheer and celebrate again. [In German] Oh man, this is going to be so much fun.

"To all the Dota fans who've been with us from day one, to those of you who've joined us along the way, and to any of you who are tuning in for the first time, welcome to The International."

Newell might be funneling a $9.5 billion fortune into boats larger than my house, and his daily routine might sound like something a content creator would invent to parody the rich, but there are a few great equalizers in this world. I get flamed in online games, so do you, and so does Gabe Newell. Personally, when I'm 62 years old, I hope to still have the dexterity and mental fortitude necessary to play a MOBA, but I hope to very much not be playing a MOBA.

Valve just gave Steam a much-needed glow-up, with a client update finally adding users' long-requested features like UI scaling and more: "Thank you, Lord Gaben."

In case you needed further proof that billionaires are living in a completely different world from the rest of us, Valve founder Gabe Newell is dropping $300 million on a giant ship to explore the deep ocean.

Per Luxury Launches and Super Yacht Times, two publications which themselves further prove my point, Newell's US-based marine research organization Inkfish has partnered up with ship builder Vard to design and construct the 100-meter custom-built research vessel, RV6000. The mega ship will be the flagship of Inkfish's existing fleet of ships, which includes the RV Dagon and RV Hydra.

The RV6000 is specifically designed for deep-sea mapping and general research, equipped with a gondola mounted sensor suite, a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) that can operate at 6,000 meters of depth, hangars, a helideck, and support for two manned submersibles.

"Our research vessels are at the heart of what we do – they're how we get science done. We're excited to be working with Vard on the next step in that journey: a world-class vessel that will dramatically increase our capacity and broaden the support we can offer the global research community. This has been a unique opportunity to involve the researchers to collaborate with the ship builder and the operators from the first stage of the design process," said Inkfish maritime operations lead Stu Buckle.

In all fairness to Newell, his passion for exploring the seas isn't anything new, having purchased Inkfish and the private deep-sea exploration platform, Hadal Exploration System, in 2022. Just this month, he invested some of his staggering $9.5 billion net worth in custom yacht builder Oceanco, and he's known to go scuba diving on his lunch breaks.

Basically, I want to differentiate Newell from your average, bored multibillionaire buying things just to buy things. He might be doing that, but he's at least proven himself to be genuinely interested in the thing he's buying.

Gabe Newell says he ditched Microsoft and made Valve and Half-Life to prove "a better approach to game design" at a time where "there were more people using Doom than using Windows"

Billionaire Valve co-founder, superyacht enthusiast, and, notably, not a movie star Gabe Newell thinks film directors – and everyone else, really – should start using AI like "some 19-year-old kid in his or her bedroom," as he recently told YouTuber Zalkar Saliev in a new interview (spotted by PC Gamer).

While I'd rather not imagine what "some 19-year-old kid" is doing in their bedroom with AI on account of the various "crazy, sexy jealous boyfriend" chatbots Instagram keeps recommending me, Newell argues that these people are just thinking, "'Oh, you guys really don't understand this. I actually use this tool.'" So it's dangerous to miss out on an opportunity to be young at heart, because AI will "impact pretty much every single business."

Including show business, baby. "If you're a filmmaker and you don't understand how to use AI, you're really going to struggle in the not too distant future," Newell says.

"I'm [picking] filmmaking because I think [AI] is going to be, like, 10 times as significant as the impact of CGI was on filmmaking, in terms of the value being accomplished with those technologies, and how it would affect your career trajectory in the filmmaking industry," Newell continues, his mind perhaps wandering to one of his superyachts and making him forget that directors don't necessarily create CGI themselves.

There's another problem, too: the major movie industry is already trying to implement generative AI – and it's failing because of how legally murky and literally hideous the tech is.

In any case, Newell says AI's influence can be predicted if you take CGI and "multiply that by an order of magnitude."

All I can say is no AI video has ever reproduced even a pinch of the emotional reaction I had seeing Pamela Voorhees' severed head at the end of Friday the 13th – and it was made of latex.

Valve boss Gabe Newell says passion wasn't enough to create Steam, Half-Life, and Portal: "Have people around you that you can trust."

Custom yacht builder Oceanco has announced Valve co-founder and president Gabe Newell as a new shareholder – but assures "this is not about buying a yacht company."

In a new public announcement, privately owned custom yacht builder Oceanco, which is based in the Netherlands, is revealed as having entered "a new chapter with Gabe Newell – founder of Valve, tech pioneer, and longtime supporter." The company continues, explaining how it's "time for Oceanco's next ownership" as Omani billionaire Mohammed Al Barwani and family move on but "remain active in the yachting world."

The statement goes on to describe Newell's interest in Oceanco. "Gabe Newell is not entering this world as a financier or a strategist, but as a hands-on visionary who respects the sea, the craft, and above all, the people who make it possible," read the company's words. "He wants Oceanco to continue on what it already does best: placing people first." It doesn't sound all that far-fetched, as Newell is indeed a known yacht enthusiast and scuba diver.

"This is not about buying a yacht company," concludes Oceanco. "It's about plugging into a team and exploring what kind of future they can create when nothing holds them back." The company then outlines its values: "Human-first. Ocean-minded. Future-focused. Welcome to Oceanco's next journey." Although this news doesn't have much to do with Valve itself, it's interesting to see Newell's hobbies outside of gaming and technology blossom.

After all, the Steam mastermind has a mind-boggling $9.5 billion net worth he can use when investing in his new passions – yachts being a major one, apparently.

Valve billionaire Gabe Newell says businesses should "listen to your customers and focus on them," putting employees, partners, and customers before capital

Steam, like Rome, wasn't built in a day. And just like the ancient city itself, for many of us, it feels like it's always been a part of our lives. Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of Valve, the company that made Half-Life, Portal, and PC's biggest gaming storefront, gave a rare interview and shared a tip for how to succeed: surround yourself with people you can trust.

In an interview with YouTuber Zalkar Saliev (spotted by our friends at PC Gamer), when asked how to succeed, Newell says, "The tactics I would suggest are: make sure that you have people around you that you can trust, that you can have transparent communications with and just engage with them to sort of think about how you can get better."

It sounds like simple advice, but often simple advice is the best. If you can't rely on the people around you to be honest, how will you ever know if what you're doing is actually any good? I'd rather get constructive feedback than insincere praise any day of the week.

Unfortunately, "it's never, like, 'follow your passion,'" Newell continues. "Sounds like a great idea, but lots of people follow their passions right into a crater, you know?" Passion is obviously important, but it's not always enough, especially in this day and age.

But, don't just take Newell's word for everything. He adds: "And then there's a selection bias, or a survival bias, where people who are successful then go back and say 'it's because I wear a yellow shirt. Everybody should wear a yellow shirt!' And it's correlation, it's not causation."

Take lessons from success stories like Valve and whatever else inspires you, but make sure you're tailoring advice to fit your unique situation, not just following what others did and expecting the same results.

And while you're here, check out the best Steam games you can play today.

Becoming a billionaire doesn't come as a product of a specific formula that just anybody can follow, reveals Valve president Gabe Newell – as it was in his case, it's often due to luck.

Speaking in a recent interview with Zalkar Saliev on YouTube, Newell answers with what he thinks the difference is between billionaires and regular Joe Schmoes: luck. "In my case, it was luck, and it was being surrounded by really great people," Newell, whose reported net worth sits at about $9.5 billion, explains. "I'm not going to speak broadly. I haven't ever bothered to study the subject of billionaires and so on."

The Valve boss continues, describing how correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation in regards to what makes a billionaire. "Whenever I read anything about it, any of the analysis is really unsound. There's this thing called survivor bias, where if you study the people who are in a certain category, you don't realize that just because they share a characteristic, there was no causality to it at all. In my case, I was very lucky in multiple dimensions."

How, though? "I've had the good fortune to, at the beginning of my career, work with people like Neil Konzen, Doug Klunder, and Jeff Harbers," admits Newell, describing some of the earlier Microsoft employees he worked alongside during the 90s. The Steam mastermind goes on to say he was "lucky enough to be around people like them" and "having the roll of the dice continue to go in my way" after departing Microsoft to found Valve in 1996.

Newell concludes: "I think that's how I've ended up where I am. I mean, it'd be great to say I'm just this absolutely fucking wonderful person and I earned all of this and this expresses my awesomeness, but there was an awful lot of luck that went into it." Hey – two things can be true at once, right? The Valve lead's words do make sense, though. When it comes to being a billionaire, everything must fall into place perfectly… and that calls for some luck.

He discusses more throughout the interview, sharing everything from his daily routine to his thoughts on AI, and some handy business advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Valve billionaire Gabe Newell says businesses should "listen to your customers and focus on them," putting employees, partners, and customers before capital

In a more detailed unpacking of Valve's origins, co-founder Gabe Newell says the company and its flagship release, Half-Life, were partly a "response" to what he saw as out-of-touch practices at Microsoft, where he worked early in his career.

In a new interview with Zalkar Saliev, Newell reflects on the ideas and motivations of Valve's earliest days, when it was more of a nascent idea than an underdog company. At the time, he pushed hard on Doom as an example of how games could go beyond the old way of insular models.

"Id was out-distributing Microsoft with Doom," Newell recalls. "They had a completely alternate model of how to reach customers and engage with customers that I thought was super interesting, to the point that there were more people using Doom than were using Windows when there was a big survey done. It was also considered to be the most graphically advanced game. You couldn't see anything like Doom that would run on the consoles or run in arcades."

Newell says he reached out to id Software to offer to port Doom to Windows, but personally began to ponder the viability of Microsoft's way of doing things at all. Newell had his eyes on the internet, but Microsoft seemed mired in old means of distribution and resellers "that was missing the opportunity represented by the advent of networking."

These embers would eventually become the fire at Valve's core as Newell considered "the kind of company you would design" with this new era in mind. He points to how businesses evolved throughout the 20th century along with technology, and how "you'd want to redesign your businesses to take advantage of that relative transition."

"I enjoyed playing video games, and used that as an excuse to say, oh, I could go design a video game company and have very strong opinions about what the opportunities were to build more interesting video games, and Half-Life was certainly an expression of those concepts," Newell continues.

"I was willing to put my money where my mouth was on the design of the game and on the design of the company, and that's when we started Valve. And that's where the ideas for Half-Life came from. It was really a response to looking at the opportunities to build what I thought was going to be a better approach to game design. And if I was wrong, I'd have to go back to Microsoft."

I'll spoil it for you now: Newell did not, in fact, have to go back to Microsoft. That Half-Life game really took off, didn't it? And its patch tool is now the premier destination for PC gaming altogether.

Valve's Gabe Newell predicts AI will lead to a "funny situation" where "people who don't know how to program" could be "more effective" than people "who've been programming for a decade."

The key to leading a financially successful business is "creating value for people," says Valve lead Gabe Newell – and that means focusing on customers, employees, and partners.

Speaking in a recent interview with Zalkar Saliev on YouTube, Newell explains what advice he would give people considering starting a new business – and also describes what interested first-time entrepreneurs should avoid doing. "I see a lot of people go into situations thinking that what they need is a pitch document to VCs to raise capital, and that's a deeply distracted beginning to an organization," says the Valve president.

"If you're creating value for people," continues Newell, "the capital will come your way, and probably at a reduced cost than it would be otherwise. Having a big bunch of capital and then saying, 'Oh, I guess all those lies we told in our pitch deck, but now we have to go and, you know, hire a whole bunch of people to be on this trajectory' – I think that's a great way of destroying a bunch of money and wasting a bunch of people's time."

The lead then outlines what people should focus on: "I think the key is to ignore all of the distractions around it and just focus on, 'how do we make our customers happier,' right? If you listen to your customers and focus on them, it's ridiculously easier to build a business. The focus should always be on your customers, on your partners, and on your employees, and then everything else will fall into place over time."

Newell also shares his thoughts on the future of artificial intelligence elsewhere in Saliev's interview, admitting that he suspects AI will eventually lead to a "funny situation" where "people who don't know how to program" could be "more effective" than people "who've been programming for a decade" – while I'm not personally sure I'd agree with that take, I'd say his thoughts on starting a business are insightful.

Valve boss Gabe Newell shares his "daily routine," which is shockingly like his Steam God persona: "I get up, I work, I go scuba diving, work some more" then "go on a second scuba dive or I go to the gym"

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell is very big on AI. In a recent interview snippet from Zalkar Saliev, Newell calls AI a "cheat code" that will affect "pretty much every single business."

This follows another section of the same interview, expected to be released in full sometime today, July 21, which saw Newell predict a "funny situation" where "people who don't know how to program" could use AI to become "more effective developers of value" than people who have been "programming for a decade."

Asked for advice on how young people can achieve success, Newell again argues that AI will be a game-changer across industries and roles.

"There was pre-computer and then there was post-computer," he begins. "There was pre-internet and there was post-internet. I think it's incredibly obvious that machine learning systems, AI systems, are going to profoundly impact pretty much every single business. So if I had to point to a technology transition to get in front of, it's to figure out how to use AI to do anything better.

"If you want to be an accountant, learn AI. If you're going to be an attorney, learn AI. If you're going to be a programmer, make sure that you know how to use the tools that are comfortable with those programming concepts. And that all seems super obvious."

Newell's comments on AI in relation to programming, specifically, seem a bit softer here compared to his previously released thoughts on AI expertise outweighing programming experience in some cases. Here, he zeroes in on using the right tools for the job, whereas some AI devotees have championed the tech as a catch-all replacement, and Newell's previous remarks were interpreted by some as leaning more toward that extreme.

Other Valve folks, notably a Deadlock designer, have also supported the power of AI systems like ChatGPT as a tool, but concerns across – and not exclusive to – the games industry remain over the accuracy and reliability of generative AI, as well as the risk that premature overinvestment in AI could lead to layoffs and mistakes.

Games have had several run-ins with AI already, from the only recently suspended SAG-AFTRA strike over AI protections and better wages, to specific examples like a Persona artist who trained an AI model to imitate his style and found that it wasn't worth it. Countless devs have also argued against the theft and unoriginality baked into generative AI art. "I think it does real harm to artists of all kinds," said Balatro creator Localthunk.

Newell, in his soft retirement as a Steam billionaire, will of course have a radically different perspective on the real-world impact of AI. His emphatic recommendation doesn't end there, either.

"You know, there are a lot of people who are incredibly successful simply because they were the first person in finance at their company to learn how to use Lotus 1-2-3, right?" Newell continues, referring to an old Lotus Software spreadsheet system. "Everybody else was still doing accounting in traditional ways. You could look like a super genius just because you knew how to use a desktop computer and a spreadsheet.

"Similarly, on the internet, there were the companies and individuals who saw the opportunity and took advantage of those opportunities to create more value, either as an individual or as a corporation, and they zoomed ahead of everybody else.

"So essentially, AI is going to be a cheat code for people who want to take advantage of it."

Valve boss Gabe Newell shares his "daily routine," which is shockingly like his Steam God persona: "I get up, I work, I go scuba diving, work some more" then "go on a second scuba dive or I go to the gym."

Valve Corporation's co-founder and memeable internet man Gabe Newell says the entire culture of starting businesses by pitching to venture capitalists first is a good way to waste a whole lot of time, and you're better off, you know, actually providing value for people. Who knew?

The superyacht enthusiast might spend all of his days working and scuba diving, but it's a luxury he's been given after opening one of the most profitable tech giants on the planet. Valve's come a long way since beginning life as the beloved developer of Half-Life and Team Fortress - it's now essentially the Steam Corporation, running the de facto PC storefront that takes a 30% cut on every penny you spend on the platform.

So, Gaben's in a unique position to be dishing out advice to startups, which is exactly what he did in a slightly odd chat with business-forward YouTuber Zalkar Saliev. "I see a lot of people that go into situations thinking that what they need is a pitch document to VCs to raise capital, and that's a deeply distracted beginning to an organisation," says Newell. "If you're creating value for people the capital will come your way. Probably at a reduced cost than it would be otherwise."

"Having a big bunch of capital and then saying 'Oh, I guess all those lies we told in our pitch doc, now we have to go and, you know, hire a whole bunch of people to be on this trajectory', I think that's a great way of destroying a bunch of money and wasting a bunch of peoples' time."

"The key is to ignore all the distractions around and just focus on 'how do we make our customers happier', right? If you listen to your customers and focus on them it's ridiculously easier to build a business," he adds. "But the focus should always be on your customers, and on your partners, and on your employees. And then everything else will fall into place over time."

Valve's Gabe Newell predicts AI will lead to a "funny situation" where "people who don't know how to program" could be "more effective" than people "who've been programming for a decade"

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell is a downright mythical figure among PC gamers, and a new interview with the man isn't doing anything to break that illusion. Certainly, we have to ask: is a man who spends his work breaks scuba diving multiple times a day truly a normal human like the rest of us?

"I get up, I work, I go scuba diving, work some more," Newell says in an interview when asked about his daily routine. "I either go on a second scuba dive or I go to the gym and work out. I live on a boat, so I just hang out with everybody on the boat. Then I work."

Hearing Newell talk about living on a boat and going for multiple daily scuba dives is pretty surreal - almost as surreal as seeing this interview take place on a YouTube channel with just 37 subscribers. I had not heard of interviewer Zalkar Saliev before today, and I have no idea how he scored an interview with the notoriously reclusive Gaben but, well, this is the reality in which we find ourselves.

"I work seven days a week," Newell adds. "I'm working from my bedroom, as you can tell. I like working. It's fun. To me, it doesn't feel like work. The kinds of things that I get to do every day are super awesome. I've said it before, but when you retire, you want to stop doing your horrible job and then go do what is sort of most fun and entertaining. So in that sense, I've been retired for a long time."

I guess as someone who writes about video games for a living, I can relate to the notion of a fun job, but I'm not quite to the 'hanging out with my friends on a boat all day' stage of my career. But then, I didn't facilitate the creation of one of the biggest gaming marketplaces in the world, either, and I suspect being a multibillionaire adds to the ways you get to set your daily routine.

Elsewhere in the interview, Newell shared some thoughts on the future of AI, suspecting that the tech will lead to a "funny situation" where "people who don't know how to program" could be "more effective" than people "who've been programming for a decade." That's perhaps a less endearing take from Gaben, but hey - he's only human.

Check out the best Steam Deck games if you want to live in the garden Gaben built.

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell broke his latest period of silence in an interview with a YouTube channel that currently has 30 subscribers and seven videos to discuss his influencer-worthy daily routine, as well as his thoughts on the AI-filled future and how to build a business.

The bizarre interview shorts are legit, Valve confirmed to PC Gamer, and part of a bigger conversation coming later this month. Across two videos, Newell digs into his business background and industry predictions. Asked about the value of investing in the technical side of AI or simply learning how to use AI tools, he responded: "I think it's both."

"I think the more you understand what underlies these current tools, the more effective you are at taking advantage of them," Newell says of AI. "But I think we'll be in this funny situation where people who don't know how to program who use AI to scaffold their programming abilities will become more effective developers of value than people who've been programming for a decade.

"Even if you're just a pure tool user, you're gonna find that the gains to utilizing those tools are very, very high. But I think your ability to use those tools will continue to improve the more you understand the underlying methods and mindsets of people developing machine learning systems. So I think it's both, and I think they're highly complementary."

Newell's argument seems to be that effectively integrating AI tools into programming practices could be a big difference maker, even when put on the scale opposite additional years of experience. He doesn't sound quite as ravenous as folks like EA, which have been calling generative AI specifically "the very core of our business" since last year, but Newell clearly puts stock in the tech.

Last year, a Valve engineer working on Deadlock said he cracked the game's new matchmaking algorithm using a code base provided by ChatGPT. "I think there are some skeptics who don't get how amazing this tool is," he wrote.

Separately, Newell fielded a more general question about advice to folks planning or starting businesses. He dismissed the "deeply distracted" idea that businesses start with a pitch to raise capital, focusing instead on "creating value for people."

"The capital will come your way, probably at a reduced cost than it would be otherwise," he says. "Having a big bunch of capital and then saying, 'Oh, I guess all those lies we told in our pitch dek, now we have to go out and hire a bunch of people to be on this trajectory.' I think that's a great way of destroying a bunch of money and wasting a bunch of people's time.

"So I think the key is to ignore all the distractions around it and just focus on, how do we make our customers happier? If you listen to your customers and focus on them, it's ridiculously easier to build a business. The focus should always be on your customers and on your partners and on your employees. And then everything else will fall into place over time."

It's hard to argue with these comments in the context of Newell's success and reputation as well as Valve's growth, which were largely fueled by turning Steam into the most dominant store in PC gaming and, handily, the best store for game discoverability across all platforms. I'm sure plenty of devs and players would like Valve to listen to just a few more things, and it's never good to be too trusting of any company, even a private one like Valve which certainly could've done worse things with the near-monopoly it's established, but PC gaming is the way it is today in part due to the enormous impact of Steam.

Earlier this year, former Valve CMO Monica Harrington, who worked closely with Newell at many points, shared the inside story of forcing a publisher's hand with the threat that Newell and his team "would never ship another game."

Newell made another rare appearance last year for Valve's 20th anniversary Half-Life 2 documentary.

Summer Game Fest is right around the corner – literally, it's later today – and there's a lot to be excited about with over 20 confirmed publishers to be present. However, there's a huge faction of gamers that currently couldn't be bothered with all of that promised excitement; they'd rather stalk Valve founder Gabe Newell's yacht to see if it docks near the YouTube Theater where the Summer Game Fest is taking place.

This meticulous tracking is due to Half-Life fans hoping for news on Half-Life 3 – a game that has been subject to much speculation, mainly over its actual existence. Still, Valve is not one of the confirmed publishers to be present at the event and given that final rehearsals for the event have already taken place, it's doubtful Newell is on his way to represent Valve.

As Kotaku noted, two days ago fans in the Half-Life subreddit noted that on VesselFinder, a site that allows public tracking of those sailing the high seas, Newell's yacht seemingly arrived in California. However, upon looking myself at his ship's information on the site, his destination is marked to be a port in San Diego, with an estimated arrival of June 7 in the afternoon. Unfortunately, that's a bit late considering that the Summer Game Fest live stream begins in just a few hours live from Los Angeles. But hey, who's a little hopeful delusion hurting here?

Half-Life 3 has been one of the most elusive games, with its existence yet to be confirmed, and hope for it previously having been considered an incurable disease. Lately, however, Half-Life 3 has seen some tangible traction within the leaks and internet sleuthing departments, and after previous leaks from Valve became the actual, real-life game Half-Life: Alyx, fans are more convinced than ever about Half-Life 3 being in their future.

Now, is Half-Life 3 in their future tonight? No, most likely, almost definitely not. As one fan acknowledged on the Half-Life subreddit, "I am insane and this is not happening right?" But the definitive answer won't come until Summer Game Fest is done and through, so I suppose we can all let them have their fun until then, right?

Valve leads considered making a "mediocre" game before Half-Life to build the team up, but original marketing exec said "if you do that, the company will fail"

From the moment it was revealed, it felt like 1998's Half-Life was destined to be a massive success. However, while everyone was celebrating just how cool the game looked ahead of time, some within Valve weren't sure they could live up to the lofty expectations.

While speaking at the 2025 Game Developers Conference (GDC), former chief marketing officer at Valve Monica Harrington talked about how the game came together. The reception to the game's E3 1998 demo had netted the game a 'Best Action Game' award, but while that would've been a high for most, not everyone was inspired with confidence. "Afterwards, one of the core developers came up to me and told me that Gabe had promised things that they couldn't possibly deliver."

The Half-Life E3 1998 demonstration showed off a ton of different scenarios (which have since been archived online), and it was undeniably very impressive for 1998, so it's no wonder some of the developers may have been afraid. But Harrington recalled, "Ultimately, of course, that developer was wrong - whatever magic Gabe promised actually could be delivered. The developers just didn't know it yet."

Unsurprisingly, it did deliver in the end, with the game being a massive commercial and critical success. The game went on to pick up a metric ton of game of the year awards, and keeping in mind this was 1998, where we also had Metal Gear Solid, Ocarina of Time, Crash Bandicoot 3, Banjo Kazooie, and many more bangers, it puts just how impressive Valve's debut title was.

Harrington also revealed that she threatened that Valve would never make another game after Half-Life if Sierra didn't rework a contract for the game.

If you've been playing Helldivers 2 since it first launched last year, then there's a good chance you're a veteran of Malevelon Creek. Dubbed "robot Vietnam" due to its dense jungle and intense fights, those early days of the game when our stratagems were weaker and we hadn't unlocked all the ship modules were brutally difficult. But do you remember Mort? And do you know why Gabe Newell almost lost it for Super Earth?

At a recent GDC talk, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt remembers Malevelon Creek and Mort. "Mort was a planet that we just made, and we didn't care too much about it, but the community cared greatly," Pilestedt says. It wasn't essential for winning the Galactic War, we just didn't want to lose the fight there after taking such a battering on Malevelon Creek.

A lot of the liberation and defend objectives for planets are timed, and "the community came down to, like, 20 minutes for win or lose," remembers Pilestedt. "And then suddenly everybody was faced with an image saying 'please wait democratically' and a buffering spinner. The entire PC community got disconnected. There were places calling us, like, 'what's going on with your servers?' It's like, 'we don't know. We can't see anything wrong with our servers.' And it was our friend Gabe N[ewell, the owner of Steam]. It was [a] Steam update."

After the update, there was only ten minutes left to save Mort, so Helldivers had to come up with some clever tactics to win. "Some of the community members, they started promoting that once you're done with the primary mission objectives, that is when the data is sent to the back end [to change the liberation and defend percentage], so you don't have to extract," Pilestedt explains. "So they're like, 'as soon as you're done with the primary mission, you just kill the entire squad over and over. That will be our sacrifice.'"

Freedom isn't free, but we managed to save Mort with just 20 seconds to spare, Pilestedt says. "We were sitting there at the office with popcorn," he says. The way we as a community decide to engage with the Galactic War is one of my favorite things about Helldivers 2. A developer has said the studio is working on how to encourage participation and rebalance the end-game, and I'm excited to see what they come up with.

In the meantime, check out some of the best online games you can play right now.

There's a world where a dispute with publisher Sierra might've left Half-Life as the first and last game Valve ever published, according to the developer's original chief marketing officer, Monica Harrington. In an effort to wrest the rights to the Half-Life IP away from Sierra, Harrington threatened that Valve might just abandon game development entirely.

In a talk at the Game Developers Conference this week, Harrington spoke on her role with Valve from the company's founding through much of its early success. The original Half-Life was, of course, published by Sierra, well before Valve was distributing its own games. Harrington says "there were a few things I didn't know" about the terms of that contract until she read it some time after Half-Life shipped.

"Chief among them was that Sierra had the option for two more games, essentially under the same terms, and this is despite the fact that we had produced a monster hit," Harrington explains. "So under this scenario, Valve would fund all but a million dollars of the cost of developing a game, and Sierra would retain all the IP rights and pay about 15%. It felt insane."

While Harrington is rarely credited as a Valve founder, she was right there with her then-husband Mike Harrington, who is typically listed alongside Gabe Newell as a co-founder. "I knew that if Mike and I were to get anything out of our ownership position in Valve, the prospects for the company needed to be much, much brighter," she explains.

There were several issues Harrington wanted to tackle to improve those prospects, and one of them was regaining control of the Half-Life franchise from Sierra. "With Gabe's OK, I met with Valve's attorney to plan out a strategy for regaining the IP for Half-Life and all future games," she explains. "And essentially, my bargaining position was that Valve and Sierra would either rework that contract, or Gabe and Mike and the team would pivot to something else entirely and Valve would never ship another game.

"It wasn't an idle threat – we weren't going to take on all of the risk to make other people rich," Harrington continues. "Besides, I knew Gabe had interesting ideas that had nothing to do with games."

If this story sounds familiar, it's because Harrington also recounted it in a Medium post last year, which has now been expanded in her GDC talk. One of the prospects proposed for a potential non-gaming business was an "online entertainment platform" to be developed in partnership with Amazon. While that deal fell through, Valve was able to successfully wrest control of Half-Life – and its own game development future – back from Sierra. The rest, as they say, is history.

Valve was "pretty close to going bankrupt" until it was saved from a pre-Half-Life 2 lawsuit by a summer intern who happened to major in Korean language studies.

Valve as a company and Gabe Newell himself were on the verge of bankruptcy in the days before the launch of Steam and Half-Life 2, thanks to a lawsuit from publisher Vivendi Games. Disaster was narrowly averted thanks to the fact that Valve just happened to have access to a summer intern who could translate Korean.

Back in 2004, Valve had already launched a handful of the best FPS games ever made, including Half-Life and Counter-Strike, which had both been published by Sierra Entertainment, a subsidiary of Vivendi Games. While Valve intended to self-publish Half-Life 2 on the then-new Steam platform, Vivendi had retail publishing rights to the game. Ahead of Half-Life 2's release, Vivendi was distributing copies of Valve's games to cyber cafes in Asia - something which, Valve argued, Vivendi did not have the right to do.

The ensuing legal battle lasted through 2005, when the two companies settled with what sure seemed like favorable terms for Valve: Vivendi would give up retail distribution rights and transfer all those cyber cafe licenses to Valve. This has all long been a matter of public record, but Valve's new 20th anniversary documentary on the making of Half-Life 2 reveals just how dire the situation was at the time and just how lucky the company got in managing to force that settlement.

Valve attorney Karl Quackenbush explains that Vivendi initially hired a small law firm to defend the publisher against Valve's lawsuit. "There was some initial skirmishing about discovery, there were some disputes and motions that had to be decided by the judge, and those went all Valve's way," Quackenbush says. "And then suddenly the law firm disappeared. They hired a big scary law firm from San Francisco. They thought, 'Okay, Valve's had some success in this case, and so we need to change their mindset from "We think we're gonna be successful" to "We're gonna be destroyed."' The next thing we knew, here comes this big stack of counterclaims, everything from canceling the 2001 agreement to obtaining ownership of all the Half-Life IP to keeping us from doing Steam, you name it."

Vivendi's countersuit named not just Valve itself, but COO Scott Lynch and president Gabe Newell - along with both their spouses - personally as defendants in the case. Lynch characterized Vivendi's sentiment as "Well, we're gonna put Valve out of business and then we're gonna put Valve out of business and then we're gonna bankrupt the two of you."

"It's not a legal strategy, it's basically trying to intimidate you," Newell says. "In other words, they're saying, 'Not only are we going to take all this money from the company, but we're gonna take money from you personally as well.'" With legal fees piling up and Half-Life 2 deep in development, Newell adds that "the company was pretty close to going bankrupt. I was pretty close to going personally bankrupt. We went all in. It's like, there was no money left."

As part of the legal process of discovery, Valve asked for information about Vivendi's operations in Korea, where much of the disputed distribution to cyber cafes was happening. Vivendi responded by dumping giant piles of documents in Valve's lap - all in Korean.

"One of the things they were doing is just dumping huge amounts of discovery on it to force us to go and just have somebody go and look through it," Newell explains. "It's like, 'Oh, look, they ordered sandwiches again,' right? It has nothing to do with the lawsuit, it's just an attempt to overwhelm us with tens of millions of pages of documents on the assumption that there's nothing in it that will be particularly problematic for their case, that we'll eventually just either spend a bunch of money, which plays into their hands, or we'll just eventually give up because it's finding a needle in the haystack. And then we found the needle in the haystack, and that changed things quite dramatically."

That needle was discovered by a summer intern who's only identified as "Andrew" in the documentary. Andrew was a native Korean speaker, so he was put to work looking through all these documents in order to find something useful. As Quackenbush explains, "He said, 'Well, there's these other emails between these vice presidents, where one says something like, "Hey, we destroyed those Valve documents like you asked."' And I said, 'Are you sure it says that?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's what it says.'"

Obviously, destroying evidence is a bit of a no-no in the legal world. Vivendi disputed Andrew's mistranslation, but he was both a native Korean speaker and had a major in Korean language studies at UCLA. As Newell recalls, following the revelation of this email, the judge essentially concluded that "All matters of fact are now according to Valve. You don't get to contest any of those. Now we're just discussing how much you're gonna have to pay and what the damages are." And thus, Valve survived to change PC gaming forever.

Half-Life 2: Episode 3 never happened because Valve lead Gabe Newell thought just “pushing the story forward” wasn’t a good enough reason to make a game.

Valve founder and president Gabe Newell says there's a simple reason Half-Life 2: Episode 3 never came to fruition - and it's because he simply couldn't find a good enough reason to complete the final piece of the sequel.

Speaking in the recent 20th-anniversary Half-Life 2 documentary, Valve developers take a moment to look back at the shooter's never completed Episode 3 and why progress on it came to a halt. Level designer David Riller explains that the studio was struggling with "element fatigue" and felt it needed to "go bigger or do something else." According to Riller, devs had already "really explored a lot of what made sense in the Half-Life universe and setting."

Then Left 4 Dead entered the spotlight and the team working on Episode 3 moved on to help ship the zombie title instead. Engineer David Speyre reveals that the devs felt as though they had missed their opportunity with Episode 3 after Left 4 Dead successfully took off, and admits it was "tragic and almost comical" - thinking back "in hindsight," he feels that they "could've definitely gone back and spent two years to make Episode 3."

Gabe Newell, on the other hand, doesn't seem to think that wrapping Episode 3 up would've ever worked out as he couldn't find the reason to do so - and doing it solely for the story isn't good enough. "You can't get lazy and say, 'Oh, we're moving the story forward," says the lead, describing why that doesn't work. "That's copping out of your obligation to gamers. Yes, of course, they love the story. They love many, many aspects of it."

Newell continues: "But saying that your reason to do it is because people want to know what happens next, you know - we could've shipped it, it wouldn't have been that hard. The failure, my personal failure was being stumped." The founder "couldn't figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward," so the project came to a standstill and never picked back up - and in the end, we got neither a Half-Life 2: Episode 3 nor a Half-Life 3.

Check out some of the best PC games available right now.

I beat Hideo Kojima. Not in a physical fight, because he's probably across the other side of the globe right now and, if I did ever bump into him, my first instinct wouldn't be to throw hands. And not in a metaphorical, "I overcame Death Stranding" kinda way. I beat Hideo Kojima, or his memeified counterpart, in a videogame demo.

Steam Next Fest always brings hundreds of playable demos to the digital storefront, and among the festivities this month was Meme Mayhem, an idle roguelike that has you fight internet trolls by chucking emojis at them across the battlefields of social media. 

After a couple rounds fighting trolls, you eventually scroll across a minor or major internet celebrity who serve as boss fights. Sometimes they come in the form of a generically cute cat that might have gone viral, or the perennially depressed toad meme, or a Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson lookalike called The Stone, who didn't hesitate in the slightest to bully me on the in-game social media board.

That's when I came across Kideo, a spectacled man with instantly recognizable hair and a knack for short-form film reviews. He wanted to fight me for unclear reasons, but at least his defeat gave him painful inspiration for his next "great game story," or so he says.

Meme Mayhem's main menu teases a bunch of other playable characters that were locked in my demo (that or I didn't manage to unlock them in time), including a Strong Doge and... Gaven, a big-bearded character who bears an uncanny resemblance to Gabe Newell, Valve's very own co-founder and an internet meme in his own unique way. 

Meme Mayhem's general concept and its slightly cringe execution might turn a lot of folks off, but the promise of playing as Gabe Newell while fighting Hideo Kojima is too alluring to resist. You can try Meme Mayhem's demo now on Steam or wait to make Kideo fight Gaven when the full game comes out this July.

Check out our upcoming indie games list for more cool, unexpected surprises.

Valve founder Gabe Newell has shared his thoughts on realism in games, revealing that he's never thought of it as "fun."

In the recently-released Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary, the Valve CEO reflects on the development and history of the studio's beloved game. During one portion of the documentary, Newell talks about realism in games, and how he's not really a fan for a pretty understandable reason. 

Talking about Half-Life's development, Newell said: "You'd have these conversations where you'd be sitting in a design review and somebody [would] say, that's not realistic." The developer continues: "And you're like, 'okay, what does that have?' like, 'explain to me why that's interesting.' Because in the real world, I have to write up lists of stuff I have to go to the grocery store to buy. And I have never thought to myself that realism is fun. I go play games to have fun." 

I can totally see where Newell is coming from, that being said I am guilty of trying to pay a mortgage to a cartoon tanuki for a house I don't actually own - something many Animal Crossing: New Horizons fans can relate to. 

It seems the Valve founder's words have resonated with a lot of fans. For example, DUSK developer Dillon Rogers shared the quote along with the caption: "I need to pin this at the top of my Steam forums. So many people do not understand the difference between something being realistic vs. something being engaging." Continuing in a thread, Rogers explained: "Something can be a great and in-depth simulation of something real."

Talking about the bread-making goblins in Arkane Studios' Arx Fatalis, the developer adds: "'Realism' is not always the goal. Realism would be 'it should take hours to bake.'" Rogers then goes on to summarise the difference between realism and something being realistic in games: "A simulation evokes the feeling and logic of something, and operates on its believability. It can be designed to be a compelling representation of an action. But that is not the same as 'it is realistic.'" 

Gabe Newell isn't the only person revisiting Half-Life on its 25th anniversary. Dario Casali, who started working at Valve back in 1996, has also been taking a trip down memory lane over on their YouTube channel - revealing that Half-Life could have been called 'Fallout,' as well as other surprising names like 'Dirt', 'Bolt', or even 'Trash'.

Elsewhere in the documentary, Gabe Newell echoes that famous (and fake) Shigeru Miyamoto quote: "Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever."

Gabe Newell has defended game delays with his own version of that fake Miyamoto quote.

Half-Life has just turned 25, if you can believe it, and to celebrate the original development team has been sharing its experience of working on the renowned FPS in a new documentary posted on YouTube. 

As well as reminiscing about Valve's early days and the work that went into designing and implementing Half-Life's characters, levels and narrative, the team spoke of the challenges they faced getting the game out the door and the decision to delay its launch in order to do justice to their vision and make the experience as enjoyable as possible for the player. 

Looking back, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell doesn't regret pushing the game's release back a year to November 1998. As he sees it, the wait for a game is finite, but releasing it before it's ready can ruin it forever. "Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever," he says. "We could try to force this thing out the door, but that's not the company we want to be, that's not the people we want to be. That's not the relationship we want to have with our customers."

If Newell's stance sounds familiar, it's because it's awfully similar to Shigeru Miyamoto's famous quote, "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." The story goes that Miyamoto was referring to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time here, but there's no actual evidence to suggest the legendary designer ever uttered these words.

While it's less relevant in modern games where updates and patches can cover up all manner of sins, Newell does have a point. It's much easier to forget you had to wait an extra few months than it is to erase the feeling of disappointment if a game isn't up to scratch.

Valve also celebrated Half-Life's 25th anniversary with a massive update for the classic FPS, which restores cut content, adds new maps, and fixes old bugs. "We now consider this anniversary version of Half-Life to be the definitive version, and the one we'll continue to support going forward," Valve says.

For more great shooters, look no further than our guide to the best FPS games.

Valve writer Chet Faliszek has opened up about his time working on Team Fortress 2.

Asked by fans on TikTok to share "any Team Fortress 2 stories", Faliszek shared a behind-the-scenes anecdote on one of Valve's biggest titles.

"I think this is the first time I made Gabe cry…" Faliszek tweeted, sharing a video he posted to TikTok. "But definitely not the last."

Reminding us that "there's a whole team of really smart people that work" on Valve games, Faliszek then talked about an incident that happened "very early in TF2".

"If you remember, it used to be a military shooter," Faliszek says. "Back in 1999, it actually won E3 Game of the Year award. But as a military shooter, [it was] all smoke and mirrors. Never really existed that way.

"So we were pitching the new game, and I was a part of the team that helped come up with the pitch and go to Gabe," he adds. "And the pitch was not going well. We ended up coming back and having more of a sense of humor to it.

"And everything else was good. It's good feedback by Gabe [after] he kind of beat us up in, you know, the way that Gabe would beat you up.

"And so, I just turned with all seriousness, and I said: well, we could be the only game ever that wins E3 Game of the Year award in two separate millennia since it had won the award in '99, and it was 2004 or 2005 that we were pitching [to release] it.

"Gabe just put his head down in his hands, and I think he started crying."

"I tried," he quips at the end. 

In related TF2 news, Valve's "entire repository" - a huge bundle of assets from all of its games, including Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life Episodes 1 and 2 - leaked online back in January.

With the Team Fortress 2 bundle of assets alone weighing in at 61GB, the leak - which features assets from Portal, Counter-Strike: Source, Team Fortress 2, Day of Defeat: Source, and Half-Life 2: Episodes 1, 2, and 2's multiplayer - features thousands of assets, some of which originate from modified or cut content.

Keep up to date with all the best games still to launch this year with our guide to new games 2023.

Valve head Gabe Newell has casually declined an agreement with Microsoft to put Call of Duty on Steam in the future.

Yesterday, on December 6, Microsoft announced a pledge to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo consoles for the next 10 years. Now, Kotaku reports that Valve received a similar proposition from Microsoft, but Valve boss Gabe Newell turned down the offer from the company entirely.

"We're happy that Microsoft wants to continue using Steam to reach customers with Call of Duty when their Activision acquisition closes," Newell says. "Microsoft has been on Steam for a long time and we take it as a signal they are happy with gamers' reception to that and the work we are doing. Our job is to keep building valuable features for not only Microsoft but all Steam customers and partners."

Then, Newell reveals that "Microsoft offered and even sent us a draft agreement for a long-term Call of Duty commitment." However, the Valve head shares that it "wasn't necessary for us," chiefly because the company doesn't believe in agreements with a party that locks them into releasing games on Steam "into the distant future."

Call of Duty games have been absent from Steam since 2017, with WW2 ending the annual launches on Valve's storefront. 2022's Modern Warfare 2 ended this back in October, bringing the franchise back to Steam for a massive launch, netting publisher Activision a record $1 in just 10 days from launch. 

Valve clearly believes Microsoft will keep Call of Duty on Steam going forward entirely of their own volition. Looking at the evidence of Modern Warfare 2's massive launch after coming back to Steam, and Microsoft pledging to bring Call of Duty games to Nintendo consoles of all platforms, perhaps this belief is well-founded. 

Head over to our complete Modern Warfare 2 gun list guide for a complete up-to-date tracker of every weapon in the game. 

The year is 2022, and games industry legends have come together to cast a huge Spirit Bomb in a Dragon Ball re-enactment. 

Late last month in June, YouTube channel Mega64 uploaded the video seen just below, which is an entire re-enactment of the Majin Buu (he's the big pink guy) saga in Dragon Ball. Towards the end of the saga, a massive Spirit Bomb is unleashed, and to accomplish this herculean feat, Mega64 look to have recruited some incredibly famous faces from around the world to help out.

As such, there's like the likes of Hideo Kojima, Hideki Kamiya, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Swery, Gabe Newell, and Cliff Bleszinski all appearing near the epic conclusion of the Majin Buu re-enactment. The cast all come together to throw their arms up around the world, casting the huge Spirit Bomb that brings an ultimate end to the saga itself.

I would like to know what the negotiations were like to recruit these legends into Mega64's video. Did anyone reject a cameo? Was anything overly enthusiastic about taking part? For his part, Sakaguchi really gets stuck into the routine, so much so that when I saw a clip of this doing the rounds earlier this month, I assumed it was for a new music video.

Well, that sure was an entertaining eleven minutes. In fact, it's a feat in and of itself that Mega64 actually condensed an entire Dragon Ball arc into a five minute sequence - Dragon Ball arcs are notoriously long, and also infamously filled with filler episodes and arcs. Boy oh boy, what a time to be alive.

Head over to our new games 2022 guide for a full look at everything coming out over the remainder of the year. 

Valve boss Gabe Newell once encouraged the Left 4 Dead team to reconsider including zombies at all.

That's according to former Valve writer Chet Faliszek, who discussed Left 4 Dead's development in a recent Kiwi Talkz video (spotted by NME). Faliszek contributed to multiple Valve games including Half-Life 2: Episodes 1 and 2, both Portal games, and both Left 4 Dead games, and he's since founded his own studio to work on co-op shooter The Anacrusis, which is proudly carrying on the spirit of Left 4 Dead. But to hear Faliszek tell it, Newell wasn't totally sold on the now-iconic enemies of the franchise to begin with. 

"I remember, he's just like, well let's not do zombies, zombies are just cheesy," Faliszek said of a meeting with Newell. "They're just really cheesy. And at the time, you did not have The Walking Dead TV series and all this, right? So it was very cheesy. But as a kid who saw Dawn of the Dead at a midnight movie and was just, like, terrified, it wasn't cheesy to me. I had no idea those scenes were cheesy until watching them later."

Newell argued that the popular zombie properties of the time used the threat of the undead to tell stories about broader and larger themes, and he pushed Faliszek and the rest of the team to define what Left 4 Dead would be about. Faliszek said the game would focus on the camaraderie born from chaos – a motif that would eventually come to define the franchise – but it sounds like Newell wasn't easily satisfied and constantly pushed the development team to stress-test not only what worked, but if it was still working. 

In a tweet, Faliszek added that Gabe would push "on all aspects of the game and [make] sure we thought through the choices and didn't just accept them as the default. Learned so much from him during those days."

We reached out to Faliszek to dig deeper into the game's formative years and Newell's part in them. He clarified that "Gabe never really 'pushed away' [from zombies] as much as he just pushed on the idea. If something is in the game - why? Why is it that way? Have you thought about it? Have you considered other things? What are your options? Why did you choose this?

"This is something he taught me over time - I am slow - but you always need to step back and question any of the givens of a project because it is really easy to get lost in the work and the desire to get things done that sometimes you lose sight - is this the right thing to be getting done?" 

Zombies ultimately remained in Left 4 Dead, but Faliszek reckons that Newell's feedback helped give its zombies their own unique flavor. 

"When he asked this, besides my desire to make a game of my dreams from the midnight movies I loved growing up, I also had other good answers as we had explored the idea of how much we stray into monsters and how much we stay in the world of zombies," he tells GamesRadar. "Clearly we stray into monster territory but always sort of based it on a variation - what if this was true at the time of infection and they morphed because of it? We revisited it in [Left 4 Dead 2] as well when creating those new creatures."

Faliszek notes that The Anacrusis goes a different way: "We said what would a ship boarding party look like if you met aliens that lived their lives in space? So we have some aliens that are the commanders and some soldiers, and some almost like pets or animals."

Newell scrutinized more than Left 4 Dead's zombies, too. Faliszek recalls meeting with Newell over the game's box art, which was initially "reminiscent of the Band of Brothers profile shot." Faliszek says he wasn't a fan of the first drafts, but that Newell maintained that "it's fine not to like it but I have communicated no vision of the game or style the box should live in, and until I could do that, what should they do?" Here again, this helped articulate Left 4 Dead as we know it. 

"So in that meeting, I got out, Half-Life is a symphony orchestra, it is beautiful, it is perfect. L4D was a college rock band, noisy, messy, loud. It would have bugs – but it would be okay and people would love it. That was the start, and by the end, once I could communicate more clearly, we came up with the Zombie Apocalypse with your Friends line, which is just the right level of description and humor.

"That is not the line that would have described the very first versions of L4D but it is what L4D became as we focused more on co-op than competition," he continues. "Which is why you always have to just lift your head every so often and ask yourself those questions. Because when you have that right, it answers questions for you and it's more than marketing but an edge you can use in design decisions."

"That's why, on The Anacrusis, we started with a series of design pillars and then on occasion revisit them – are these still true? They are the game developer side of the public-facing line as we build out and find the game's public face while in early access. Our core pillar is that our games are about players working together. Co-op isn't just in the moment-to-moment gameplay but every facet of the game." 

How Back 4 Blood and The Anacrusis are building on the legacy of Left 4 Dead.

Update: A new video reveals handing out signed Steam Decks to customers was Gabe Newell's idea.

Just below, you can check out Valve's Kaci Aitchison revealing that the stunt was all the Valve president's idea. Aitchison, who accompanied Newell on his delivery run around the Seattle area - said that the video documenting the journey stemmed from the fact that he had missed interacting with customers over the past couple of years.

The delivery process didn't go entirely to plan - Aitchison mentions during the video that at least one person didn't entirely trust Valve's delivery email ahead of their arrival. Newell also commented that he was worried some people might be upset that he'd decided to sign their cases, but personally I can't imagine that being a problem.

Original: Valve boss Gabe Newell appears to be hand-delivering signed Steam Deck consoles to customers.

Over the past weekend, a few Reddit posts began to surface from users claiming to have received the Steam Deck by way of none other than Newell himself. The first post, just below, is expanded upon in the comments section, where the recipient claims that his wife received the Steam Deck from Newell, who was accompanied by an entire camera crew.

The post also reveals that Newell signed the protecting case for the Steam Deck. If the claim about the Valve boss being accompanied by a whole camera crew is true, then it's highly likely we'll be seeing footage of Newell delivering said Steam Decks at some point in the coming days or weeks.

A second post, just below, reveals Newell actually gave two people a Steam Deck each even though they didn't order one. In the comments, the user claims that they saw Newell and a camera crew going into a nearby house, and when they shouted out to greet him, he disappeared into a big van and emerged with two signed consoles for them each.

Newell's been doing a fair bit of publicity over the last year, but this is perhaps a step up from the time he made an appearance at a Q&A session in a New Zealand college. In fact, Newell just confirmed over the past weekend that the Steam Deck won't be receiving a price hike just yet. As for future price increases though, the door remains open to that possibility.

Check out our full Steam Deck review to see what we made of Valve's latest technological ambitions.

Gabe Newell, head of Valve, has confirmed that despite the popularity and scarcity of its new handheld system, there are currently no plans to increase the retail price of Steam Deck.

"I mean, part of what you do with pricing is you're making a promise to customers. [...] But we wouldn't expect to be adjusting the SKU pricing," Newell told IGN in an interview, acknowledging that initially pricing the system had been "painful" but "critical". 

It'll be good news for Steam fans who hope to lay their hands on the handheld PC but struggled to get the model they wanted in the pre-order scrum.

Newell has, however, acknowledged the team has looked at introducing "higher-end configurations" at a later date.

"Absolutely. [...] That's the great thing about the PC market, right?" Newell said. "That it just continues [...] Like a year from now, AMD is going to have better parts, right? A year from now, all the component suppliers are going to either expand capacity, expand performance, or reduce costs. 

"So, we're absolutely going to ride that as hard as we can. That's part of the thing about being in the PC space - everybody's essentially driving everybody else's price performance improvements over time."

In related news, yesterday Newell confirmed that there are currently no plans for the company to introduce a game subscription service, like Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass or EA's EA Play.

Despite the release of its highly-anticipated and all-new handheld system, Newell says that while he understands that subscription services are "clearly a popular option" with some gamers, he doesn't "think it's something [Valve] needs to do" despite their popularity.

He did, however, suggest that the company would be open to working with third-party partners such as Microsoft to "get [subscription services] on Steam".

Still undecided on Steam Deck? In our Steam Deck review, we said: "Steam Deck is everything Valve promised, a handheld with all the potential of a PC and a huge library of games ready to go," giving it 4.5 stars out of 5.

Looking for something new to get stuck into? Here are the best PC games right now.

Valve had to "very aggressive" in terms of pricing the Steam Deck, according to president and co-founder Gabe Newell.

Speaking to IGN, Newell described the balancing act the developers had to achieve when pricing the Steam Deck due to “price-performance [being] critical factors in the mobile space.” He continued, saying “we’ve had to be very aggressive, in terms of pricing on the deck [..] I want to pick this up and say oh, it all works, it’s fast, [the] price point was secondary, and painful. But that was pretty clearly a critical aspect to it.”

The device comes in three different options: the 64GB option for $399, the 256GB option for $529, and the 512GB option for $649. According to Newell himself “the only difference between those is the amount of storage, and the speed of the storage” with the 256GB option containing a NVMe SSD which could rival the likes of the PS5 and Xbox Series X. 

Newell also stated his expectations for the device noting that: "Our view is, if we're doing this right, we're going to be selling these in millions of units, and it's clearly going to be establishing a product category that ourselves and other PC manufacturers are going to be able to participate in."

If you’re considering getting one of the Steam Decks yourself, here is a rundown of what you’ll be getting: the handheld console uses a custom AMD Zen 2 APU to run it, with a quad-core Zen 2 CPU, and 16GB of Ram - which Valve says can comfortably "run the latest AAA games." It also has a battery life of two to eight hours depending on how demanding your gameplay session is and features a USB-C dock to connect it to external displays with up to 4K or 8K output. 

Those who manage to get their hands on the console will also get a protective carry case for it, with the largest model also featuring an anti-glare etched glass screen. You can find details on how to secure your console on the Steam website and find out how the pre-orders are going to work which will be live today at 10am PT/1pm ET/6pm BST. 

For ideas on what you could be playing on the Steam Deck, take a look at our best PC games list.

Valve will launch the demo-filled Steam Next Fest this week, letting Steam users try many upcoming games with no strings attached, as Gabe Newell confirmed at the PC Gaming Show. 

Newell touched on a few of the demos coming to Steam Next Fest – which will run from Wednesday, June 16 through Tuesday, June 22 – including Sable, Tiny Thor, Undead Citadel, Rogue Lords, and hundreds of others. "Oh fuck, some of those look pretty good," Newell said of the featured games, which is pretty high praise from the boss of Valve. 

Given the overall decline of game demos, Steam has been one of the most (that is, one of the few) demo-rich storefronts for several years. Various events and sales have buoyed demos in the past, but with Steam Next Fest, formerly the Steam Game Festival, Valve is aggressively offering hundreds of demos alongside dev-led livestreams to help players get a feel, literally and figuratively, for just some of the games on the horizon. 

Personally, I was especially delighted to see Sable among the Steam Next Fest lineup. I'm willing to bet that developer Shedworks is bringing the same demo I got to play last week, and if so, Steam users are in for a real treat.

"Maybe it was the floaty, atmospheric trailers, or maybe I just didn't pay close enough attention, but I never thought Sable would be such a full-fat, open-world experience," I said in my Sable preview. "I would've stuck around for the art and music alone, but Sable is so much more. I can't wait to see what else it has up its crimson sleeve."  

There's sure to be plenty to see at Steam Next Fest. While we wait for the festivities to begin, you can get a preview of the game lineup on the event's announcement page. 

Kudos to our friends at PC Gamer for another great show. Our very own showcase is up next: here's how to watch the Future Games Show Powered by WD_Black. 

Valve President Gabe Newell has teased that Steam games could be coming to consoles during a public Q&A session.

During a panel interview at Sancta Maria College in Auckland, New Zealand, Newell was asked if “Steam will be porting any games to console, or will it just stay on PC?” 

Newell’s answer was surprisingly candid, as he replied that we would “get a better idea of that by the end of this year”. The tease elicited a delightful “ooo” from the crowd, and since the video was posted online by Redditor Odysseic, the internet has gone wild with speculation.

Now the wording of both the question and the answer could be very important here. The audience member’s question can be interpreted to mean “is Steam coming to console?”, but you can also read it as “is Steam bringing any of its games to console?”. While the latter would be a big deal, the former would be an industry-shattering announcement. Of course, without further clarification from Newell, his answer has left many speculating. 

When it comes to the potential of games coming to consoles, Valve has only released one major title recently, the VR adventure Half-Life: Alyx. There's a chance that this answer is Newell teasing a port of the incredible shooter to PS VR. Of course there is also the Valve-owned Campo Santo's In The Valley of Gods, their follow-up to Firewatch, which could also be getting a console port as well. 

As for Steam itself coming to consoles, it’s hard to imagine how it would fit into the current console ecosystem. Considering that Steam is a platform for buying games, it’s unlikely that either Sony or Microsoft would allow players to just install Steam on their consoles and bypass their respective digital storefronts, let alone the fact that there might be compatibility issues when it comes to games running on platforms they weren't designed for. 

Odysseic has since posted more of the interview online, where Newell talks about how Valve is working on updates for CSGO’s anti-cheat system along with new Team Fortress 2 updates. He also answers all kinds of questions about everything from his favourite games to brain-computer interfaces. His answers can be a little difficult to make out at times, but it’s all fascinating stuff.

If Steam does come to consoles, then Xbox and PlayStation gamers will want to check out our list of the best PC games to see what they can look forward to.

Valve CEO Gabe Newell says he has "a lot of sympathy" for Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red over the controversy surrounding its recent game. 

Speaking to TVNZ, Newell said he'd "had a lot of fun" playing the futuristic RPG on PC, and praised the Polish studio's ambition. Asked what he thought about the decision to pull Cyberpunk 2077 off the PlayStation store, Newell said "well first of all, as a game developer, I have a lot of sympathy with a situation that every game developer finds themselves in regarding "trade-offs" between console and PC versions. "All I know is that there are a lot of very happy gamers in the PC space which are the ones that are most visible to us."

Despite the difficulties that CD Projekt Red faced in the months leading up to release, Newell says that "there are aspects of the game that are just brilliant, and it shows a tremendous amount of work [...] it's unfair to throw stones at any other developer, because just getting something as complex and ambitious as that out the door is pretty amazing."

The Valve CEO also said he had faith that CDPR would be able to turn the game's fortunes around. Referencing negative feedback that he's received from fans, Newell said that "when people have those kinds of reactions, my first thought is that this is an opportunity for us, and I assume that the Cyberpunk 2077 developers are similarly just using it to crank through and make improvements [...] they have a long history of doing a great job, of continuing to invest in their products over time, and I suspect that they're going to be very good at making their customers happy over time."

While the PS5 and Xbox Series X ran Cyberpunk 2077 relatively well through backwards compatibility, the game struggled on last-gen consoles, resulting in myriad glitches and performance issues for many players. CDPR has apologized for the difficult launch and promised fixes over the coming months, but those will mean a delay to the game's next-gen update.

Cyberpunk 2077 isn't the only thing Newell has been discussing his own company's future, revealing that Valve "definitely has games in development that we're going to be announcing."

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Valve has games in active development, according to boss Gabe Newell. 

Speaking with TVNZ, Newell confirmed that "we definitely have games in development that we're going to be announcing – it's fun to ship games. [Half-Life: Alyx] was great – to be back doing single-player games, that created a lot of momentum inside of the company to do more of that."

Valve has made similar statements before, hinting in 2020 that Half-Life: Alyx would not be the end of the Half-Life franchise. And as early as 2019, Valve suggested that Alyx could kick off a whole new wave of Half-Life games. 

"It’s probably no surprise that many people at Valve have been wanting to get back to the Half-Life universe for a long time, and this experience has only reinforced that," Valve programmer David Speyrer said at the time. "In the process of creating Half-Life: Alyx, we’ve had to explore new ways to tell stories with these characters and this world, and we’ve discovered a lot of new gameplay experiences that go beyond what we’ve been able to do before. Of course, we’ll have to wait and see how people react to Half-Life: Alyx once it’s out, but we’d love to continue pushing forward."

However, while Valve is conceivably working on some sort of Half-Life game, Newell didn't offer any specifics – and characteristically dismissed Half-Life 3 and Portal 3 as "moot questions." He also brushed off an inquiry about a rumored project code-named Citadel, which predates Alyx. 

Canceled Valve projects including Left 4 Dead 3 received new details in a documentary released last year. 

Valve boss Gabe Newell would rather have an Xbox Series X than a PS5. 

Newell briefly discussed his opinion of the coming console generation on The Project NZ, a New Zealand talk show (as spotted by the Xbox Series X subreddit). Asked about which console he thinks is better, Newell succinctly replies, "The Xbox." And why is it better? "Because it is," Newell says. 

Newell has been critical of both Xbox and PlayStation and the past, as well as their corporate owners. In an old interview with our sister site PC Gamer, Newell described Xbox Live as "such a train wreck that something will have to change," specifically with regards to the update process for the Xbox 360 port of Team Fortress 2. In 2012, meanwhile, he criticized the Windows 8 operating system as "a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space."

That said, Newell worked at Microsoft for 13 years, and once insisted that his first three months at the company were more valuable than his time at Harvard University. And it's not that Newell's always had a soft spot for Sony. Far from it; in 2007, he argued that the PS3 is "a waste of everyone's time" due to its confounding proprietary Cell architecture (which would prove to be a massive hurdle for PS3 developers). 

Newell doesn't really clarify his stance on the Xbox Series X, only affirming that "of the two, I would definitely go with an Xbox." But this does make a fair bit of sense given Valve and Newell's focus on PC gaming. Of the two, Microsoft's approach to the next console generation is definitely much more PC-like. Where Sony is pushing for a clear next-gen divide and emphasizing the advancements it will bring, Xbox has gone out of its way to connect multiple generations using backwards compatibility as well as services like Xbox Game Pass and Smart Delivery. 

Our own Josh West was on board with the future-facing vision Microsoft showed at the latest Xbox Games Showcase.