The gaming industry is quite literally full of companies and teams that formed not only out of the love of making games, but also the desire to capitalize on something that others don’t see the potential of. That often leads to stories about how people leave incredibly popular and successful companies to go on and make their own things, and then outshine those that they used to work for. Take Valve as an example of this. Gabe Newell, the company’s founder, used to work for Microsoft, and in a special YouTube interview, he revealed that he broke off from them to make his own company so that he could prove that they were using PC technology incorrectly regarding graphics, UI, and so on:
“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?”
Wrong. And he knew it. Just as bad, though, was that the PC industry was almost intentionally underutilizing the capabilities of the PCs themselves because of a “fear” of having less performance once they put things on Windows. Gabe wanted to do something different to “prove them all wrong,” and at that same time in history, a little company called Id Software was rocking the gaming world with a little game called Doom, and they were doing far better than anyone, including Microsoft, could’ve predicted:
“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.”
Given that point in history, that was quite a feat, and that lit the fire under Gabe Newell that would become the start of Valve:
“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. 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.”
Fast forward to now, and Valve not only revolutionized gaming with some of its titles, but it also overhauled how games can be bought and played via Steam, which is easily one of the most important platforms in the gaming industry. In contrast, Microsoft, via Xbox, still struggles with being a leader in the gaming industry despite having the PC. So, in the end, Gabe Newell was right.
