Gabe Newell, yacht enthusiast and the founder of one of the biggest videogame storefronts and developers on the planet, has just bought a big stonking house with his seemingly bottomless well of "I own Steam" money.

The news comes courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, which reveals that Newell has bought a property in Manalapan, Florida, for $70.8 million from Cindy and Ron McMackin. The home's previous owners certainly didn't get a bad deal, mind, having purchased it for $39 million in 2020. Ah, to be on the property ladder and to make almost $32 million just by living somewhere.

Anyway, the estate—which has about 20,000 square footage—is located on the Intracoastal Waterway and has a tunnel directly connecting the house to a slice of the ocean, as you can see in the video embedded above. It also, naturally, has a dock and boat lift. Likely for Newell's superyachts (or indeed, a smaller boat to ferry him back and forth) one of which he purchased for $500 million back in May.

It also enjoys a substantial outdoor pool, which is appropriately snazzy for a mansion that costs more than you or I'll likely see in our lifetimes. On the whole, it's an appropriate domicile for Newell, who has taken up a lot of scuba diving in recent years. Back in July of last year, Newell confirmed in a YouTube interview that his daily routine was the following:

"I get up, I work, I go scuba-diving, work some more, [then] 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."

So, yeah—snagging a mansion where you can live on both your big boat(s) and an actual demesne seems like a logical next step. I'm happy for him—and not at all jealous of his routine scuba breaks, which I tried to suggest as an expense for the team here at PC Gamer and was told "Harvey, we cannot afford a superyacht". Life is deeply and mercilessly unfair, sometimes.

As spotted by user Worrissey on the Steam subreddit, Gray Newell, the oldest son of Valve head honcho Gabe Newell, is set to compete at the legendary 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race on June 13.

Newell has been part of the Heart of Racing, a team co-founded by racer Ian James, businessman Yahn Bernier, and Gabe Newell, since 2021. This is Newell the Younger's debut season in the FIA World Endurance Championship, the highest level of international competition in endurance racing. Newell previously competed in the GT4 and GT America Series, as well as the GT World Challenge America.

24 Hours of Le Mans is one of the oldest and most famous sportscar races in the world, first occurring in 1923 and, after a 10-year hiatus due to the Great Depression and World War 2, held annually since 1949. Each car is driven by a team of three, with the active driver rotating approximately every two to four hours. Le Mans is a set course, and drivers race to get as far as possible in the time limit. The current record of 3,360 miles (5,410 km) was set in 2010.

Newell is on a team with fellow racers Jonny Adam of the UK and Eduardo Barrichello from Brazil, and they will take the field in an Aston Martin Vantage AMR GT3 Evo. Heart of Racing is also fielding a second team at Le Mans that includes team co-founder Ian James.

We've previously reported on how Newells Gabe and Gray were big fans of Final Fantasy 14 on Steam Deck. Newell the Younger also pursued a career in games once upon a time⁠—he told us about his project and thoughts on Valve's direction in 2018⁠—but he seems to have firmly pivoted to racing.

Newell the Elder, meanwhile, has been in the news a fair bit recently. He reportedly pushed back hard against an internal suggestion of greater content moderation on Steam, and we now know that the development of Portal 2 was a moment when Newell stepped back from game design in a big way. We also recently saw a fresh trove of photos of the superyacht the gaming billionaire famously lives on these days.

Valve is a relatively small company that punches well above its weight. Perhaps it's the low staff numbers—or maybe just a general libertarian lilt—that makes its approach to content moderation on Steam a hearty "Can't someone else do it?"

Its freewheeling approach has drawn criticism for what it allows to proliferate and, of course, has its hard limits: Valve delisted all manner of adult content from the platform last year following pressure from payment processors.

But it's clearly an approach Valve co-founder and big boss Gabe Newell is personally keen on. In a recent report from Bloomberg, we got an anecdote from an anonymous former Valve employee of a time when Newell downright bit the head off Valve general counsel Karl Quackenbush. The lawyer was advocating for a more hands-on approach to content moderation on Steam as it pondered embracing outright pornographic content.

Newell's response to that proposal was, ah, forthright: "What the fuck do I pay you for if that's your opinion?" the Valve boss reportedly snapped at Quackenbush and—while we don't have further details on the story—we sure know who won the debate in the end: Steam very much did open the floodgates on NSFW content, and its approach to content moderation is as laissez-faire as ever, barring the odd payment processor contretemps.

It's an interesting but brief glimpse into the Valve black box. The studio's public image is A) taciturn and B) democratic, with the memetic image of Valve devs' wheeled desks serving as a bit of a metonym for its willingness to let its employees work on whatever they're interested in. Newell himself barely registers in that picture—the perception is he's a hands-off boss who spends most of his time literally at sea.

Clearly, though, Newell does stick his oar in from time to time, and is willing to throw his weight around on topics he deems important enough. You've gotta feel a bit sorry for Quackenbush—getting yelled at by Gabe Newell ranks high on my personal listings of things that would make me cry.

And hey, Valve owes him: it was Quackenbush who enlisted the aid of a Korean-speaking intern named Andrew to help the studio sift through a ream of Korean-language docs from Vivendi in a legal case where Valve's future hung in the balance: a move that pretty much saved Valve.

Back in 2023, a court ordered Valve chief Gabe Newell to testify, in person, in the long-running antitrust suit filed by Wolfire Games in 2021. A new report by Bloomberg runs down some of what Newell had to say during that testimony, including a denial that Steam holds any kind of monopoly on PC gaming. Or is even an overly dominant force.

"Customers have enormous choice" about where they purchase their games, Newell testified, including "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."

Newell also denied the existence of an alleged 'unwritten rule' that prevents developers from offering their games at lower prices on non-Steam storefronts. That's one of the central complaints behind Wolfire's lawsuit: Founder David Rosen said in 2021 that when he asked Valve about offering his studio's game Overgrowth at a reduced price on other stores,"they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam's DRM."

Asked about this rule, Newell repeatedly denied it exists, even when shown internal communications seemingly showing Valve employees enforcing it: "Valve does not have a policy or practice of dictating prices to third-party software developers on other platforms." When asked how Valve would react if it ever happened, Newell initially said he was confused by the question and then added, "Many of our partners and many of our customers are quite happy with the service that we're providing."

That's certainly true, as far as it goes. Games aren't getting any cheaper and there's a good likelihood that Grand Theft Auto 6 will usher in the era of the $80 videogame, but Steam sales remain massively popular because holy cow, there's a ton of good stuff and you can get it dirt cheap. Steam has also helped break the grip that major publishers had over conventional retail sales, opening the door to real fame and fortune for lucky indie devs.

At the same time, Steam is, if not a monopoly, awfully close to one: It is so deeply entrenched that Epic Games has spent years literally giving away its games, and has barely made a dent—in fact, New Blood boss Dave Oshry said earlier this year that Epic freebies were great for sales on Steam. The Epic launcher is admittedly not an optimal experience, but a big challenge Epic Games faces is simply that an awful lot of gamers don't seem to want an effective Steam competitor: Steam rules the roost, and they like it that way. A big majority of game developers, meanwhile, reckons that Steam really does hold a monopoly on the PC games market.

Newell's deposition is especially interesting because the outcome of the Wolfire case has potentially big ramifications for Valve, which is facing serious legal challenges on multiple fronts—most notably, a $900 million lawsuit filed in the UK accusing the company of using Steam to overcharge for games and muscle out competing storefronts. That lawsuit too alleges the existence of that unwritten rule (which, again, Newell denies even exists), and that Valve uses it to forbid lower prices on other storefronts.

The once budget handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck, recently received an astronomical price hike, with Valve citing "global logistical challenges" (otherwise known as the global memory crisis) for this decision. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney soon weighed in on the matter, drawing attention to Gabe Newell's $500 million superyacht in the process.

Commenting on X, Tim Sweeney says, "Everyone’s being too harsh here. There has been a significant rise in the cost of components that Steam customer spending ultimately funds, and economic trends have created severe disruptions in the component parts supply chain for megayachts."

For the unaware, the Leviathan is a 111-meter superyacht built for Gabe Newell with an on-board hospital, submarine garage, and 15 gaming PCs. It's the 50th-largest yacht in the world right now. It also comes with two gyms, a 250 square meter beach club with a spa and bar, and diving platforms. It's luxurious is the point I am trying to make.

It does sort of seem like Sweeney is just taking swings for the sake of taking swings here, because, although Gabe Newell does own a superyacht (that was likely super expensive), it's hard to believe the Steam Deck price hikes will exactly cover that cost.

The price of memory is sharply surging upwards, and Valve is just one of many companies that have raised prices to accommodate it. Without knowing the specific price of the hardware, it's hard to say if Valve is making a bigger profit or not from the rise than it was pre-memory crisis.

The comments on Sweeney's post are not very happy with it. The top one, as of the time of writing, says, "Hey Tim when was the last time Valve laid off their employees? Oh yeah never?"

It seems like the last public round of layoffs made at Valve was back in 2019, where 13 were let go. And tens of staff were let go six years prior, in 2013. Epic Games, on the other hand, let go of 1,000 employees just two months ago, with one employee saying, "We only had a slight hint that the company revenue wasn't doing well."

Despite prices of Steam Deck models rising by almost 50%, it still somehow sold out in North America less than 24 hours after the hike. If the Steam Deck can be successful way above its original price, it does make me a little worried that I'll need a superyacht to afford a Steam Machine for my living room, even if it may not be Valve's fault.

We all know Doom was so popular, so monumental, that it changed videogames forever. As a society, we're still obsessed with installing Doom on increasingly improbable devices, from pregnancy tests to vapes. But sometimes I run into an old factoid about Doom, some detail from its heyday that I'd forgotten, that still puts it in perspective.

Like this one: back in 1995, Doom was installed on more PCs than Windows.

I was reminded of this bit of trivia by re-reading an old PC Gamer magazine interview with John Carmack, published in November 2008, where the id Software programmer was reflecting on the benefits of open source and shareware. "We look back at the early days when the original Doom was shareware, and Microsoft did a study at the time that said there were more copies of Doom installed on computers than there were Windows 3.1. It's hard to characterise what exact value that is, to have people aware of your game but not paying you, but I certainly don't think it's been bad. Maybe we could have monetised it better than we would have thought of as a young company."

More users than Windows sounds like it should be a gargantuan number, but you have to remember this anecdote predated the launch of Windows 95, in August 95, which is when the operating system truly took off. Personal computers weren't rare in the early '90s, but according to articles about the history of Windows, Microsoft sold only about 10 million copies of Windows 3.0 between 1990 and 1992, and an additional three million of Windows 3.1 within its first three months.

In a 1996 interview, id Software president Jay Wilbur said that the shareware version of Doom had been downloaded 20 million times. That seems like an easy slam dunk comparison—Doom, which ran on DOS, was way bigger than Windows!

In the early '90s, being installed on more computers than the most popular operating system of the day was unheard of. As Carmack alluded to, those installs didn't all mean sales, though—Doom's first episode was free, thanks to the very successful shareware model id used. But clearly it was a detail that stuck with people in the tech industry at the time.

People like Valve founder Gabe Newell, who offered more details on the Doom/Windows ratio in a 2013 interview than Carmack did in 2008. Newell said that in the early 1990s, Microsoft (where he worked at the time) had very little insight into how many people were actually using Windows or its other software or what they thought of it, so it commissioned "a really large study" rather than relying on retail reseller data to guess.

"They'd actually go out into the real world and see what people were actually doing. This was the first time Microsoft had done it, to look at 10,000 people's machines and figure out what they were actually using PCs for. Well, it turns out they were actually using them for porn and videogames, and that part of the study was immediately ignored. But the good news was that if you extrapolated those numbers, Windows was actually being used in 30 million people's PCs in the United States.

"But the thing that was really striking to me, at the time, was that Windows was the number two product. Most of you probably know what the number one product was. Yeah, it was Doom."

The rest of Newell's talk is interesting if you're into the sales machinations of the early software industry, and how that ultimately informed the "direct to consumer" model of Steam that we now take for granted. But the bit that sticks out to me is that, at least according to his memory of the study, Doom was installed on more than 30 million PCs. He doesn't cite the year, but he references the "early 1990s," which suggests to me the study was conducted before the release of Windows 95.

30 million is a significantly bigger number than the 20 million number Wilbur cited in 1996. And that's from after the launch of Windows 95! It seems there's no doubt that Doom exceeded Windows' popularity. But by how much?

Could boxed retail sales and people passing around copies of the game on floppy disks or across office and college LANs have made up for another 10 million that id Software couldn't account for? How many times was Doom pirated?

Newell also specifically referenced 30 million Windows users in the United States, while another popularly quoted figure about Doom's success, this one from a September 1995 interview with Wilbur, highlighted the game being on "at least 15 million computers worldwide."

Those numbers from Wilbur are the ones you'll see on Wikipedia, which suggests to me we really don't know how many people installed, much less played, the shareware version of Doom. The anecdote that it was more popular than Windows 3.1 has been passed around in articles for years, but seemingly without anyone focusing on the significance of Newell's reference to 30 million Windows users. Was his memory of the study way off, or were we undercounting Doom's popularity all these years?

I've reached out to Newell and id co-founder John Romero to see if either of them remember the survey's findings in more detail, because it sure seems like we've got an unaccounted-for 10 million players or so.

No wonder Bill Gates was so excited about the Windows 95 port of Doom he cut a promo with a trench coat and shotgun.

Gabe Newell is widely regarded as the big name (and the big brain) behind Valve, and thus Half-Life and all that has sprung forth from it. But Valve, Half-Life, and the gamers who love it owe something of an unspoken debt to another man, a foundational games industry titan himself, who despite having no despite having no history or experience in the FPS field immediately saw the potential of Half-Life—at a time when numerous others did not—and moved aggressively to help make it happen.

In a lot of ways, Ken Williams was the Gabe before Gabe: He co-founded On-Line Systems with his wife Roberta and together they turned it into one of the early powerhouses of the industry, known more widely as Sierra Online—home of King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Gabriel Knight, and, for the real heads, Softporn Adventure. In 1991, it launched The Sierra Network, the first online service dedicated exclusively to videogames. And in 1996, as recorded by Geoffrey Keighley's The Final Hour of Half-Life report for GameSpot (yes, he went by Geoffrey back then), Williams met with Newell.

At this point, Valve "had their technology, their team, and their genre," as Keighley put it. What it didn't have was a publisher—and in the mid 1990s, a decade before Steam, publishers were essential: Videogames relied on literal, and limited, shelf space for exposure and sales, and it was publishers who put them there. If you didn't have a publisher, you were pretty much out of luck if you wanted your game to have any kind of reach.

Valve had taken meetings with multiple publishers about Half-Life, but as an unknown studio with big ideas and not much else, it failed to get any traction. "It was sort of weird going from Microsoft, where you were really respected, to going into a meeting with a game publisher who said, 'Go away, stop bugging me! Come back with credibility!'," Newell said.

Williams, however, liked what he saw. Sierra went public in 1989 and had grown and expanded significantly in the years following, but it didn't have a presence in the burgeoning new first-person shooter genre. Williams wanted to change that: He'd been "aggressively" looking to license a shooter engine, and "was negotiating with id and some others," when he received the proposal from Valve.

"Gabe said he had the license and a team of ex-Microsoft people put together," Williams said. "It was the right email at the right time."

It snowed in Seattle, where Sierra was then based, on the day Valve was scheduled to make its pitch—an extremely rare occurrence that made for a hair-raising commute. But Valve co-founder Mike Harrington said "there was no way we weren't going to show up," and apparently Williams was equally enthusiastic, as he was the only Sierra employee to make it into the office that day.

It didn't take long before Williams committed. As Newell recalled, "About 20 or 30 minutes into the presentation, when we were just starting to gear up for our big close, Ken says, 'Okay, you're done! Let me tell you why you should be working with Sierra rather than anyone else'."

Ironically, it sounds like the technical ambitions that put off other publishers were what convinced Williams to make the move: "Most of the [developers] I spoke with were groups of artists and designers, but no engineers. Valve were the first ones who were using an existing engine as a starting point, not a finishing point."

Another irony is that it wasn't actually Williams who ended up signing the Half-Life deal: He left Sierra not long after that meeting, leaving it to Sierra business guy Scott Lynch to actually close it. Lynch apparently wasn't as immediately enthusiastic about the project as Williams had been, saying Sierra wanted to be sure Valve would "take the technology as a foundation and add something new" before committing. But, Lynch continued, "When they started talking about telling a story and creating a persistent world, it was pretty obvious they weren't going to do a mission pack with the Quake engine."

More irony: Keighley writes at the end of his report that "Valve's Half-Life is bound to bring the Sierra name back to the forefront of interactive entertainment." As we all know now, it did not: Sierra had what Valve's former chief marketing strategist Monica Harrington described as a "launch and leave" marketing strategy, and with Half-Life finished, it wanted to move on to new deals with new partners. Valve was subsequently able to regain the IP and distribution rights from Sierra, and went on to change the world; Sierra, by contrast, quickly faded away: It was acquired by Vivendi in 2004, and then closed in 2008.

It wasn't all smooth sailing with Sierra: Valve famously opted to reboot Half-Life entirely midway through development, a decision not supported (or funded) by Sierra. Valve also worked hard to ensure Half-Life was seen as a Valve game, not one with Sierra's name on the marquee, which doesn't necessarily speak to especially warm relations between them. But without that early support from Ken Williams, who knows? Maybe Valve finds a different deep-pocketed, visionary backer to bring its ambitions to life—but maybe not, too.

One more interesting Gabe-n-Ken parallel to close things out: After leaving Sierra in 1997, Ken became a boat guy too. He's not a mega-yacht owner like Newell, but on his blog he says that he and Roberta have cruised roughly 60,000 nautical miles as of 2025, and was in the process of wrapping up a major refit on a 90-foot Doggersbank yacht. That's a pretty sweet tub too.

Earlier this week Gabe Newell made a surprise appearance in an ad for Oceanco, the company he liked so much that last year he just straight-up bought them. Oceanco is, of course, behind the construction of the Valve co-founder's $500 million custom superyacht, Leviathan, and it looks like this is PR week for the company: it's just dropped a whole bunch of new photographs of the boat for our peasant eyes to gaze longingly upon.

As PCG's Andy Chalk adroitly noted of the video ad, "it sure looks like being a super-rich guy is a pretty good time", and these photos do little to dispel that. They also arrive with a load of the cod-philosophical verbiage Oceanco seems to specialise in, because apparently these first images of the Leviathan in operation "reveal her human-centered philosophy in practice."

The photographs were taken by Guillaume Plisson in the Bahamas, and the full gallery certainly shows that this thing puts the 'yacht' in superyacht. "The imagery places a strong emphasis on people and how the yacht is used, reinforcing the community-driven environment at the heart of the design," says the Oceanco bumpf.

"Leviathan represents a new philosophy of yachting—one that places greater purpose at the heart of design, ownership and operations," says Deniz de Koningh, project director at Oceanco. "The owner’s vision sets a forward-thinking example of how yachts can be built and used with intent. We are excited to see the influence she may have in shaping the future of the industry."

Gabe Newell: not just a videogame legend, but apparently a yacht revolutionary to boot. The interior of the ship is, ahem, "conceived to dissolve traditional hierarchies between guest and crew spaces." I doubt that means that Gabe's in the kitchen whipping up dinner, and that just seems a very weird thing to say about a vessel that, with all the good intentions in all the world, is designed as a billionaire's floating palace and looks like it must have a staff count in the very high dozens.

What Oceanco means by this is that "recreational areas such as the gaming lounge, basketball court and sun deck are designed for shared use", which is very nice and all. More practically, the "crew-centric approach" means that the majority of the material choices are "low-maintenance solutions" that are easy to upkeep: "custom Bolidt decking, bead-blasted stainless steel railings, synthetic handrails and an off-white exterior finish."

"The goal was to consider where the most valuable experiences occur for the community of people onboard," says Gabe Newell. "By increasing crew productivity, we can enable them to focus more on engaging with guests and creating meaningful experiences for everyone."

The photos also show Leviathan's dive center, helipad, the biggest big screen you'll ever see on the top deck, the pool, a bunch of young folks playing Counter-Strike 2 in the gaming room, various lovely interiors, people doing yoga on the deck, people scuba-diving, the support vessels, the on-deck basketball court, the control room, various exterior shots contrasting night/day, a chap hosing off some of those low-maintenance banisters, and oddly enough there's a photograph of some stairs.

We can also see that the ship flies the Red Ensign, so I'm declaring Gabe an honorary Brit. One of the photos also shows that beneath one of the Leviathan logos on the ship, it says "Bloody Bay," which Google tells me is a port of registry in the Cayman Islands for luxury superyachts. I will never understand rich people.

The one absence is Gabe Newell himself, who doesn't seem to be present in any of the group shots (unless I'm mistaken, which is possible because I've just looked at 55 super high-res photos of a yacht and need a lie-down). Newell does however appear briefly in the promotional video, where he can be seen chatting with a diver and laughing at someone's joke. There's also a sketch of Newell with a leviathan curling around him, featuring the words "Thank you Gabe." Hey, if he'd just paid me $500 million, I'd say thanks too.

The legal fight between OpenAI co-founders Elon Musk and Sam Altman has seen much internal documentation from the firm's earliest years released to the public. One minor revelation has been the serious involvement of Gabe Newell from the start, who gave the company over $20 million and was the sole member of its "informal advisory board" in 2018: he later personally emailed Musk to try and get Hideo Kojima a tour of SpaceX.

An email chain from 2018 has now been released, which is between Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, and Shivon Zilis. On January 31, 2018, Brockman replies directly to Musk about OpenAI's future and, under a section titled "fundraising", said "Ilya and I are able to convince reputable people that AGI can really happen in the next <=10 years" and "there's *very* large appetite for investments from those people."

As for who those people might be, clarity arrives a paragraph or two later. "Of the people we've been talking to, the following people are currently my top suggestions for board members. Would also love suggestions for your top picks not on this list, and we can figure out how to approach them." There's then the following list of names:

• Reid Hoffman
• Gabe Newell
• Adam d'Angelo
• Jed McCaleb
• Herb Allen
• Terah Lyons

Musk replies on February 1, 2018, writing "Reid, Gabe and Adam are two thumbs up from me. Don't know the others well enough yet." He goes on to insist that OpenAI must "pull significant numbers of key people from Google/Deepmind" or otherwise "assume failure." Then comes an extraordinary broadside at Jeff Bezos and his space exploration company Blue Origin.

"It feels like [OpenAI is] similar to Blue Origin," writes Musk. "Bezos is still clueless as to how hopelessly far behind he is and constantly rationalizes his position, overestimating his ability and dramatically underestimating SpaceX year after year.

"We lost an excellent engineer to BO last year (first one in several years) and were very concerned. That guy recently returned to SpaceX and told everyone how hopeless they were. Now zero people are even taking BO recruiting calls. Doesn't matter what they offer."

Musk's disdain for Bezos is a minor theme of these documents (at one point he describes the Amazon founder as a "tool") but to return to Newell, the above exchange comes before an email sent on April 23, 2018, which reveals Newell's donation of $20,008,279 and that the Valve co-founder was offering informal advice and guidance.

In that email Shivon Zilis writes to Musk: "Sam [Altman] and Greg [Brockman] asked if I'd be on their informal advisory board (just Gabe Newell so far) which seems fine and better than the formal board given potential conflicts? If that doesn't feel right let me know what you'd prefer."

To be clear, Gabe Newell's involvement with OpenAI has been public since 2018: there were just no solid details before the release of these documents. Newell doesn't seem as involved in OpenAI these days, and now seems to spend most of his time on his $500 million superyacht. Musk's clearly always been something of a Valve fan though: to the extent he considered calling OpenAI 'Freeman' because of the bonkers rationale that the Half-Life protagonist represented "what we are essentially trying to achieve."

Remember Gabe Newell's superyacht Leviathan—the one he liked so much, he bought the whole damn company making it? Oceanco, as the company is known, has dropped a new ad for the boat and its owner, complete with appearances by Gabe himself, and it sure looks like being a super-rich guy is a pretty good time.

"With a greater purpose on how yachts are built, operated and owned, its vision is rooted in the owner's ethos of teamwork and community," the YouTube page (via Polygon) states in kind of oddly jumbled verbiage. "Leviathan's revolutionary layout, ergonomic design and the process have brought her to life."

Gabe Newell: Extremely rich guy.

The video itself is a mashup of extremely rich people doing extremely rich people things, while people whose net worths are presumably less filled with zeroes toil away in the background to make it all possible. They toil joyfully, of course: You can tell by the big smiles plastered across their faces as they cook, clean, lead yoga classes, and otherwise serve the people who ride around on superyachts for fun.

For those who do not toil, but merely reap its rewards, scuba diving features as a prominent activity—Newell is an avid diver—but of course there's some gaming to be done as well. Leviathan comes equipped with a full suite of what I'm sure are extremely high-end gaming laptops ('Rampocalypse' means nothing when you're riding around in a tub like this) as well as at least one Aston Martin-branded F1 racing sim pod. There's a gym, massage facilities, a helipad, what looks to be a recording studio—it's a lot!

Gabe himself can be seen, briefly, in a couple shots: One where he's discussing matters unknown with a fellow diver, and again near the end of the spot where he's laughing contentedly, presumably with people who are just offscreen. There's also a quick look at a sketch of the Valve boss and Oceanco owner, with a leviathan curling around him, festooned with the words "Thank you Gabe," so that's nice.

While the video is about Leviathan, it's not really an ad for Leviathan: You can't just pop down to the local Oceanco dealership and take one out on a 96-month lease. It's really more of a "this is what we can do for you" kind of thing, assuming you have half a billion dollars kicking around, plus whatever it costs to keep the thing crewed, stocked and fuelled.

That's not a problem for Newell, of course: It's sometimes easy to forget but he's a super-rich guy, with approximately 11 billion kicking around, according to Forbes, and a net worth that's risen substantially since 2024. And that's how it is when you're swimming in those big-money seas: If you did just pop around to Oceanco with a half-billie in your pocket and say "I want the Gaben Special," well, I'm pretty sure they'd whip one up just like it for you, too.

The ongoing Musk v. Altman lawsuit has seen the release of various internal emails relating to OpenAI, which for now are mostly focused on the early years of the company's founding, over roughly the period 2016-2020. OpenAI wasn't nearly as prominent as it would later become, but one of the surprising elements is the involvement of Valve founder and CEO Gabe Newell, who seems to have acted as both an "informal advisor" and put his money where his mouth is.

The first email mentioning this is from Shivon Zilis to Elon Musk. Zilis is a tech venture capitalist who held a seat on OpenAI's board until 2023, and was also romantically involved with Musk: they have four children together. Based on these and other emails, Zilis was both working for OpenAI and providing Musk with the inside track on what was happening.

In an email from Zilis to Musk, sent on April 23 2018, she lists some facts under various headings. Under "Tech" she discusses how OpenAI's attempts to have its AI beat a five-player team in Dota 2 is "looking better than anticipated" and the uptick in the AI's performances "is apparently causing people internally to worry that the timeline to AGI is sooner than they'd thought before."

Then we move on to "time allocation" where Zilis tells Musk how she's dividing her time between OpenAI and Neuralink / Tesla, before this paragraph:

"Sam [Altman] and Greg [Brockman] asked if I'd be on their informal advisory board (just Gabe Newell so far) which seems fine and better than the formal board given potential conflicts? If that doesn't feel right let me know what you'd prefer."

Newell's donation to OpenAI was listed on the OpenAI website in 2018, though not detailed, but other submissions show he was clearly on good terms with Musk and also provided some serious cash in the company's early years. A separate court submission titled "undisputed facts" lists the contributions OpenAI received from people other than Elon Musk over the period 2016-2020.

The second-largest donation listed is "$20,008,279 from Gabe Newell" in 2018, the same period in which Newell was acting as an "informal advisor" to the company. His continued involvement is unclear, though future document releases may clarify this. But as recently as January 2026, Newell contributed an unspecified amount to a funding round for a brain-computer interface company called Merge Labs, which lists OpenAI as an investor and research partner.

In that case, at least, it's easy to see where Newell's interests align. He's the founder of Starfish Neuroscience, which is designing a minimally invasive neural interface chip. In other emails Newell discusses neuroscience interests with Musk.

"For a long time I thought neuromodulation (e.g. rTMS) was weird, mainly because I had an unsophisticated understanding of a bunch of aspects of the brain," wrote Newell. "I've more or less done a 180, and think there is a significant near-term consumer market. Is this something I should bring up with the Neuralink team? If so, anyone in particular I should chat with there?"

Musk gives him some contacts before saying Neuralink has "made some pretty insane technical progress. This is highly confidential, but we're now able to implant ~6000 electrodes in a monkey brain with decent signal / noise. Moreover, the electronics are compact enough to be flush with the skull and the only thing visible is the USB-C opening and slight surround. Very trippy. Just like Neuromancer."

The Musk v. Altman lawsuit continues. Among the other revelations are that, after Hideo Kojima visited Valve in 2018, Newell emailed Musk trying to set up a tour of SpaceX for Kojima: who really, really wants to go to space.

In 2018 Hideo Kojima visited Valve headquarters to talk about Death Stranding. Based on emails now public thanks to the ongoing Musk v. Altman lawsuit, Kojima and Gabe Newell seem to have hit it off, if they weren't already buddy-buddy: after the meeting Newell promised to introduce Kojima to people at the then still-not-well-known OpenAI, and also to Elon Musk.

Musk, of course, owns SpaceX, and Kojima has well-known ambitions to go to space.

"Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear series, a real visionary in our field) was here at Valve talking about his new game, and he mentioned the importance he places on future work in AI," Newell wrote to Musk in late October, 2018. "I said I'd be happy to introduce him to the people at OpenAI and spoke enthusiastically about the work that team has done with us (I'm not sure how involved you are with them nowadays)."

Newell continues: "The second thing is he was talking about how much he wants to go into space, and I offered to introduce him to you. He'd love to get a SpaceX tour."

Musk was receptive: "Sure, it would be great to meet Hideo Kojima and he's welcome to see the rocket factory," he wrote. "No problem to send him my email."

By 2020, Kojima's desire to visit space still hadn't been fulfilled. In an interview with Geoff Keighley, Kojima said that he wanted to visit SpaceX with Newell, to which Elon Musk replied on X (then still Twitter): "Welcome anytime."

It needs to be kept in mind that Kojima's desire to go to space is more intense than, say, a five-year-old child's. In his book The Creative Gene (via Vice), Kojima describes his passion thusly:

"If I could have just one wish in my life—if I could cast a magic spell and make anything come true—without hesitation, it would be this: 'I wish to go to space before I die.' It doesn't have to be anything as extravagant as a trip to the moon or Mars. I would be satisfied with only a brief orbit, just beyond Earth’s atmosphere, where I can gently brush against outer space. I would give up anything to make that wish come true: my current place as a game designer, which I’ve built up for forty-five years; I'm even prepared to throw away my family or my own life. That is how powerfully I—or rather we—yearn for the cosmos."

In other words: Someone really needs to send this guy to space.

As for Kojima's wishes to chat with OpenAI, Musk displays an early ambivalence towards the organisation that seems to presage the current Musk v. Altman lawsuit.

"Regarding OpenAI, my involvement is very limited at this point. I still provide some financial support and get verbal and email updates every few weeks from Sam Altman, but don't spend time there. I lost confidence that OpenAI could muster the resources to serve as an effective counterweight to Google / Deepmind and decided to attempt that through Tesla instead. We have cash flow on the order of billions of dollars per year to build hardware that hopefully has at least a dark horse chance to keep Google honest. Probably worth talking about at some point."

Given how much Steam earns Valve in revenue, I have to imagine that even in 2018 he wasn't overly impressed by Musk's "billions of dollars per year" line. Newell does, though, touch on Musk's Neuralink concerns. No idle interest, it turned out, because a year later Newell founded his own neuroscience company in the form of Starfish Neuroscience.

"For a long time I thought neuromodulation (e.g. rTMS) was weird, mainly because I had an unsophisticated understanding of a bunch of aspects of the brain," Newell wrote. "I've more or less done a 180, and think there is a significant near-term consumer market. Is this something I should bring up with the Neuralink team? If so, anyone in particular I should chat with there?"

Musk points him to several contacts before offering a progress report: "We've made some pretty insane technical progress. This is highly confidential, but we're now able to implant ~6000 electrodes in a monkey brain with decent signal / noise. Moreover, the electronics are compact enough to be flush with the skull and the only thing visible is the USB-C opening and slight surround. Very trippy. Just like Neuromancer."

You can read the full email exchange, surfaced by OpenAI defense firm Morrison & Foerster, here.

Steam is, by a country mile, the premier power in PC gaming. If you own a PC and play games on it, then it's just about a guarantee you use Steam with some regularity. You might therefore expect that, like Sony with PlayStation and Microsoft with Xbox, Valve would feel obligated to promote and support the PC. But 15 years ago, when Steam was still relatively youthful, Gabe Newell said that's not quite the approach he takes.

"It's a lot easier for me to think of it as having a responsibility to gamers and game developers," the Valve boss told us back in 2011. "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."

It's a small but vital distinction, and one that was made necessary to a large extent by what Newell said Valve "loves" about the PC as a platform: Openness, innovation, and the ability to move quickly in ways that consoles cannot. The tradeoff is a lack of standardization and quality control that can be massively frustrating when you're troubleshooting a game that's working fine for everyone else.

But at the time Newell said even that is an advantage in the big picture, and it's one of the main reasons PC gaming was still relevant in 2011, despite the persistent "PC gaming is dying" refrain—and remains so today.

"People like their PCs," Newell said. "There are huge numbers of them and each person gets to have the one that they like rather than the one that someone else has defined for them. There were 350 million PCs sold last year so the economies of scale are tremendous, so you get great value for money."

That sentiment has held true despite several companies over the years, including Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia, pushing cloud streaming as an alternative to owning your own PC. Valve has also broadly stuck to Newell's priorities, too, launching Steam Greenlight to allow for crowd-voted games to release on Steam a year after our 2011 interview. It threw open the doors in 2018 to allow anyone to release a game on Steam, though that hasn't prevented Valve's decisions to reject or delist certain games based on their content from causing significant controversy.

One of the PC's 2011-era selling points in Newell's eyes, "great value for money," is a little bit of a tougher sell these days, what with the ravenous RAM hunger of AI, buttressed by tariff chaos, the war on Iran, and, as always, unchecked corporate greed. Just a few months ago Valve seemed set on a sort of redemption arc for its living room PC initiative, the Steam Machine, after trying and failing to launch a line of Linux gaming machines in 2013. But the company has already acknowledged that the $99 tag on its new Steam controller is "up from where we originally wanted it to be," and it's hard to imagine the Steam Machine won't be following suit.

But on the bright side, console prices are skyrocketing too, so there's no escape there. PC gaming wins again!

Valve boss Gabe Newell has a history of being right about things, probably most famously about Steam itself: Making the platform an integral part of Half-Life 2, when most of the world insisted that digital distribution "will never happen," may be the single most impactful decision in the history of PC gaming. But he was a little bit off the mark eight years later, when he gave us his thoughts on what the future might hold—including, possibly, a world where Steam has been left in the dust by its competitors.

"There's always this temptation to assume that the way things are today is the way things are going to be, 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," Newell told us in an interview back in 2011. "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.

"It's like, along comes the Wii and that overthrows a bunch of ideas; along comes social gaming and that throws over a bunch of ideas. 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."

The up-and-comer in those days was Origin, Electronic Arts' own digital distribution platform, which EA had positioned that same year as a competitor to Steam: It even produced a chart, as part of a quarterly financial report, comparing Origin's current and future platform features with its "leading competitor," which, I mean, come on:

It was also around this time that EA began making noise about peeling its games off of Steam: The removal of Crysis 2 and other games from Steam was explained as merely a minor policy conflict, but the suspect timing naturally led tongues to wag.

Reacting to that, Newell told us at the time that it was "incumbent on us to create value for those partners, whether it's EA or Ubisoft or Take-Two, or any of the other developers who are using it. That's our goal, so we're going to keep trying to do that with EA and trying to convince them that it's worth it to have their games on Steam."

Steam hasn't stood still in the 15 years since then, obviously, but I think it's fair to say that it is essentially in the same position it was then: massive, omnipresent, and too good to leave thanks to the powerful magic of Steam sales, which Newell cited as one major factor in Steam's success in particular. In the years since Epic tried to launch its own competitor, Steam has added a steady stream of new features rather than fighting for exclusives.

The world around Steam has most definitely changed, though: A decade after this interview ran, they'd all come crawlin' back to Steam: After dalliances of varying durations with their own storefronts and the Epic Games Store, EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and Take-Two all opted to kiss the ring.

Even the mighty behemoth of Amazon got demolished by Steam, an ass-kicking made doubly funny by the fact that most of the world didn't even know there was a fight going on. It reminds me of the classic Excalibur throwdown between Captain Britain and the Juggernaut:

Through it all, Steam has only entrenched itself more deeply, setting new concurrent user records every few months (most recently surpassing 42 million users) and adding thousands of new games to its library every year.

And all of this has happened despite Steam's refusal to meaningfully reduce what it takes from games sales: While both Epic and Microsoft take dramatically lower percentages on sales made through their storefronts, Valve has only fiddled slightly with Steam, and it continues to aggressively defend the 70/30 split it takes out of the gate. It speaks volumes that developers don't like it, but—like EA and the rest—they keep comin' back for it. Maybe Steam really was "the answer" after all.

Gabe Newell remains the CEO of Valve, but it's no secret that he stepped back from actively running the company some time ago: he says himself he's been "retired for a long time." Newell now divides his days between various other pursuits, including Starfish Neuroscience, a company he co-founded that focuses on neural interfaces, and Inkfish, a marine research operation. As well as buying $500 million superyachts.

I've always been a little fuzzy about exactly when Newell stepped back from the game design side of things, not least because Valve itself often credits staff equally, though he was clearly intimately involved in the design of Half-Life and its sequel, as well as spearheading the company's acquisition of fan-made properties like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress. But an interview with Portal 2 project lead Josh Weier by Kiwi Talkz, recently resurfaced by PCG sister site GR+, gives a rough idea of the timeline for Newell moving away from being hands-on with development: and the main reason why.

"If you haven't met him, Gabe is a very imposing guy," says Weier. "He's literally just a tall dude, and also his mannerisms can be imposing. So when I'm like 20 on [Half-Life 2] and he's taking me out for lunch, giving me game ideas, I'm like [mimes eating and looking at the ground] 'Yes Mr Newell!'"

Weier laughs: "Head down freaking out! And I think over time Gabe realised 'oh OK, I should let the game teams do what I pay them for' and he would stop in and give us feedback. I think his things were, he was worried about… we redesigned GLaDOS for Portal 2, because she was going to have a bigger role and felt like the old model wasn't going to quite give us what we needed. He was very adamant about us giving GLaDOS a face and we were 'ah don't really think so, we're gonna go a different direction.'

"So we kind of went back-and-forth with him a bit, and then after a while he was like 'alright, you guys got it, I'm just gonna leave you to it.' And he would check in with me personally to say 'how you doing, are you stressed, how's life going?'"

The real problem from Newell's perspective though was that he'd become almost too forbidding a presence: even the kind of top-tier developer that works at Valve couldn't quite bring themselves to push back hard enough.

"At that point I think he was realising… I think he always wanted to be part of the team, but being Gabe and being in his position, that never really worked," says Weier. "Because people would be like, 'whatever you say!' And he was more 'no no no, I want to be part of the team and come up with ideas.'

"And 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 and I'll just work at a higher level', and that was alright.'"

Portal 2 began development after the release of the original (2007) and released in 2011. While Valve had always been a successful company, this was also roughly the time period where Steam was exploding in popularity and beginning to truly dominate the PC market, so obviously the company's priorities were shifting from being solely a game development studio.

The danger, which Newell clearly spotted and avoided, was him becoming too dominant a creative presence for Valve, and ending up in a position where he was cramping the ideas of the company's game developers rather than helping to refine and realise them. On the one hand that's sad for obvious reasons, but on the other Newell obviously found many other outlets for his generational talents.

I occasionally find myself counting my lucky stars that I'm not a videogame developer, largely because trying to finesse the Steam market sounds like an abstract nightmare. And after listening to indie game advisor Chris Zukowski, who gave a talk at GDC this year (via GamesRadar+) I'm not convinced that sorcery isn't involved.

Some Steam hopefuls, according to Zukowski, are "golden goose" games—the implication being that they are eggs yet to hatch, but have the potential to rake in cash for Steam, thus drawing its attention. The tipping point is around $150,000 sales in six months alongside 500 reviews—humble amounts compared to the big boys, but enough to start gathering moss.

"Your relationship with Valve will change overnight," Zukowski explains. "Gabe cannot buy yachts with wishlists. And you will have so many wishlists after you launch a golden goose game. Gabe will need you. He needs you and your golden goose, and that's a nice thing to have."

He then begins to talk about the process as though the developer in question has been plucked out of the pages of a storybook: "You have power now—all of the sudden you're like a little goblin that has a magical power to turn straw into gold. And Gabe needs you to convert those wishlists into gold. Gabe needs the gold. He will say to you, 'oh god, please spin these wishlists into gold.' And it is up to you to do it. He cannot do it for you."

The process, he argues, is something he calls "the breath of Steam," which is to "inhale wishlists, exhale money." The inhale being Steam's promotion cycle, the exhale being sales—which, fair enough. If I'm on the fence about a game, a sale is the most likely thing to get me to hop on it.

The power of a sale is so strong, in fact, that Zukowski apparently has data to suggest that as many as one to two discounts a month lead to more bulk sales for these golden geese overall.

You might even get a special weekend deal: "I think Valve uses weekend deals to really juice up the games that are going viral," Zukowski explains, before sharing a quote from a dev that states their game's weekend deal raked in more cash, daily, than their launch.

Still, having made it to this status doesn't sound any less stressful—the opposite, actually. Being selected as a golden goose apparently starts a rush to keep the momentum going with, DLCs, bundles, promos, collabs—anything you can throw at them that might stick, really.

"Some people seem to cringe at this," Zukowski admits, and while I'm certainly flinching myself, he's also argued that communities, like the ones behind Spirit City: Lofi Sessions, are happy for more: "They do tons of DLC, and they asked the community, 'are we doing too much DLC?' And the community's like, 'oh please, give us more.'"

Is there a single games company that cultivates the kind of hushed, awed whispers that Valve does? As a private company, Gabe Newell's baby doesn't have to concern itself with putting out all the information that companies with masses of shareholders have to. And yet, it pretty much props up all of PC gaming with Steam. It's a perfect recipe for theorising, rumour-mongering, hypothesising. Are they making Half-Life 3 in there? Do all their desks really have wheels? What goes on in that black box? We may never know, but we can damn well estimate.

Today's look into the crystal ball comes from research firm Alinea Analytics (via Tom's Hardware). In a post on X, the firm's head of market analysis, Rhys Elliott, posted some estimates for just how many scads of cash Valve has pulled out of Steam this year.

Turns out? A lot. So many scads. Alinea estimates that Steam has churned out about $16.2 billion in revenue in 2025, over $4 billion of which went to Valve itself (Valve, notoriously, takes a 30% cut on Steam purchases, a number that only gets lower after your product has raked in over $10 million).

Now, let's be clear: Valve doesn't give anyone any information it doesn't have to, and Alinea hasn't shown its working as to how it arrived at these numbers. I've reached out to both companies to ask for more info, and will update if I hear back, but it's worth underlining in your mind that these are just estimates.

But with Valve prez Gabe Newell pulling in enough billions to buy not just multiple megayachts, but the whole damn yacht company, these estimates don't feel particularly buckwild.

As we wrote last year, even Valve employees have tried their hand at the napkin maths necessary to figure out how much money-per-head it generates. In 2018, Valve's Kristian Miller pegged its number of employees at around 350. That number has doubtlessly changed somewhat in the last seven years, but I can't imagine it's radically different—Valve has not become a <100-employee company or a 1000-employee one; we'd have heard about it if it had.

So taking that number and doing some simple division with Alinea's estimates, we arrive at a figure of about $11.4 million generated for Valve per employee from Steam alone. Which would be wild. For comparison, Apple—the on-again-off-again most valuable company on Earth—generates about $2.4 million per employee. In other words, it would mean Valve is a kind of miraculously efficient capitalism fusion reactor.

So if Alinea's numbers are even close to accurate then, well, it's no surprise Newell has all those boats. Though frankly, I do wish Valve would do us all a favour and crack open its books once in a while. Alas, I think it enjoys being a black box so much it's now started making them.

Valve co-founder and games industry man of mystery Gabe Newell put consoles on notice Wednesday, and has now ended the week by taking delivery of his new custom-designed superyacht, the Leviathan. The vessel was built by Oceanco, a firm that's done such a good job that Newell just decided to up and buy it outright in August: apparently because he "respects the sea."

The news comes via Boat International, "the global authority on superyachting," which has Oceanco CEO Marcel Onkenhout waxing lyrical about the glories of the Gabenboat. Leviathan is 111 meters long and the 50th largest yacht in the world. Onkenhout says the diesel-electric vessel is the "most comfortable yacht ever designed" by the company (you'd hope so!) and a feat of custom engineering.

You want cables? This baby's got 280 miles of them, powering everything from an on-board hospital (with live-in nurse), air conditioning, satellites, cavernous garages for tenders (small boats, not chicken) and submarines, and of course entertainment systems.

We're not done, not even close. Leviathan has two gyms, a 250 square meter beach club with a spa and bar, diving platforms, and whatever a "dedicated drinks pantry" is. The cherry on top: a room with 15 of the finest gaming PCs ever assembled. Now that would be one hell of a LAN party.

Newell's own chambers include, per Luxury Launches, a large bathroom finished with parquet flooring and ash cabinetry. Sounds nice.

We're gonna need a bigger yacht

Time for some words from the man himself:

"Working with the team at Oceanco is incredibly enjoyable and a lot of fun; everybody is professional, creative and dynamic," said Newell. "We knew we were asking for unusual things, and Oceanco embraced it with open arms. Not only have we designed a very unusual yacht that leans into Oceanco’s strengths of innovation and design, but the team has also been willing to collaborate with us on evolving the process."

"From the very start, we knew nothing about her would be done in a traditional way," says Onkenhout. "We were welcomed into the team alongside Gabe and everyone who would ultimately be involved in operating her. It is this level of collaboration that sets Leviathan apart from anything we’ve built before."

I'm guilty of going on about the luxury side of this, but Leviathan has also been designed with scientific work in mind: Newell's interests now include Starfish Neuroscience, a company focused on neural interfaces (popularly known as "brain chips"), and Inkfish, a marine research operation. Part of this is a "convention-defying layout" that apparently brings teams together, which makes me think about all the times I've read about desks with wheels at Valve.

The materials were also chosen with an eye on reducing maintenance and repetitive tasks for the yacht's staff, so traditional materials like teak decks and wooden handrails are out, and composite alternatives are in. The diesel-electric power plant works alongside a battery storage system that allows Leviathan to operate for long stretches with no emissions, and it also features an advanced wastewater treatment system.

"She is not just a high-performance vessel," said Charlie Birkett, CEO and co-founder of brokerage firm Y.CO. "She is a working ecosystem, designed to support everything from world-class hospitality to scientific research. That is what happens when you put people and purpose at the centre."

Over 2,000 people were involved in the vessel's creation, and all of their names are engraved on a glass panel in the main staircase.

The Leviathan joins Newell's existing small fleet of very expensive boats, including the Draak and Rocinante, though this is undoubtedly the jewel in his collection. Newell says he still works seven days a week on "super-awesome" projects, even though he's technically retired, and the Leviathan will no doubt fit nicely into the multi-billionaire's daily routine: "get up, work, go scuba diving."

Congressman James Comer, chair of the US House Oversight and Government Reform committee (HOGR), yesterday invited Valve president Gabe Newell, Discord CEO Humam Sakhnini, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy, and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman to testify before a HOGR hearing on October 8.

The hearing, per a press release from HOGR itself, "will examine the radicalization of online forum users, including instances of open incitement to commit politically motivated acts," and if you're wondering if that's a roundabout way of saying it's tied to the September 10 assassination of American far-right activist Charlie Kirk—it is.

"The politically motivated assassination of Charlie Kirk claimed the life of a husband, father, and American patriot," reads a statement from Comer (the motivation for Kirk's murder is yet to be definitively established). "In the wake of this tragedy, and amid other acts of politically motivated violence, Congress has a duty to oversee the online platforms that radicals have used to advance political violence."

Comer says that the above-named execs "must appear before the Oversight Committee and explain what actions they will take to ensure their platforms are not exploited for nefarious purposes."

A Discord spokesperson said to the BBC that Tyler Robinson—the 22-year-old who has been charged with Kirk's murder—seemingly took responsibility for the shooting in a Discord server not long after it occurred. "It was me at [Utah Valley University, the site of Kirk's shooting] yesterday. im sorry for all of this," wrote an account alleged to belong to Robinson on the platform.

Perhaps it was this that led HOGR to issue its request for testimony to Discord's CEO, but even so, there is little evidence that Robinson was radicalised by any online platform he's alleged to have been on.

Records obtained by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein appear to show the same account which made the aforementioned confession only ever seemed apolitical, mostly discussing games like Helldivers 2 and Deep Rock Galactic. "I think the main thing that’s caused so much confusion is that he was always generally apolitical for the most part," an anonymous friend of Robinson's told Klippenstein.

There is even less obvious reason for HOGR's invitations to the bosses of Twitch, Valve, and Reddit. While it's undoubtedly true that teenagers have been—and continue to be—radicalised by extremists on gaming platforms, there is not yet evidence to suggest this led to Kirk's assassination.

In the absence of a sure explanation, theories and conspiracies abound, and with figures like health and human services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr making claims reminiscent of the heyday of anti-videogame lawyer Jack Thompson—that there is a link between gaming and US mass shootings—it feels like the attempt to put a spotlight on online gaming spaces is less about a serious attempt to tackle online radicalisation, and more about finding a scapegoat.

The finals of The International 2025, the annual Dota 2 world championship tournament, are now underway, and to get things started on the right foot Valve boss Gabe Newell shared a special message with fans: After all these years he still loves the game, even though a lot of you are pretty mean to him online.

"14 years ago, we held the first The International in the German city of Cologne," Newell said (via JakeSucky), presumably from the comfort of one of his yachts. "The first International truly amazed me. It was amazing to see the players’ skill and the passion of the community. Before the first International, I really liked the game, but after TI I fell in love with it. I love not only the game, but also the community."

Heartwarming, isn't it? And, it seems, also true: Newell said in 2011, after the first International, that he'd put about 800 hours of playtime into Dota 2, and that "it's probably the game we've made that we're most obsessed with playing."

"Every day after we're done working on the game, everyone goes home and plays it till two or three in the morning," Newell said, way back then. "So yeah, I love playing the game."

But it's not just the game he loves, Newell continued in his new video message: It's the community of players who bring it to life.

"Sure, people talk shit at me in chat, and about once a week people say, 'Hey, noob, uninstall the game and ********,' but that's really about their enthusiasm for the game, and the energy that they bring. And that's why, after all these years, I still play Dota every day."

Okay, well, that's maybe a little less inspirational, but full points for telling it like it is: That's the real Dota experience, alright. Of course, there are good odds here that Newell isn't being entirely serious about the whole thing: He's known for having deadpan fun with this sort of thing, maybe most famously with the Potato Phone episode of 2022. Compared to that, this is positively restrained, but still pretty great.

The finals of The International 2025 kicked off today at the Barclays Arena in Hamburg, Germany, and will run until September 14, with a $2.6 million prize pool up for grabs. You can follow along with the action at dota2.com.

Gabe Newell is the Kilroy of videogames, constantly popping up in strange corners where you least expect to find him. He owns Valve, he's doing weird brain science, he's at the bottom of the ocean, he's chatting with a YouTuber with a double-digit number of subscribers. Where will he pop up next? Right behind you? Yes.

Today, Newell's popping up to acquire a yacht company. In a press release hot out of Alblasserdam, Netherlands (via Knoebel), it was announced that "Oceanco, one of the world's leading custom yacht builders, is entering a new chapter with Gabe Newell." Sure. Why not? Maybe Half-Life 3 is a boat.

For 15 years, Oceanco has been the domain of the Barwani billionaire family, from Oman, but now "it’s time for Oceanco’s next ownership," apparently. "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," trundles the press release.

Newell acquiring a yacht company is very funny but not very surprising. The man himself already owns a small fleet of very expensive boats, including the Draak and Rocinante, and is set to take ownership of the $400 million Y722 superyacht (made by Oceanco) later this year. He only recently graced our pages for chatting about how he spends a lot of time at sea scuba diving.

Although I, being a games journalist, own many yachts, I confess it's an industry that's not super familiar to me. So it was with some amusement that I learnt these kinds of changes in ownership get the same treatment from the yacht world that they do in the games industry. Namely, a lot of promising potentially worried investors that absolutely nothing is going to change.

"Valve was never about market domination or quarterly wins," says the Oceanco site blurb, "it was about giving smart people the space to build weird, wonderful things that changed how people play. "That same spirit draws him to Oceanco. His first decision? Leave the team alone. Seriously. Oceanco has vision and integrity, and a culture that actually works. Gabe doesn’t want to fix it—he wants to fuel it."

The corpo hypespeak flows thick and fast. "Gabe sees the world as full of crossovers. What happens when you let yachtbuilders talk to worldbuilders? When craftsmen get access to tech usually reserved for game devs and mad scientists? You get innovation that doesn’t just look good—it feels good." Does that actually mean anything? No, but it certainly feels exciting.

"This isn’t about buying a yacht company. It’s about plugging into a tribe of builders, dreamers, sailors, creatives and engineers—and seeing what kind of future they can shape when no one’s holding them back. This isn’t a transaction. It’s ignition."

Sounds amazing. Who wants to spot me several hundred million dollars to invest in yachts?

Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve Corporation and billionaire yacht-fancier, recently gave an interview to YouTuber Zalkar Saliev (TikTok, IG). The full interview covers things like Newell's daily routine ("get up, work, go scuba diving"), as well as some amusing drive-bys on conventional Silicon Valley wisdom, such as why startups chasing VC money makes no sense.

Newell is asked about AI, both the tech obsession of the moment and a field that has potential to upend elements of society: or so we're promised. The question put to Newell by Saliev is whether younger folk should be learning the technical side of AI, or focusing purely on the best way to use the tools?

"I think it's both," says Newell. "I think the more you understand what underlies these current tools the more effective you are at taking advantage of them, 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, y'know, for a decade.

"Even if you're just a pure tool user you're going to find that the gains to utilising those tools are very, very high. But 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 goes on to give some specific examples, saying that "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." Why? Because filmmakers who use AI will think to themselves "Oh, I could spin up a simple model to solve a very narrow problem that I have, and I understand its strengths and limitations and why I can't get away with not using a foundation model to solve a technical problem."

Once you're working like that, Newell reckons, you're "off to the races." As for the example of filmmaking, "I think [AI is] going to be 10 times as significant as the impact of CGI was on filmmaking, in terms of the value of being accomplished with those technologies and how it would affect your career trajectory in the filmmaking industry, I think multiply that by an order of magnitude."

"Value" is a word that Newell uses a lot, and in this context it's about practicality: the distinction between someone knowing a technology exists, versus the person just getting in there and using it and understanding the limitations.

"If you're a tool user, it will help you understand the capabilities when a lot of other people will be reading articles on Variety to try to understand what its impact is going to be on the industry," says Newell. "Whereas some 19 year-old kid in his or her bedroom is like, 'Oh, you guys really don't understand this. I actually use this tool, and unless you're a regular user of it, and have seen how it's evolving and have a sense of how it's going, you're going to completely miss the opportunities of how to take advantage of it.'

"And that same person in their bedroom, the more they try to write a little bit of code or try to dig into the research papers on the topic, the more that they're going to find that it's just trying to accelerate that process even further."

Newell is positive on AI and this shouldn't be any surprise: the man loves new technology, has constantly pushed Valve into technical experiments (some with enormous success, some not so much), and has co-founded Starfish Neuroscience, a company focused on neural interfaces. His bullishness is no surprise, even if the wider story of the tech is a little more complicated than sunshine and lollipops.

Valve co-founder and yacht-loving billionaire Gabe Newell has given a new interview to the YouTuber Zalkar Saliev (TikTok, IG). . It's a wide-ranging chat that covers everything from Newell's earliest jobs to his current daily routine ("get up, work, go scuba diving") and at one point Newell, by any metric one of the most phenomenally successful entrepreneurs on the planet, is asked for his advice on success in life. Why do some succeed where others fail?

"There's no 'one size fits all' thing, each person has to kind of figure that out for their own," says Newell. "It's an inconvenient truth that there are no simple slogans. There's no simple thing that you can do. Everything that is a good idea for one person at a certain point in time, it was a terrible idea for somebody else."

You can almost hear the LinkedIn grifters rending their hair and gnashing their teeth at this point. Where's the 'always on' mindset Newell?

"The tactics I would suggest are: make sure that you have people around you that you can trust," continues Newell, "that you can have transparent communications with and just engage with them to sort of think about how you can get better. But it's never like 'follow your passion'. Sounds like a great idea, but lots of people follow their passions right into a crater, you know?

"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."

Newell has long been known for his focus on surrounding himself and others with the best talent around: one former Valve exec says his superpower is that he "delighted in people on the team just being really good at what they did". These days Newell's interests extend far beyond Valve (he co-founded a neuroscience company and a marine research firm) and his personal time seems focused there, but this principle holds.

"The tactic I would strongly suggest is think about the people that you work with and collaborate with and make sure they're the best people you can find," says Newell, "because they'll help pull you through whatever developmental challenges that you might have. And each person's challenges are going to be different. Some people have motivational challenges. Some people have training, have knowledge gaps. Some people haven't found which field they really are going to contribute the most in. And so the advice for each one of those people is going to be different and contingent on where you're coming from.

"Achieving those kinds of things… it's going to be idiosyncratic, independent, and the key is to have the people around you who will help you make that progress. It's just a lot easier when you know you have somebody who can slap you upside the head and say you're being stupid: 'stop it', right? Or 'you really need to take a risk here', or things like that, who are giving you good advice. But that's really tactical, right? There are lots of examples of people who haven't had that sort of social graph around them to help them, but it certainly makes it easier. It simplifies the challenge. It doesn't define the challenge that people are going to be facing."

In a lengthy interview with YouTuber Zalkar Saliev (TikTok, Instagram), Valve co-founder Gabe Newell attributed his billions to "luck" and "being surrounded by great people."

Asked whether there's a difference between enormously wealthy entrepreneurs and everyone else, Newell said that the only reason to think so comes from "unsound" analysis. (The topic comes up around 30 minutes into the video.)

"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," Newell said.

Rather than crediting his success to a special personality trait that only super-hustlers are born with or an ancient and forbidden LinkedIn posting technique, Newell said that he was "very lucky" in his career, which includes having the good fortune to work with people like Neil Konzen and Doug Klunder and Jeff Harbers—early Microsoft employees—and others during the personal computing revolution.

"Continuing to be lucky enough to be around people like them, and having the roll of the dice continue to go in my way—I think that's how I've ended up where I am," Newell said.

He did play his cards pretty well, though. Newell started Valve in 1996 with fellow ex-Microsoft employee Mike Harrington. The company's first game, Half-Life, was a success, and Valve could have simply carried on adding employees and producing popular games, becoming a large public game developer akin to a Ubisoft or EA.

That would've made Valve a success by many measures, but if it had gone that route there's a decent chance it'd be owned by Microsoft by now, and Newell would be busy drafting unconvincing letters explaining why he just laid off 100 people.

Instead, Valve stayed private and picked its shots with a stunning hit rate, working with modders and changing the trajectory of PC gaming with the Source engine and ultra-influential hits like Counter-Strike, Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal, and Dota 2.

Even more significantly, Valve launched Steam in the early 2000s, beating console makers to mass digital distribution by years and becoming the de facto PC game store as access to broadband internet grew.

Steam features such as friends lists, seasonal sales, the Steam Marketplace (and all those hats), Early Access, user reviews, and Steam Greenlight, which gave indies a path to Steam listings and was later replaced with direct self-publishing, have been enormously influential on PC gaming and gaming in general. Valve's recent work to popularize Linux gaming by way of SteamOS and the Steam Deck may become another thing we look back on as one of its revolutionary efforts.

Valve's had its missteps, and whether or not it's good for one company to have so much power and for one man to have so many knives and yachts is up for debate, but it isn't really debatable that Newell and Valve have had a direct and extremely important role in building PC gaming into the mainstream activity it is today.

He takes a 'right place/right time' view of his life's work.

"I mean, it would be great to say I'm just this absolutely fucking wonderful person, and that I earned all of this, and that this expresses my awesomeness, but there was an awful lot of luck that went into it," Newell concluded on the topic.

In another part of the interview, Newell says that he'd originally thought he would be a doctor, but went into programming as a career following an encounter with Steve Ballmer at Microsoft.

Aside from Valve, Newell has founded a neuroscience company called Starfish and an ocean exploration organization called Inkfish.

Valve co-founder and yacht-loving billionaire Gabe Newell has granted a new interview to the YouTuber Zalkar Saliev (TikTok, IG). The chat covers everything from Newell's current daily routine ("get up, work, go scuba diving") to his earliest days as a programmer: and how he ended up at Microsoft.

One particularly interesting digression comes when Newell first gets access to a computer: until that point, the only programmable device he'd known was his Texas Instruments calculator. A common element in the youth of people who went on to do great things in the computer industry, in the early 1970s, was being near an educational institution that actually had a computer: and would let the kids play around with it.

In Newell's case, his high school had an arrangement with the University of California, Davis, where students could access a computer. I believe it was this exact machine: The Raytheon 703.

"We would do what was called batch programming," recalls Newell, "where you create a punch card and then run the punch card through the punch card reader, and then run over to the line printer and see what your output was."

Newell says that videogames didn't really exist when he was a kid: they existed on university mainframes, sure, and there had been pioneering machines like the Odyssey, but the real massmarket breakthrough would come with Atari and Pong.

"So the very first sort of real video game I played was a game called Trek which printed out the [Starship] Enterprise as E and the Romulans as an R, the Klingons as a K, and the star was an asterisk," says Newell.

The game Newell's talking about is, I believe, a variant of Mike Mayfield and Bob Leedom's 1971 Star Trek. Funnily enough this was created at the University of California, Irvine.

"Then you use the same random number seed at the beginning of each of your batch jobs so you can just do the next move," recalls Newell. "So 'frames per second' at that point were more like 'minutes per frame', and it usually takes about 15 minutes to do a move. So once again this was just a complete distraction or a waste of time versus what I was supposed to be doing."

Newell is of course being overly self-deprecating. His passion for coding would see him begin to study programming at Harvard, before a chance encounter with Steve Ballmer saw him hired at Microsoft. "I kept saying 'I have to go back and finish my degree' and, 13 years later, I still hadn't gone back and finished my degree," says Newell. "So that's where I learned the profession of being a developer."

We all know the story of how Valve was founded. Gabe Newell, born beneath a rainbow on Mt Paektu, was visited by an archangel in his quarters and charged to build Half-Life. Then he was charged to build a Half-Life patch tool called Steam that remains inexplicably popular to this day. In return, he was blessed with 800 sacred knives and a superyacht, which he uses to travel the globe like Cain, battling his enemies.

Or so I thought, anyway. But in a new interview with YouTuber Zalkar Saliev (TikTok, IG), Newell chatted about the circumstances that led to Valve's birth in much more mundane terms. Turns out, the germ that would become Valve got its start when Newell—then working at Microsoft—was trying to convince people that maybe not every app needed its own bespoke interface and approach to graphics acceleration tech, and how he convinced them using Doom.

"Everybody would create their own interface to the hardware, and they were all over the place, right?" said Newell. "Some of them were just unbelievably slow.

"We were trying to explain to them why device-independent graphics was a useful way of improving their applications, but everybody kept explaining to us that that couldn't possibly the right solution, that everybody needed to develop their own method of taking advantage of graphics accelerators, right?"

The most bullheaded resisters to Newell's crusade to get everyone on the same graphics page? The PC games industry, with developers adamant they knew best how to get their games playing with graphics tech. "Then we'd look at it," says Newell, "and it would be obvious that they were completely underutilizing the capabilities of the devices. That they had one person working on it, and they weren't necessarily very good." Nevertheless, "they were sort of, then, under the illusion that they were going to lose a bunch of performance by moving to Windows."

Newell needed a way to prove those fears unfounded, and oh, what do you know? Around the same time he noticed a strange phenomenon where the plucky folks at id Tech seemed to be outperforming Microsoft. "Id was out-distributing Microsoft with Doom," recalls Newell of the studio's shareware approach to getting the game out there. "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."

Plus, Doom was the most "graphically advanced" game around at the time. Newell smelled opportunity. "I contacted the people at id and said, 'Hey, we'll port Doom onto Windows and just give it back to you." The aim was to create hard "proof that you can have very high performance running videogames on Windows," and put an end to the naysayers determined to spin up their own, inferior solutions for graphics interfacing.

But getting in touch with id got Newell thinking: "id sort of presented a bunch of evidence that maybe the way of thinking about how to have customer relationships in the age of interconnectivity was wrong," that maybe Newell's home company wasn't quite keeping up with the times. "It was like, the way that Microsoft thinks about these things in terms of distribution and Salesforce and resellers and all of that was missing the opportunity represented by the advent of networking."

Newell got thinking about "the kind of company you would design as a result of that change in the relative value of different lines of business functions" and, well, you can see where this is headed, right? "Maybe in the 1950s it was like this, but in the 1990s it was going to be like this, and if that's true, then you want to redesign your businesses to take advantage of that relative transition.

"I enjoyed playing videogames, and used that as an excuse to say, 'Oh, I could go design a videogame company,' and [I] had very strong opinions about what the opportunities were to build more interesting video games. And Half-Life was sort of an expression of those concepts," says Newell. "I was willing to sort of 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."

So Half-Life, Valve, and the entire direction of PC gaming in the 21st century? You can thank bullheaded app developers refusing to listen to Gabe Newell about graphics interfaces for all of it. Well, you can thank id and Doom for a bunch of it, too, but we already knew Carmack and Romero's fingerprints were already all over our hobby of choice. It's all, says Newell, "a response to looking at the opportunities to build what I thought were going to be a better approach to game design, and if I was wrong, I'd have to go back to Microsoft."

Valve co-founder and yacht-loving billionaire Gabe Newell has given a new interview to the YouTuber Zalkar Saliev (TikTok, IG). It's a wide-ranging chat that covers everything from Newell's earliest jobs to his current daily routine ("get up, work, go scuba diving"), and it turns out that the young Newell loved programming, but had no thoughts that it would ever lead to, y'know, a useful career.

"I started programming in high school," says Newell. "At the time programming wasn't really a career path. There were probably only a couple of thousand programmers in the United States, working on mainframe accounting software primarily, and maybe there were some people doing stuff at NASA, but it wasn't like people said 'Oh, you know, there's this huge industry where software gets developed.'

"And videogames didn't even exist. I was 10 before the first videogame came out, it was called Pong, so when I was a kid I thought I was going to be a doctor, and programming was what I did when I should have been doing something else, right? It wasn't a career path, you know, there were no classes in it, and my first programmable device was a calculator, a [Texas Instruments] calculator."

The medical world lost someone who would no doubt have been a spectacular doctor (can't you just imagine Gaben in scrubs with a stethoscope?), but Newell's love for programming would lead him to the University of California's Raytheon 703, the first machine he coded on, before he won a place at Harvard and started to take programming classes.

"It still didn't occur to me that programming was a career path," says Newell. "I went out to visit my brother for Thanksgiving, and he'd just started a job at Microsoft, and at the time Microsoft wasn't the largest software developer in the world. It wasn't even the largest software developer in the US. It wasn't the largest software developer in Washington State. It was the third largest software developer in the suburbs of Washington at the time, right? So there was no notion of having any of the reputation that it would have, say, 10 years later.

"I was visiting my brother, and I thought he and I were going to just hang out, [but I found out] that he was working on a C compiler, and so that's what he did all this time. So I just hung out with him at work, and Steve Ballmer got mad because I was distracting Dan from doing his job and said, 'If you're going to be hanging out here, you know, why don't you do something useful?' So I said 'fine, I'll do a little work.' And decided I'd take the quarter off and just work at Microsoft."

That quarter would become a year, which became two years, which… you see where this is going.

"I kept saying 'I have to go back and finish my degree' and, 13 years later, I still hadn't gone back and finished my degree," says Newell. "So that's where I learned the profession of being a developer. And it was interesting how much faster I was learning by working at Microsoft, right? At the time it was the best place in the world to learn how to be a programmer. You know, there was a company that really prided itself on its ability to produce code faster and with higher quality and to solve programming problems that nobody else was solving. It was having lots of great people to learn from.

"It was pretty obvious when I got there that in terms of doing interesting work that was going to be valuable at the time, hundreds or thousands of people doing it at Microsoft was way better than going back and continuing my education at university. I was there for 13 years and then decided to start Valve."

What is striking here is Newell's clear respect for early Microsoft, and the elements of its culture he particularly admired: which would bleed into some of the Valve culture that the company is so well-known for. The ideas are simple—surrounding yourself with clever people, learning by doing, focusing on problems that others aren't—but in the context of the growth of computers produced radical results for both companies.

The co-founder of Valve Corporation, Gabe Newell, recently gave an interview to YouTuber Zalkar Saliev. The ocean-going billionaire shares his thoughts on everything from his daily routine to startup culture, but one of the largest themes is AI: and the "funny situation" Newell foresees whereby people who can't code become "more effective developers of value" than those who've been coding for a decade.

In a new short, Newell returns to AI after being asked what advice he'd offer to young people hoping for success in their careers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Newell believes that LLM tools are the next great technological leap, and are going to prove so transformative that this is where people should focus their learning.

"Well I think [in terms of] significant technology transitions there was pre-computer and there was post-computer, there was pre-internet and then there was post-internet," says Newell. "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 wanna be an accountant, learn AI, if you want to be an attorney, learn AI, if you're gonna be a programmer, you know, make sure that you know how to use the tools that are comfortable with those programming concepts. That all seems super obvious."

Rather than focusing on the high-falutin' side of AI, however, Newell compares this to past innovations in software like Lotus 1-2-3, which may not be a household name these days but was the first fully featured spreadsheet software to find widespread success, and was considered the first "killer app" for IBM PCs.

"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," says Newell. "Everybody else was still doing accounting in traditional ways, and you could look like a super genius just because you know how to use a desktop computer and a spreadsheet, right?

"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."

It is worth the cautionary note that this is a field rife with promises and unproven use-cases, and in some scenarios AI seems to create more problems than it solves. The technology is here to stay, of course, but we've been hearing about how transformative it's going to be for many years now, and… yeah, we'll see. But Newell is both a genius and one of the most successful businessmen on the planet, so no doubt this latest pronouncement will have plenty rushing off to work out how AI is going to help them become a better lawyer.

Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve Corporation, recently gave an interview to YouTuber Zalkar Saliev. The full interview is yet to surface but a few shorts from the conversation have been released, including one about Newell's daily routine ("get up, work, go scuba diving"), and his thoughts on why startups chasing VC money makes no sense.

Newell is asked at one point about the hot topic of the moment: AI. It's a field rife with promises, where the ultimate white whale is the search for artificial general intelligence (AGI), and there's little agreement on the best use cases for the technology as it is now.

To take one example, you'll find people claiming that LLMs will soon replace human programmers, while others will rightly point out that LLM code is often filled with errors and needs so much human oversight it may be counter-productive.

That's the question put to Newell by Saliev: should younger folk looking at this field be learning the technical side, or focusing purely on the best way to use the tools?

"I think it's both," says Newell. "I think the more you understand what underlies these current tools the more effective you are at taking advantage of them, 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, y'know, for a decade."

Newell goes on to emphasise that this isn't either/or, and any user should be able to get something helpful from AI. It's just that, if you really want to get the best out of this technology, you'll need some understanding of what underlies them.

"Even if you're just a pure tool user you're going to find that the gains to utilising those tools are very, very high," says Newell. "But 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."

It's no surprise that Newell is generally positive on AI: this is a man who loves new technology, who's pushed Valve into various technical fields (some with enormous success, some not so much), and who co-founded Starfish Neuroscience, a company focused on neural interfaces.

But it is perhaps worth adding a note of caution to his generally rosy view on how programmers and AI will interact: such as this story from a few days ago, in which 200 staff laid-off from King are being replaced by the AI tools they helped build.

Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve Corporation and the driving force behind much of the company's unique philosophy, recently gave an interview to YouTuber Zalkar Saliev, a channel that's more business-focused than games but, hey, this is Gaben. The full interview is yet to surface but a few shorts from the conversation have been released, including one about Newell's daily routine ("get up, work, go scuba diving").

Yeah yeah: easy enough when you're a billionaire with a fleet of superyachts. But the reason Newell is a billionaire with a fleet of superyachts is Valve, or to be more precise Steam: the de facto PC distribution platform that takes a 30% cut on nearly all sales. These days it is of course a very different company from the one that launched Half-Life 2 alongside Steam, but is one of the most spectacularly successful businesses in the world while remaining privately owned: the profit-per-employee makes Apple and Facebook look like lemonade stands.

During the interview with Saliev, Newell is asked what advice he'd give to people starting businesses: fairly boilerplate perhaps, but Newell's answer is essentially to ignore the entire model that Silicon Valley has been built on.

"I see a lot of people that go into situations thinking that what they need is a pitch document to VCs to raise capital," says Newell, "and that's a deeply distracted beginning to an organisation. 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."

And just like that, 99% of tech startups are explained. But it feels more widely applicable too, especially at a time when Microsoft is boasting about being in a stronger position than it's ever been while subjecting its workforce to periodic bloodbaths. Newell's summation will be familiar to any Valve-watcher, but some things do bear repetition.

"The key is to ignore all the distractions around [a business]," says Newell, "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. 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."

Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve Corporation and the driving force behind much of the company's unique philosophy, has had a much less public-facing role in recent years. Newell still turns up for things like the Steam Deck launch and official documentaries, but much of his time now is spent on one of his (several) superyachts, and on his other companies' projects: He co-founded Starfish Neuroscience, a company focused on neural interfaces (popularly known as "brain chips"), and Inkfish, a marine research operation.

Newell also remains magnificently quixotic, popping up every so often to talk about things like when a shark went for him, and now he's re-surfaced to do an interview with a YouTube channel that has 19 subscribers (Valve confirmed to PCG that the interview is legit). Zalkar Saliev "shares powerful interviews and lifestyle stories with successful men across the US," and his channel has previously played host to employees of Amazon and Microsoft. And now Gabe Newell's on there: well, some short clips are on there, with a full interview to follow later.

The ocean-loving billionaire is asked, "What is the daily routine for Mr Gabe?" I'd hesitate to call Newell "Gaben" to his face so Mr Gabe is quite the framing.

"My daily routine," begins Newell, "I get up, I work, I go scuba-diving, work some more, [then] 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.

"I work seven days a week: 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."

Indeed, we can see from the clip, which alternates between Saliev's Macbook view and the camera feed, that Newell appears to be sitting on the end of his bed. The view makes it impossible to say for certain, but the IRL Saxton Hale is looking good for his age and more trim generally: clearly all the scuba-diving and gym-going has paid-off. Newell goes on to say that he's effectively retired, inasmuch as he only does stuff that interests him now, but the man's work ethic is clearly second-to-none.

"I've said it before but, when you retire, you want to like stop doing your horrible job and go do what is sort of most fun and entertaining," says Newell. "In that sense I've been retired for a long time."

Newell goes on to give some examples of what's currently taking up his time. "In one of the companies we're working on an aerosol pathogen detection device so you can see all the pathogens that are in the air. Brain-computer interfaces are incredibly cool and all of the associated neuroscience is incredibly cool."

The upshot? Talk about life goals: "I just work all the time," ends Newell. "But it's not like 'oh my god I'm up late at night slaving away on stuff.' It's more like 'I can't go to sleep because I'm having fun', you know?"

Expect more to come from this interview, even if Newell's current interests have moved (somewhat) away from pc gaming. Newell's spectacular success and unusual perspectives have created an intense cult of personality around the man's pronouncements, but as the above shows some of it is really quite simple. As a Valve exec once observed, Newell's real superpower is in how he "delighted in people on the team just being really good at what they did."

Remember last year when leaked documents from a court case between Valve and indie dev Wolfire Games revealed that—per the calculations of its own data scientist Kristian Miller—Valve makes more money per head than Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and any other tech titan you care to name?

That was remarkable, as news days go, but there was some info missing: Miller's calculations for Valve's net income per employee was redacted, meaning we only could tell it was higher than Facebook's $780,400 net income per employee in second place (and much higher than Apple's $476,160 in third). How much bigger was uncertain.

But, as spotted by The Financial Times, one particular leaked document from the case got snatched back down before most people could notice it, one that supposedly shows Steam's commission revenues between 2009 and 2021.

Now, it's important to emphasise—as the FT does—that this document has long since been yanked offline from where it originally leaked, meaning we can only go by the word of SteamDB's Pavel Djundik and the, um, r/FuckEpic subreddit that it's not some mad fake.

So take the numbers with a grain of salt, but they're certainly believable. Per the docs, Steam's commission revenue (the juicy cut it takes from sales on its platform) climbed from a mere $100 million (ish) in 2009 to a tough-to-fathom $2 billion in 2021, where the data ends. In terms of Steam's operating profit margins (its earnings minus the expenses of running Steam and Valve more generally), that increased from 30% to just under 60%.

Combine those figures and you get a 2021 operating profit of about $1.2 billion, just from Steam, in 2021 alone.

So let's do some maths. Those leaked court docs show that Valve had 336 employees in 2021. Some quick division would put the company's profit-per-head from Steam commissions alone at, um, $3.5 million.

The FT's own calculation—which just factors in the 79 employees Valve has on Steam, plus the 35 it has in "admin," yields the even more eye-watering number of $11.4 million per employee in operating profit from Steam commissions.

Again, recall that Miller's calculations in 2018 put Facebook second-place to Valve with $780k per head. That's not so much a gap as a gulf. Now, to be fair, we're comparing different things here: Facebook's numbers are from 2018 and Valve's are from 2021.

Then again, we're comparing all of Facebook against just one portion of Valve's income (Steam commissions), so if anything you'd probably expect a true comparison to look even worse for Meta and co. The fact remains that Facebook has tens of thousands of employees while Valve has a number in the low-hundreds. I doubt Zuckerberg caught up in the interim.

It turns out that Valve boss Gabe Newell is also the cofounder of a neuroscience company called Starfish that's "developing a broad range of foundational technologies to enable new ways to interact with the brain," and if all goes well its first neural interface chip may launch in late 2025.

The 'brain interface' thing isn't a new interest for Newell: In 2021, for instance, he went deep (and, honestly, got a little weird) about the potential of brain-computer interface technology in gaming, but he was talking about biometric interfaces at least as far back as 2010. According to The Verge, Starfish Neuroscience was launched in 2019, although it remained quiet until last week, when its first (and thus far only) blog post (via Brad Lynch) offered a little insight into what the company is aiming for.

Starfish is taking a different approach to brain interface technology than other companies working in the field, neuroengineer Nate Cermak explained in the update—foremost among them presumably being Neuralink, although it's not mentioned by name in the update.

"Existing approaches to interfacing with the brain predominantly focus on interacting with a single brain region (for example, deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease)," Cermak wrote. "However, there is increasing evidence that a number of neurological disorders involve circuit-level dysfunction, in which the interactions between brain regions may be misregulated."

Cermak said developing therapies for those disorders "will require distributed neural interfaces capable of interacting with the brain at the circuit level; that is, reading and writing to multiple connected parts of the brain at once."

Current tech really isn't up to the task for a variety of reasons—size, power requirements, "surgical burden"—which is where Starfish hopes to come in: The company is working to develop "a new class of minimally-invasive, distributed neural interfaces that enable simultaneous access to multiple brain regions." The work is still very preliminary at this point, but it seems to be coming along reasonably well.

"We anticipate our first chips arriving in late 2025 and we are interested in finding collaborators for whom such a chip would open new and exciting avenues," Cermak wrote. "At this early stage, we’re especially interested in collaborators for whom this technology would pair well with their existing work in fields such as wireless power delivery and communication, or those designing custom implanted neural interfaces."

This new brain chip technology isn't the only thing Starfish has on the go: It's also developing a "targeted hyperthermia device" with potential uses in cancer treatment, and is researching "transcranial magnetic stimulation" therapies for possible use across a range of neurological disorders. Big stuff indeed—something to keep in mind the next time you find yourself wondering where Half-Life 3 is.

When asked to explain why Valve never made Half-Life 2: Episode 3 for the recent 20th anniversary documentary, Gabe Newell said that he "couldn't figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward."

For the Valve founder, the Half-Life games can't just push Gordon Freeman's story forward. They have to push videogames forward in one way or another. So, if Half-Life 3 ever happens (or Episode 3, but that ship has probably sailed), what would it 'push forward'?

It's a question that hasn't gotten easier to answer in the time since Valve cancelled Episode 3.

The original Half-Life changed the way stories were told in games, expanding on potential for narrative FPSes only hinted at by Unreal, and was nigh inarguably the best game of its kind in its day. And then Valve somehow did it again with Half-Life 2, breaking new ground for the narrative FPS with its novel physics and top-shelf dramatic storytelling.

Finally, although it wasn't the big numbered entry people might have hoped for, Half-Life: Alyx was yet another technological marvel that helped prove the potential of VR.

Assuming that 'VR again, but even better' isn't the plan for whatever the next Half-Life thing is (although rumor has it that Valve's got an all-in-one headset coming), there are a few possibilities for where Valve's attention lies, at least in terms of technological innovation.

Over a decade ago, Valve toyed around with the idea of biofeedback in games, an idea that still mostly appears in toyish novelties today, though it's gaining more traction. The most striking example from Valve was a demo of Portal 2 using the player's eyes to control in-game perspective, but it also tried a version of Left 4 Dead 2 where stress levels were monitored to dynamically change encounters. It might be old tech, but so is VR, which has had an incredibly long and slow journey toward mainstream appeal.

And then there are the more controversial candidates. Generative AI is a big topic these days, and while its applications in gaming so far have primarily been in the form of empty promises, there have been some discussions about how AI might be used to assist development in a thoughtful, temperate way.

There have also been efforts to incorporate generative AI directly into games, such as with the AI NPCs Nvidia has been demoing, but Valve would have to make huge creative and technical leaps to get that kind of thing out of tech demos and into a game in a way that is actually good, especially in a series known for telling coherent(ish) narratives. Despite the breathless claims of the AI industry, we don't even know if such a thing is possible, even if Valve did secretly have some brilliant machine learning department.

AI still feels too experimental to be the thing Valve is fixated on, although it seems reasonable to guess that the developer could be working on something related to procedural generation that isn't necessarily tied to LLMs or machine learning.

Blockchain trading is the other controversial recent tech development, and Valve doesn't allow it in Steam games—it's got its own Steam Marketplace, after all—so it's an extremely unlikely candidate for Valve's interests.

One clue might be in Valve's recent hardware innovations: the Steam Deck and the Steam Link. Game streaming and handheld gaming certainly seem like they're here to stay when compared to some other big trends, although it's hard to imagine how they might inform the design of a new Half-Life in a way that pushes things forward—handhelds have been around a long time. Although, if Nintendo can sell me on the potential of Joy-Cons after motion controls were so finicky for so long, maybe Valve can make magic happen with something only the Steam Deck's trackpads and paddles can enable.

I think novel control inputs are always worth exploring, whether we're talking about a bespoke arcade cabinet or the Playdate's crank, and my intuition tells me there has to be something that's only possible with a dual-trackpad-with-paddles setup. Or come to think of it, maybe what Half-Life 3 really needs is a crank.

It's possible that Valve is thinking about 'pushing things forward' in some way that doesn't primarily have to do with technology—design, storytelling, structure—although tech has always been a big component of Half-Life games. Half-Life 2's physics puzzles and characters who actually looked something like human beings aren't such a big deal now, but they were in 2004.

Even if Half-Life 3 never happens, the first two will always be among the most celebrated and evocative games ever created, so it's hard to feel underserved. Let's just hope they get crank support soon.

Last year saw the 25th anniversary of Half-Life, one of the most important games in PC history and a spectacular debut for Valve. But in another timeline, it could've been the studio's second game.

Valve co-founder and former chief marketing officer Monica Harrington was on a panel at the recent 2025 Game Developers Conference called "How Valve Became Valve: An Insider's Account." This expanded on Harrington's memories of the crucial early years at the company, and one tidbit concerns how Valve was looking to build up its development strength and team size.

Harrington says Valve was headhunting developers in the late 90s, and one of the ideas linked to this was to work on another game as well as Half-Life, with the idea being to release this unnamed title first and make a bit of money to help with the development of the studio's premier product.

"The original idea was to do what they called the B title," says Harrington. "This was going to be just kind of a mediocre game, and the idea was that the building of that game would build out the team."

Despite coming at it from more of a business and marketing perspective, however, Harrington saw that this would be a disaster for the fledgling studio.

"I told them, I led them through the business analysis, and I said that's just not gonna work," recalls Harrington. "If you do that, the company will fail. From the very beginning, we said you need to go all out. It's got to be in that top 10. I told Gabe [Newell] that I thought the only way that Half-Life was really going to work was if it was named Game of the Year."

No further details were offered on what this "B title" would have been, though given the rationale for making it Valve must have been considering another first-person shooter. Half-Life was after all intended to push boundaries, and that was one of Valve's problems: after a spectacular E3 showing in 1997 Valve was burning through cash, with Gabe Newell taking out a loan against the company's future profits to continue development.

"If Valve shipped the game we had, it would launch and quietly disappear, and all of the work we'd all done would account for nothing," recalled Harrington last year. "All of the people we'd hired would lose their jobs, we'd lose the money we'd invested. It was a disaster."

As Valve scrapped what wasn't working and development went through a reset, it was self-funding the game. We all know that things eventually worked out when the game released in November 1998, but Harrington's throwaway line to Newell about it needing to be "Game of the Year" proved oddly prophetic. Valve would struggle to sell Half-Life until Harrington came up with a marketing manoeuvre that persists to this day: putting all those accolades to good use, and slapping a "Game of the Year" sticker on the box.

I'm not sure there's any single figure in the games industry that people are more intrigued by than Gabe Newell. He has a fascinating air of mystery, which is weird, given you can sort of just email him and get a reply. But nevertheless, there's a bit of a cult of personality around the man, to the extent that he sometimes becomes a stand-in for Valve itself.

Sometimes it's a joke—the various Gabe memes around Steam sales, 'Praise Gaben,' that kind of thing—and sometimes it's more serious, like people's real fear that Steam might rapidly enshittify once Newell's no longer the boss.

But it turns out that, hey, maybe that kind of founder mythologisation is a little bit off, because in a recent GDC chat with PCG's Ted Litchfield, former Valve chief marketing officer Monica Harrington said that one of the key things she appreciated about Newell during her time working with him in the late '90s was the way he nurtured team talent: "He delighted in people on the team just being really good at what they did," said Harrington. "I think he liked being part of all of that."

Ol' Gabe has an eye for talent, in other words, and a capacity for nurturing it. Which makes sense, since a lot of Harrington's GDC talk on her time at Valve focused on how the company managed to locate and bring on-board skilled people from all over the country and from all manner of backgrounds. "You know, Gabe is the one who wanted me to join Valve," Harrington told PCG. "When we were having those discussions, we just got along really well."

So, you know, it sounds like rather than being the heroic Atlas who keeps Valve aloft on his back, a huge reason Valve has been so successful under his stewardship is that he's good at—and takes pleasure in—finding the right people who can help with the weight. You know, like the intern who saved the whole company that one time. You need people like that if you want to spend your time hanging out on your yacht with a potato phone.

Which isn't necessarily bombshell news: I don't think any organisation in history has ever truly been kept afloat by the energy and dynamism of literally a single person, but given the way we sometimes talk about Newell and Valve, it's perhaps a necessary corrective.

Anyway, that's not to say Newell isn't a remarkable guy unto himself. Harrington recalls that she "thought he was really, really smart and he had interesting takes on things," even to the extent that he stood out from all the other "really, really smart people" Harrington has worked with across the rest of her career.

During the Game Developer's Conference 2025, Monica Harrington—one of Valve's founders and its first chief marketing officer, who once outright threatened Sierra over the rights to Half-Life—gave an illuminating talk on the company's infancy. Before, of course, it became the goliath-felling company it is today.

While this is interesting in itself—another fascinating snippet she shared was about how Gabe Newell, circa 1998 to the early 2000s, had his eyes set on a social network. Y'know, like Facebook, Instagram, or X. "Gabe had interesting ideas that had nothing to do with software," Harrington said. "I mean, with games—and some of those would have been really interesting."

Really interesting indeed, which is why PC Gamer's Ted Litchfield asked about it when he sat down for an interview with her after the talk. Harrington revealed the bombshell that, if a time traveller had gone back and stepped on a butterfly, we could all be yelling at each other on a Valve-owned social media platform instead.

"One of them that just struck me—because this was not in a games context at all—an interactive social hub … I'm trying to remember some of the conversations we had at that time, but he was not talking about, like the community that exists on Steam or anything like that."

Harrington says that both she and Newell had a strong nose for where gaming was going—and how massive it could potentially be. But they also knew that the internet in general had the power to be an extremely effective social hub, too. She talks about it in almost prophetic terms:

"What he was very aware of—and I was too—was that the internet could be this incredibly social place, and people weren't thinking about it that way at that time. Y'know, people were doing transactions, tech companies … they weren't thinking about the psychology and the social aspects of it."

She's not wrong. To put a pin in the timeline, Myspace debuted in 2003 (may she rest in peace), Facebook arrived in 2004, Twitter in 2006, Tumblr in 2007, and Instagram dropped in 2010. Valve had its finger on the pulse of a thrumming network of social media giants that was about to bloom, its knee downright swollen from the approaching storm, and eventually decided nah. Let's not.

"Where Gabe's mind was going [was] about expanding that social element, but not in a gaming context … I think it probably wouldn't have looked anything like Facebook or what happened, but yeah."

The only question is, what would it have been called? Steam wouldn't change PC Gaming forever until 2003, so maybe Gabe 'n' Co would've cribbed the name for that. In some alternate universe, we're all posting Steets, or getting into arguments in quote-vents. Still, seeing as Steam barely felt the Amazon trying to muscle in on its corner of the market? Valve likely made the right choice.

It's been one heck of a week for serious Valve news, thanks largely to founder Monica Harrington's new GDC talk about the company's early days. So I thought it was perhaps time for a palate cleanser: What's Gabe Newell up to?

Well, when he's not fighting off sharks in South Africa, or tootling around on one of his mega superyachts, Gabe remains just one of us. Remarkably, he also still monitors his email address and, every so often, replies to someone.

Reddit user Walrus6444 recently sent one such message, politely asking: "Dear Mr Gaben, what games do you actually play?" I think brevity might be one of the keys to getting Gabe's attention, because the Valve co-founder replied to assert his bona fides.

"Lately I've been playing a bunch of Stalker 2," said Newell in response. "I should get the fourth ending tomorrow, and then I'll have to figure out what I'm going to play next."

I haven't even finished Stalker 2 once, so Gabe is putting me to shame here. I'm not surprised he has the spare time to do it but I do hope that, when I'm 62, I'm still mainlining the good stuff like this.

No doubt Newell noticed a certain skeleton in Rostak's toxic underpass location. It's next to a shipping container, with a red crowbar propped up against it, and some familiar looking glasses.

We can return to the serious news now. Among which is the story of how Valve's DRM was inspired by an exec's nephew, who "used a $500 check I'd sent him for school expenses and bought himself a CD-ROM replicator… he sent me a lovely thank you note." Then there's Harrington's fight to regain the rights for Half-Life, which could have seen Valve walk away from games altogether: "It wasn't an idle threat—we weren't going to take on all of the risk to make other people rich."

"Little Rocket Man" is truly one of the greatest bits in videogame history⁠—a challenging achievement in Half-Life 2: Episode 2 that requires you to carry a cherubic little garden gnome named "Gnome Chompski" through the entirety of the campaign and deposit the wee fellow on a rocket ship to another dimension in the final level. The Chompski achievement returned in several later Valve games, including Half-Life: Alyx. It reached apotheosis with Gabe Newell's 2020 IRL recreation, with a tangible Chompski launched into space as a fundraiser for a pediatric charity. And it all began with bored Valve QA testers messing around with physics props in Half-Life 2.

"This small baby doll has a long legacy," explained Valve developer Scott Dalton in Half-Life 2's new commentary mode while Gordon explores the playground in the game's opening. The baby in question is a scrungly little doll missing an eye and an arm. When you pick the baby up, it makes a little cooing noise, and that's about it⁠—or it would have been if mid-development madness hadn't set in.

"During the long months of internal testing, some of the team turned it into a challenge⁠—a way to make the 47th playthrough of the game a bit more fun," said Dalton. "They'd place the doll inside a nearby blue crate and see how far they could carry it throughout the game. After Half-Life 2 launched, the community started carrying cratebaby as well, adding their own stories and rules to the mix.

"A few years later, while working on Episode 2, this was the inspiration for the 'Little Rocket Man' achievement, where players had to carry a garden gnome dubbed 'Gnome Chompski' throughout the entire episode. Chompski even made a comeback for Left 4 Dead 2, in the 'Guardin Gnome' achievement, where players had to carry him through the Dark Carnival campaign."

There's been some discussion of the cratebaby over the years, but this seems to be the first definitive accounting from Valve. Some scuttlebut had credited cratebaby as a pure post-launch fan creation, while a 2020 IGN video of HL2 developers Adrian Finol, Robin Walker, and David Speyer reacting to a speedrun saw the developers joke that the cratebaby is a hidden master speedrun strat waiting to be discovered⁠—seemingly to the confusion of at least some fans, who thought the devs were revealing a genuine undiscovered exploit.

YouTuber PurpleColonel released a video last year going over the history of the cratebaby as it was known up to that point and showcasing his own attempts at the challenge. It turns out that carrying the cratebaby in its titular crate can result in some whacky Havok physics freakouts that should be familiar to anyone who's ever tried manually decorating their house in Skyrim. The cratebaby can also tragically go no further into the game than Kleiner's laboratory⁠—the teleporter malfunction sequence won't let you take anything with you.

If Dalton's recollections and the trio of speedrun-watching devs' bants are any indication, the cratebaby still holds a dear place in the hearts of devs at Valve. "These kinds of interactions with players are some of the most rewarding parts of game development," Dalton concluded in the commentary track. "We design games with theories in mind, but you never really know where things are going until players get their hands on it."

Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary saw Valve doing a Valve: The game received a massive surprise update, adding new commentary and integrating the two episodes, alongside adding a whole bunch of enhancements. It also dropped a two-hour documentary about the making of the game, and the background of Valve's existential legal battle with Vivendi, which features all sorts of digressions into the studio's multifaceted thinking, and the possibly unforeseen consequences: Most notably, the creation of what would become the de facto PC gaming platform Steam.

Steam launched in 2003, initially as a way for Valve to automatically ship updates to players of its existing games. "Gabe [Newell] in particular, he had a pencil sketch of an idea in his head of what would become Steam," says Erik Johnson. "But it was clear with Team Fortress Classic and then Counter-Strike that fundamentally the thing we were really attracted to was the ability to ship content directly to our customers.

"I mean, there was a set of business goals that ended up being part of Steam. But fundamentally it was a bunch of game development goals that it was servicing that was so attractive to us."

Newell may have had some idea of where he eventually wanted this thing to go, but Steam wasn't initially being built to distribute games: Until someone had a lightbulb moment.

"We ended up going out and finding this company called Applied Micrososystems," says engineer Yahn Bernier. "So we ended up hiring most of the original Steam team from that other company to build initially this sort of in-game advertising streaming model but then there was this epiphany that, 'Hey, it's just bits. Why don't we just download whole games this way? You guys go off and do it.'"

Steam would eventually begin selling third-party games in 2005. But well before that point Valve had made the major decision that Half-Life 2, which would release in November 2004 and was easily the most-anticipated PC game of its era, would require Steam to play. Readers of a certain vintage may even remember that, at the time, this got a lot of angry pushback from elements of the PC gaming community, aghast at being forced to install an additional client in order to run a game they'd paid for.

"The decision not just to ship Half-Life 2 with Steam but to actually require Steam, even with the versions that were purchased at retail in a box, was the most interesting decision of all those," says Greg Coomer, who worked with Gabe Newell at Microsoft before becoming one of Valve's first employees. "Because it turned out to be an incredibly important decision for the future of the company, and a lot of us were nervous, and a lot of the people who'd been at Valve for a long time, since the very beginning, were the most nervous about that decision.

"So it was one of the rare exceptions to our [usual] decision-making process, and Gabe had to really step in and say, 'No, actually we're doing it this way.'"

The consequence of this decision was that Half-Life 2 became not only a best-selling smash hit for the company, but one whose very success made it a phenomenal Trojan Horse for Steam as a platform. Steam was a digital storefront that was already installed on your PC when most of us hadn't heard the words "digital storefront" before. Put like that, it almost seems like a fait accompli: But no one at the time, outside of Valve, thought Steam would work.

"It was a very weird time," says Gabe Newell. "I don't think people understand how many times we would go to people and say, 'No, you will be able to distribute software over the internet' and have people say, 'No, it will never happen.' I'm not talking about one or two people. I mean like 99% of the companies we talked to said 'It will never happen. Your retail sales force will never let it happen.'

"But also people would say, 'Users aren't gonna want this... people want physical copies.' There were so many bad faith arguments that were being made. Retail sales is not the goal, right. It's actually an impediment, it's somebody who sits between you and the customer."

This is one of the consistent things about Newell and Valve people generally: Most answers end up back at the user.

Valve's hegemony over PC gaming is one of those facts that elicits strong reactions. Some folk, and they're not wrong, bristle at its sheer dominance, its ability to set the terms for developers, and the control wielded over the PC gaming landscape by one company. Another perspective might be that Steam does have competition, albeit no equals, and if one company is going to be in that position, well, Valve certainly ain't the worst: And does seem acutely conscious of its responsibilities to developers as well as players.

Whether what exists now resembles that "pencil sketch" Gabe Newell had in mind… well, only he knows. But its success can arguably be put down to two facts above others. Valve saw which way the wind was blowing before most everyone else: And it had one hell of a delivery vector ready to go.

In a recent documentary on the making of Half-Life 2, Gabe Newell has basically confirmed that he is the IRL Saxton Hale, and the kind of man that just isn't all that fussed when faced with a shark attack. Aren't we all?

One of the themes of the documentary is that, as Half-Life 2 was being developed, Valve was embroiled in what would become a huge and potentially existential legal fight with publisher Vivendi. Valve COO Scott Lynch explains that they'd filed a "narrow" suit over a dispute in their existing licensing terms, and won a few minor victories, before Vivendi decided to "go World War 3" in response.

Yes, we'll get to the shark soon, but the necessary context for this tale is that Vivendi was allegedly out for blood, soon targeting Lynch and Newell (and their wives!) personally in addition to suing Valve.

"It's not a legal strategy," says Newell. "It's basically trying to intimidate you, they're saying 'not only are we going to take all this money from the company but we're going to bankrupt you as well.'

"Publishers in the industry at that time were used to being able to bully developers, right? And so this was as much about an assertion of power as much as it was optimizing for a financial outcome."

Lynch says there came a point where "if we want to keep going" Newell had to put his house on the market, and Newell himself says "I was pretty close to going personally bankrupt: ⁠We went all in, there was no money left."

Now, it strikes me that trying to bully someone like Gabe Newell might be a bad idea. The man himself, telling the story from what looks like his $500 million superyacht, has another way of putting it.

Asked whether this was an anxious time for him, Newell demurs. "I don't know, uh, there are certain things that I just… I'm kind of a weird person in a number of dimensions. I don't really think 'oh this is super scary', like I don't have an emotional response to it. I just say 'well this is what we're doing and we'll see how it plays out.'

"So I don't think it was super stressful to me, right, I mean it didn't really bother me. I was diving in South Africa recently and a shark tried to bite me a couple of times, and the people around me were way more freaked out than I was. I was like 'oh, a shark's trying to bite me, I should get away from the shark' whereas other people were having like [high-pitched voice] 'oh, a shark! It's trying to bite somebody!'"

Newell is at pains to point out that he doesn't consider this to be anything to do with bravery, or indeed foolhardiness.

"I just think that's how I'm wired," says Newell. "I don't think it's anything that speaks to my character or anything, it's like I just seem to not get particularly agitated around risk, which probably means I take on more risk at times than most sane people would. Which can be a positive or you can wreck a bunch of other peoples' lives being in the neighborhood of your risk indifference."

In other words: Vivendi could go swivel. And I'm not sure there's a better comparison for standing up to bullyboy lawyer tactics than being unbothered by an actual honest-to-god shark trying to bite you.

One final touch is that Newell tells this story on a yacht, with a big model of a shark behind him. Was the shark in question zapped for its impertinence and stuffed as a trophy for the big man? Well if this was Saxton Hale, there would be no doubt.

Valve would eventually emerge triumphant from the Sierra lawsuit, much as I imagine Newell emerged triumphant from the sea, ending the ordeal in 2005 with a settlement that saw the publisher stop distributing Valve's games, and all the licenses return. It's a wild story though and, next to the shark, perhaps the most stunning cameo comes from an intern who could speak Korean and, arguably, changed the course of videogame history with what they found.

As part of Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary Valve has released a new documentary on the making of the game, a period that was arguably also the making of the company. A significant thread in the story is not just the difficult development of the game itself, but Valve's major legal battle with Vivendi over these years.

Vivendi, through subsidiary Sierra Entertainment, had published the original Half-Life and owned the IP, but had overstepped its bounds by selling Counter-Strike (a Half-Life mod) in Asia without Valve's knowledge. To cut a long story short, a huge legal fight kicks off, with Valve looking to regain control of Half-Life, and the much larger Vivendi simply looking to bully Valve out of the IP and employing seriously nasty tactics (like making Gabe Newell's then-wife part of the lawsuit).

This thing dragged on for years, and it got existential for Valve, with Newell leveraging himself to near-bankruptcy in order to keep the company afloat. Valve COO Scott Lynch, who ironically had managed Sierra in the past, was desperately trying to ink deals that would keep the studio going and let it keep fighting. And so it happened that Counter-Strike 2, a game that would finally be released in 2023, became almost a makeweight in a Half-Life 2 deal.

"I started working on a deal with a big publisher that was for Counter-Strike 2," says Lynch. "So we're right there, ready to sign. We're really kinda running on fumes at that point. And then get a phone call and they're like 'yeah we changed our mind, we're not doing the deal.' I remember one conversation with Gabe, he was like 'so how we fucked are we?' And I was like 'well, we're kind of screwed.'

"We can probably reformat everything we're doing but it means we lay off people, and we still had the huge uncertainty of what's going to happen in the lawsuit."

With Vivendi's lawyers circling, and Half-Life 2 still some way from shipping, Valve needed an influx of cash to keep the lights on. "I immediately started chasing another publisher," says Lynch. "And we were able to get a deal done with another publisher for Counter-Strike 2. When we got the deal done Gabe at that point was super into knives and as the deal gift for the parties he built a knife that was inscribed Counter-Strike 2."

Newell's knife obsession is well-known, though the fact he built a custom Counter-Strike 2 knife (shown in the video) is new: Wonder what that thing would fetch on the community market? Lynch roughly dates the deal to May 2003 though doesn't specify which publisher this was, but a reasonable guess would be Electronic Arts, which did end up distributing Half-Life 2 at retail (though the game would end up primarily sold on Steam). Which may also be why the publisher got cold feet at some point down the line.

"So the deal structure was, after we ship Half-Life 2, if you decide that you don't want to keep moving forward then you can just decide to terminate the deal and we'll pay the money back," says Lynch. "That ended up happening. So… maybe a good choice, because it took us a long time to ship Counter-Strike 2."

Lynch can't help but smile at the memory, and it's clear why: "Through some more depositions Vivendi figured out that we'd gotten this new infusion of capital, and kind of lost their mind trying to figure out how did that happen? Because clearly part of their strategy was running us out of money."

Spoiler alert: Vivendi did not, in fact, run Valve out of money. The lawsuit would end in complete vindication for Valve in April 2005, with a settlement that saw Vivendi stop distributing Valve's games at retail and the licenses in question returning to Valve.

At which point, clearly, Valve decided to take 20 years to actually develop Counter-Strike 2. I jest of course: It's likely that the game Lynch refers to as Counter-Strike 2 is what ultimately became 2004's Counter-Strike: Source. Co-developed by Valve and Turtle Rock, this was the first Counter-Strike built on the Source engine and would initially ship as part of Half-Life 2 retail bundles before a standalone release.

The whole documentary is worth a watch for nuggets like these, from staff days out photographing cranes to Gabe Newell's wider thoughts on the future for the Half-Life series. Heck, there might even be a tease for what's to come in there: "I think that Half-Life represents a tool we have," says Newell, "and promises made to customers."

Less than a week after the release of an ADL report accusing Steam of "normalizing hate and extremism in the gaming community," US Senator Mark Warner has sent a letter to Valve boss Gabe Newell asking what the company is doing to combat the rise of extremist content on the platform, and warning of further "scrutiny" from the government if Valve doesn't play ball.

"It has been brought to your attention before that extremist ideologies seem to find a home on Steam," Warner wrote in his letter (via The Verge). "In 2022, Valve received a Senate letter identifying nearly identical activity on your platform, and yet two years later it appears that Valve has chosen to continue a 'hands off'-type approach to content moderation that favors allowing some users to engage in sustained bouts of disturbing and violent rhetoric rather than ensure that all of its users can find a welcoming and safe environment across your platform."

The 2022 Senate letter referenced by Warner, written by US Senator Maggie Hassan, said Steam has "a significant presence of users displaying and espousing neo-Nazi, extremist, racial supremacist, misogynistic, and other hateful sentiments," and requested a detailed report on what Valve is doing about it. Warner's letter is quite similar in that regard, acknowledging that Steam does have an online conduct policy and subscriber agreement, but questioning how committed Valve is to actually enforcing it.

"As Black Friday and the holiday buying season approaches, the American public should know that not only is Steam an unsafe place for teens and young adults to purchase and play online games, but also that, absent a change in Valve's approach to user moderation and the type of behavior that it welcomes on its platform, Steam is playing a clear role in allowing harmful ideologies to spread and take root among the next generation," Warner wrote.

Warner also warned, somewhat ominously, that if Valve does not adopt industry-standard moderation practices—whatever that means—it will "face more intense scrutiny from the federal government for its complicity in allowing hate groups to congregate and engage in activities that undoubtedly puts Americans at risk."

There's an aspect of irony to the complaint: Elon Musk turned Twitter into a haven for racism and far-right rhetoric, after all, and he's being rewarded with a high seat in the incoming US government. It's also not clear what the US government could do to force Valve's hand: "Hate speech" in the US is broadly protected under the First Amendment, and as a privately held company Valve is not subject to pressure from external shareholders who might not be comfortable with its permissive attitude.

At the same time, questions about Valve's content moderation policies have persisted over the years, and it does sometimes seem inclined to let the monkeys run the circus. We said in a 2018 report on Valve's "hate group problem" that Steam's problem isn't so much the absence of rules as the failure to enforce them; Valve updated Steam's community rules in 2023 with a more detailed breakdown of what is and isn't allowed, but enforcement (or lack thereof) remains an issue.

Warner's letter concludes with a series of 10 questions, several of them multi-part, covering broad topics like enforcement practices to more granular stuff including internal definitions of terms, the number of content moderators working at Steam, and what commitments it will make "to ensure that it has meaningfully curbed white supremacist, antisemitic, terroristic, Nazi, homophobic, transphobic, misogynist, and hateful content by November 15, 2025."

The Senator has asked for a response by December 13. I've reached out to Valve for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

Half-Life 2's third DLC episode was never finished because Gabe Newell and company didn't just want to finish the Half-Life 2 story arc, but to do something big and innovative with the game design, and as Newell put it in a new documentary, he was "stumped."

But also in that documentary, released for Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary, there's footage of some pretty cool-looking Episode 3 stuff, including an ice gun that could be used to build transparent barriers, but also in "kind of like a Silver Surfer mode" that lets you run across ice ramps as you build them. The detail that there'd be an ice gun was known previously, but as far as I'm aware, this footage is seeing the light of day for the first time.

There were also some neat "hoppy blob" enemies that used Portal 2's gel tech and could gobble up headcrabs, divide themselves, and pass through grates with their amorphous bodies—if you want to see 'em, the bit of the documentary that covers Episode 3 starts at about an hour and 53 minutes in. You can watch it in the player above or on YouTube here.

I guess I must not be Valve dev material, because if they'd put out Episode 3 with the ice gun and blobs in 2010ish, I probably would've been fine with it. Sure, it wouldn't have blown my mind like Half-Life 2's Striders and Gravity Gun did in 2004, but you know: ice gun, blobs, the rest of the story. I'd have been into it! That wasn't enough for them, Newell said in the documentary.

"You can't get lazy and say, 'Oh, we're moving the story forward,'" he said. "That's copping out of your obligation to gamers. Yes, of course they love the story. They love many, many aspects of it. 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. I couldn't figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward."

Not everyone from Valve is in agreement, though: "We could've definitely gone back and spent two years to make Episode 3," said engineer David Speyrer.

Hey, who says the window has passed? Half-Life 2 did just get a big update for its 20th anniversary: Along with the documentary, Valve added in-game commentary and made a bunch of fixes. It also now includes Episodes 1 and 2, and is free for a limited time. Maybe that big idea will come to Gabe one of these days.

Rumors and facts about the contents of Half-Life 2: Episode 3 and why it was never finished have circulated for years, but a new documentary released for Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary is particularly revealing, showing us a glimpse of unfinished Episode 3 guns and enemies—including an ice ray that had "kind of like a Silver Surfer mode"—and getting a few of its developers to explain why it was never finished.

For the uninitiated, Half-Life 2 was famously followed up with two episodic expansions that were going to form a trilogy, but after Episode 2, Valve abandoned the Half-Life story for 13 years, only picking it up again in 2020 with VR game Half-Life: Alyx. Since then, speculating about Episode 3, or the fabled Half-Life 3, has become a cherished PC gaming forum pastime.

What happened to Episode 3 is no big surprise: The gist is that they didn't know how to push the game design forward enough to make it feel worthwhile to them. That ice gun was apparently not up to Valve's standards of innovation, nor were the blob enemies that use Portal tech. In the documentary, Half-Life 2 level designer David Riller says that they were experiencing "element fatigue" and needed to "go bigger or do something else."

"I think we had really explored a lot of what made sense in the Half-Life universe and setting," Riller said. Writer Marc Laidlaw echoed that feeling, noting that even Arkane was struggling to do new things in its canceled Ravenholm spin-off.

When Left 4 Dead needed help shipping, the Episode 3 team paused work on the next Half-Life campaign to pitch in, and like a hobby woodworking project that gets put down for just a moment and winds up collecting dust for decades, that was its ultimate demise.

Engineer David Speyrer says that it was "tragic and almost comical" that, after Left 4 Dead was out the door, they felt like they'd missed their opportunity to finish Episode 3 and needed to make a new engine if they were going to continue the series.

"That just seems in hindsight so wrong," Speyrer said. "We could've definitely gone back and spent two years to make Episode 3."

But it doesn't seem like there's complete agreement at Valve on whether they should've just finished Episode 3 to conclude the story or not. When Valve founder Gabe Newell addressed the subject, he said that completing Episode 3 just to finish the story would've been cheating.

"You can't get lazy and say, 'Oh, we're moving the story forward,'" said Newell. "That's copping out of your obligation to gamers. Yes, of course they love the story. They love many, many aspects of it. 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. I couldn't figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward."

The documentary concludes with the upside: After not finishing Episode 3, Valve's done a lot of other stuff, like release Dota 2 and the Steam Deck. But for the Half-Life fans unsatisfied by that takeaway, there is an extremely meager tease (classic Valve) about the future of Half-Life at the end: just Newell saying that, sure, yeah, there are opportunities to do more Half-Life stuff.

You can watch the Half-Life 2 Anniversary Documentary on YouTube, and Valve's also released a big patch to the game itself that adds in-game commentary.

To celebrate Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary, Valve dropped a few surprises in our lap on Friday afternoon, like putting together the original dev team to record in-game commentary for the legendary FPS, which is free for the weekend on Steam. Awesome! Valve also posted a two-hour documentary on the making of Half-Life 2 on YouTube. Also awesome—unless you had something else to watch tonight like a ridiculous boxing match.

Personally, I'm less interested in the development of a 20-year-old game I know like the back of my hand as I am in some hints about what might come next for Half-Life. So, I did the thing you do when you just can't wait to find out who done it in a whodunnit: I skipped to the end.

Is there confirmation of Half-Life 3 in the Half-Life 2 documentary? Or confirmation of Half-Life: Alyx 2? Or confirmation of anything specific at all? No. But in the closing minutes of the documentary, there are some hints that the Half-Life saga isn't over.

"It was easy to think about VR being a vehicle for Half-Life because that was a big technological innovation and kind of a core reason for that product's existence," said Valve engineer Brian Jacobson. "And I think one of the things we have internally tended to attach to the Half-Life IP is innovation. Gameplay innovation is often enabled by technological innovation. Clearly there was a ton in Half-Life 1 and 2.

"It's an interesting challenge moving forward to think about what that means for future Half-Life stuff, for sure," Jacobson added.

Future Half-Life stuff confirmed? I mean, sorta, though Jacobson is implying that more Half-Life won't happen until more technological innovation is done.

Over to you, Gabe Newell:

"The ending of Half-Life: Alyx is somewhat a self-critical realization," said Gabe. "I think that Half-Life represents a tool we have and promises made to customers to capitalize on innovation and opportunities to build game experiences that haven't been involved previously. And I think there are no shortage of those opportunities facing us as an industry right now."

Look, I know GabeN is a beloved industry figure but at times he talks like a business cyborg. What does that word salad mean? At the end of Half-Life: Alyx we briefly get to inhabit the boots of Gordon Freeman again for a few seconds, and a portion of the history of Half-Life is changed due to a bit of spacetime G-Man magic. I'm not sure how that adds up to a self-critical realization, honestly.

But it does seem like Gabe is saying something along the same lines as Jacobson did: Half-Life and technological innovations go hand in hand, and you won't get one without the other.

What those innovations might be, I'm not sure: more advanced VR? More powerful GPUs? A Steam Deck you control with a neural implant? Whatever breakthrough needs to happen, I hope it happens soon. Otherwise, see you at the Half-Life 2 25th anniversary party for some more speculation.

One of the many great treats PC gaming has given us lately is a new generation of handheld PC that’s genuinely capable of desktop-like performances from within a pocket-friendly chassis. Valve’s Steam deck dispelled our old memories of greenscale Gameboy screens and constant battery-swapping. 

Then the market exploded with even more performance-focused handhelds, giving us numerous options for playing Cyberpunk on the train. And with MSI’s mighty Claw, we might have found the one handheld to rule them all. 

Expertly balancing high performance specs, ergonomics and cooling, the Claw delivers cool, comfortable, top-end gaming performance in a unit that weighs just 675g. And the internal componentry’s mighty impressive, so let’s dig into it.  

It’s all built around a 7-inch, full HD 1920x1080 IPS touchscreen, for that rich, deep colour reproduction at any angle. ​​It’s nippy too - the refresh rate’s 120Hz, so even in competitive game scenarios you can outpace the competition, keeping those high syned frame rates to better track your targets and react to enemies in an instant.

Down under the ergonomically designed chassis itself, the internals are specced with up to an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU, packed with those innovative new neural processing units (NPUs) for an AI-assisted performance boost. 

MSI’s shooting for the outright performance advantage over the competition in the handheld market, so the Claw pairs that powerful CPU with an Intel Arc GPU. It’s great to see Arc in the mix - the power-efficient, battery friendly graphics processing it offers here is perfect for a handheld. 

Speaking of battery life, it’s usually the elephant in the room when we talk about mobile gaming devices. All that graphical grunt chomps through energy, so great battery life isn’t a given. MSI’s worked hard on the Claw’s battery though, achieving a 53Whr capacity –  the largest in the handheld PC market right now. 

For a spot of future-proofing, it’s also Wifi 7 compatible. So when you’re connected to a nice fast Wifi network, you get multi-gigabit performance, peak speeds of 5.8 Gbps on 5GHz and 6GHz connections. With 320MHz channel bandwidths, it delivers substantial throughput gains.

Since the Claw has a touchscreen, MSI’s designed a bespoke interface just for this device, MSI Center M, to help you easily navigate between the settings and modes that matter most, without having to delve into too many menus. 

That means you can adjust brightness and sounds easily, select operating scenarios (realistically, it’s going to be game mode: on isn’t it), program your macro key and customise the colours of the Claw’s mystic light. 

Finally, let’s talk comfort. As a handheld device, Claw has achieved the optimal balance between its grip and weight. With thousands of sample data collected from around the world, the Claw is ergonomically tailored for comfort and precision.

Pre-order yours at MSI’s official site.

Valve is currently embroiled in a US antitrust lawsuit with Wolfire, a developer that alleges the Steam platform holder uses its position to unfairly crowd-out rivals and control game prices. Valve tried to have the suit dismissed, but in May 2022 the court ruled it could go ahead with some changes and enter the discovery phase: the juiciest part of the legal process where, among other things, plenty of internal correspondence from the companies involved is made public.

Among these documents are a couple of spicy exchanges between Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, and Valve's CEO Gabe Newell, COO Scott Lynch, and project manager Erik Johnson (first spotted by Simon Carless at GameDiscoverCo). The context for both exchanges is broadly speaking store pricing and specifically the commission that Valve takes on Steam sales, which are some of Sweeney's favourite topics. The first chain in 2017 is sparked specifically by a leaked comment from Steam's developer forum, in which Valve's Sean Jenkins mistakenly said Steam may start restricting the keys it gives to developers:

On August 12, 2017, Gabe Newell emails Tim Sweeney: "Anything we doing to annoy you? We’re guessing Sean Jenkins' public dumbness might be part of it."

Sweeney replies to Newell and Valve's Erik Johnson saying he's not annoyed "and I've never heard of Sean Jenkins" (poor Sean). Then Sweeney adjusts his flight goggles and gets ready for takeoff on one of his pet peeves: the 30% platform fee on Steam. "There was a good case for [such fees] in the early days," writes Sweeney, "but the scale is now high and operating costs have been driven down, while the churn of new game releases is so fast that the brief marketing or UA value the storefront provides is far disproportionate to the fee."

Sweeney opines that, if you were to strip away the top 25 selling games on Steam, "I bet Valve made more profit from most of the next 1000 than the developer themselves made." The maths to get there is 30% to Valve, 30% on marketing, and 15% on servers / engine costs, so "the system takes 75% and that leaves 25% for actually creating the game, worse than the retail distribution economics of the 1990s."

If either Valve employee replied to Sweeney, it's not in this disclosure. Which might be why, when we get to December 2018, Sweeney is in an even more ornery mood. At this time Valve had introduced a royalty change that almost seems custom-designed to get Sweeney frothing at the mouth: it reduced Valve's cut on the most-successful games down to as low as 20%. Not only is Sweeney all about the little guy but, at this exact moment in time, he's gearing up for the launch of the Epic Games Store and the antitrust fight between Epic and Apple (still ongoing).

Sweeney is emailing Gabe Newell and Scott Lynch, and begins by outlining his problems with Apple, before telling them about the imminent launch of the Epic Games Store. This is a direct competitor to Steam and, credit where it's due, Epic put its money where Sweeney's mouth was by launching with a flat 12% platform fee. Sweeney wants Valve to respond to this, mainly because it'll strengthen Epic's hand against Apple, but he's clearly not had too many lessons in the gentle art of persuasion:

"Right now, you assholes are telling the world that the strong and powerful get special terms, while 30% is for the little people," writes Sweeney. "We're all in for a prolonged battle if Apple tries to keep their monopoly and 30% by cutting backroom deals with big publishers to keep them quiet. Why not give ALL developers a better deal? What better way is there to convince Apple quickly that their model is now totally untenable?"

The next day Valve's Scott Lynch simply sends this email to both Gabe Newell and Erik Johnson with one-line commentary: "You mad bro?"

I imagine, at that exact moment, Tim Sweeney probably was quite mad. It should also be noted that, while some may see Lynch's response as rather flippant, it was of course never meant to be seen outside of Valve. And Sweeney has just emailed two senior Valve types, told them he's launching a direct competitor to their platform, criticised how Valve operates its store, ranted a bit about Apple, ranted a little bit more about Apple, and then called them "assholes." I mean, it's a bold move Cotton.

The Wolfire lawsuit is much wider than just these emails, and Carless does raise the interesting question of who exactly is funding the smaller company against Valve. Litigation on this scale is eye-wateringly expensive and, while Valve has large pockets, it's not clear where Wolfire is getting the money from. It's currently asking the court to resolve the suit as a class action claim, and has re-stated its core arguments about pricing, during which amusingly enough it backhands the Epic Games Store ("publishers have little incentive to offer games on EGS and consumers have little incentive to use the platform").

The suit honestly doesn't seem enormously coherent in what it claims about Valve, with various different elements of how Steam works being conflated, and I'm not sure it's going anywhere but, hey, not a lawyer. Still, thanks to this we've found out what happened behind closed doors when Epic was launching its big Steam competitor: at Valve, they were laughing.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly suggested Scott Lynch was replying to Tim Sweeney directly. He was commenting on Sweeney's email to Gabe Newell and Erik Johnson.

Valve boss Gabe Newell is headed to court. A court order filed on November 16 (via Gamesindustry.biz) says Newell is required to testify in person in the ongoing antitrust lawsuit between Wolfire Games and Valve so the plaintiffs in the case can "adequately assess" his credibility.

Wolfire filed the antitrust suit in April 2021, claiming that Valve suppresses competition in the PC gaming market through the dominance of Steam, while using it to extract "an extraordinarily high cut from nearly every sale that passes through its store." Valve takes 30% of all sales made on Steam up to $10 million, after which the percentage drops to 25% on sales up to $50 million, and 20% for all sales beyond that.

The suit was dismissed without prejudice in November 2021, meaning Wolfire had 30 days to amend its complaint to address the shortcomings cited by the court, and so it did—the case was revived in May 2022.

As part of the ongoing discovery process, lawyers for Wolfire want to question Newell, who they say is "uniquely positioned to testify on all aspects of Defendant’s business strategy." And they want to do so face-to-face, as "only an in-person deposition would allow them to adequately assess Mr. Newell’s credibility."

Newell had previously requested a remote deposition, saying "that he is at risk of developing a serious illness were he to contract Covid-19," according to the filing, and thus "has structured his life to minimize exposure to possible Covid-19 transmission. According to Mr. Newell, an in-person deposition, even with the health measures which plaintiffs propose, is not consistent with those safeguards."

He has indeed taken steps to avoid exposure to the pandemic: Newell famously spent a good chunk of time through 2020-21 in New Zealand as a "Covid refugee." The court rejected his argument, however, saying that while Covid-19 presents "continued public health risks," Newell failed to present any substantial evidence that he's at greater risk of serious illness arising from Covid-19 than the general public—and even if he had, Wolfire's lawyers "would be unduly prejudiced by a remote deposition given Mr. Newell's unique knowledge as to defendant's business strategies."

To accommodate Newell's concerns, the court ordered that everyone in the courtroom must wear an N95 or compatible mask during his appearance, although Newell himself will have to remove his mask when answering questions.

Chet Faliszek, the lead on Left 4 Dead—who is now making his own retro sci-fi version called The Anacrusis—says that Gabe Newell had some pretty strong opinions on the game during its troubled development.

That's according to an interview by GameDeveloper, which outlines the horde shooter's rocky start. Faliszek recalls stumbling into his position as project lead almost by accident due to Valve's funky organisational structure where people can drift towards projects they think are interesting. He says an engineer responded to Newell with a casual: "'Well, you should just talk to Chet, Chet's kind of the person.' Like, no one ever told me I'm running [the game]!"

The only problem is, L4D's early prototypes weren't working. The game was originally imagined as an asymmetrical game with a PvP focus—four gun-toting survivors against four special infected. That would later return as the game's Versus mode, where the zombies were far more fragile. Even so, the original playtest was a disaster.

Firstly, the matchmaking system didn't work, prompting a very blunt response from Newell. "Gabe just asked me very seriously, 'why don't I just play Counter-Strike instead? That's working.' And I thought he was joking. Like, ha, ha, ha. But then he made me watch him play it, he made me sit in his office and watch and play it."

Faliszek does emphasise that it was a pretty good object lesson, rather than a weird flex. "[Newell] says, 'No, seriously, this is every single one of your customers, asking this question right now. What do you tell them?' Like, fuck, good question."

The other problem was that the concept just didn't really work—a common problem in these asymmetrical PvP games. It's hard enough to balance classes when both teams have access to the same ones, let alone when they're playing with an entirely different set of abilities. "One really good player on the infected side could ruin the game for the other team … I thought they would play better with [Newell], and they didn't. It was a mess." 

The experience caused Faliszek to rethink the game's whole structure, though the shift itself was gradual. He calls the phrase "lone wolves die" the "knife that everything in [the game] was cut on." There was apparently some resistance to this idea, though, especially when it came to how the special infected could screw you over if they snagged you on your lonesome.

"I remember at one point an animator at Valve telling me that we would never ship the Hunter," a special infected that can pin you down and tear you to shreds. "Nobody will ever put up with something that can just jump on them and take them down, and you have no way to get it off. 'You need to have a quick time event! You need to do something.' And I'm like, 'Nope! Nope! we're gonna ship that! I'll bet you money.'"

Eventually, the Left 4 Dead we know and love started to take its full shape—personally, I'd be curious to play something along the lines of that original prototype. But only curious, not enthusiastic. 

That's not to say the concept itself was flawed. Dead by Daylight has proved you can pull off horror PvP very well—though it simplifies things by having one monster versus a group of fragile survivors. I can't imagine the design nightmare of adjusting for four super-zombie players.

The shift away from PvP turned out to be a smart move, as while I've definitely enjoyed L4D's Versus mode in the past, Faliszek says: "I knew the stats of how Left 4 Dead was played, and we saw that people predominantly played co-op" and I can't say I'm surprised. Versus was fun, but it was also chaotic and very swingy. You were either steamrolling the infected enemy team or dead as a doornail with very little in between. Jolly co-operation in the zombie apocalypse was the right call.