Gabe Newell got a chance to speak in the UK recently, after being awarded the fellowship Bafta. The acceptance speech was full of the sort of thanks and jokes you’d expect, but the interview afterwards was a bit more illuminating: Gabe said Valve had grown by as much as 50 per cent in the last year alone.
He also championed open platforms, suggesting that with these and a huge upsurge in gaming interest, Valve was snowballing. “And just so people sort of understand the scale of how big it’s getting… so like the last DotA 2 update we were generating 3 and a half terabytes per second, so that’s about 2 per cent of of all of the mobile and land based internet activity was just for a single game update.”
In a very humble fashion however, Mr Newell wasn’t keen to allow the hosts of the show to heap too much praise on him and Valve as a whole. He went on to describe how some of the best work was coming out of the community of gamers, pointing the finger at such projects as the Steam Workshop and Garry’s Mod as great examples of games made outside of the big industry that it has become.
“I think we’ve seen a bunch of very interesting stuff happening so if you think of a multiplayer game or a social game really as being a collaboration between a game designer and their community, we continue to see that when we have stuff like the workshop where we’re actually drawing users in and they’re making €300,000 a year generating content for each other, it’s really an acknowledgement of the reality of those democratic principles at work.”
