good point, I agree.

Better media and infrastructure support

the only positive you’ve stated lol. man, do I wish the fediverse would take off

other than userbase, what does twitter have that mastodon does not have? genuinely curious

ahahahahahahahahaha

Monica Harrington isn’t one of Valve’s official co-founders, but she was heavily involved in its formation and initial success - working by day as a marketing manager at Microsoft with responsibility for the games division, while helping her partner, Mike Harrington, and Gabe Newell get the Half-Life studio off the ground. In a lengthy post on Medium - which Nic has already covered in the most recent Sunday Papers, but which I think deserves a piece of its own - Harrington takes us through those heady early days.

Amongst many other things, Harrington discusses how she and her husband poured their own money into Valve, and how she walked the complicated line of drawing upon her Microsoft experience to shape Valve’s approach with Half-Life, without developing an actual conflict of interest. When the line became impossible to walk, she resigned from Microsoft, becoming chief marketing officer at Valve from 1996 to 2000.

There are intriguing memories aplenty - how Valve and Sierra fell out over the marketing of Half-Life after release, and how concerns about CD burners led to the implementation of an authentication scheme which accidentally gave Valve a direct line to their first players. Harrington also treats us to a marketing-eye picture of the industry during the 1990s and the balance of clout between developers, publishers, press, pirates and players, drawing comparisons with music and film.

There are insights upon the development of Half-Life - how it looked after its first triumphant E3 showing versus how it was shaping up internally - and to a lesser extent, Team Fortress. But I think the most interesting part is Harrington’s account of a pitch she made, shortly after Half-Life’s release, to set up a digital games store and community platform in partnership with… Amazon. Had that gone all the way, industry history might have been very different. Here’s the excerpt in full:

In a nine-page document, I proposed that Valve and Amazon team up to create a new online entertainment platform. I scaled the business opportunity within four years at $500 million dollars. The gist of the idea was to create a made-for-the-medium platform that would bring users together in a sticky, compelling entertainment experience, with digital and offline content sales. I wanted Amazon's financial backing as a way to gain first mover advantage against Microsoft and Electronic Arts, then the major PC games players. I didn't see a role for Sierra. If pushed, we wouldn't create any new games ourselves, and instead would team with outside developers so that they could distribute content not subject to an 85% publishing fee. At the time, I considered it an act of rebellion against the traditional publishing dynamic where independent developers took on huge risk, and the big publishing houses reaped the rewards. 

According to Harrington, Amazon offered to buy a minority stake in Valve a few weeks later. You can obviously see the bones of Steam in that proposal, though Harrington appears to have conceived of it mostly to get a valuation for Valve, to help her and her partner when they eventually sold their share of the business to Newell.

Sadly, Harrington’s motivation for writing the post is partly that she has been left out of Valve’s history - including Valve’s own 2023 Half-Life making-of documentary - despite being so heavily involved with the company during its first few years. Harrington attributes this partly to her consciously stepping back to avoid interfering in her husband’s partnership with Gabe Newell, and partly to “bro culture” and sexist practices in the tech biz at large. Here’s that part in full:

As I look back on the huge success Valve has become, I'm proud of what the team accomplished. I'm also proud of the work I did while recognizing that my biggest contributions to Valve's business went largely unnoticed and unrecognized within the industry. Part of that was due to the bro culture of the software business, part of it was that I receded to support my husband in a partnership where he was effectively the lesser partner, and part of it was that women, especially in tech, often seem to disappear when the story gets told.

I was hugely disappointed when Valve released a video in 2023 about the creation of Half-Life where one of the people interviewed, Karen Laur, a wonderfully talented texture artist, talked about the isolating experience of being a woman at Valve and essentially said that the only other woman during her tenure there was an office manager. I understood why she felt as she did, but the senior Valve team knows better. Watching the video, I felt like my place in Valve's history had been completely erased.

I know that Valve wouldn't have been successful without Mike. It wouldn't have been successful without Gabe. And it wouldn't have been successful without me. A friend of mine who knows the full story once said to me, "you were a founding partner" and in hindsight, I agree. From the beginning, I invested time, treasure and industry expertise to make the company a huge success.

And it is. 

Harrington has done a variety of things since leaving Valve in 2000, from getting into whale conservation to a job at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She and Mike Harrington broke up and divorced in 2016. The full post is worth a read. As it happens, I’ve recently been trawling back through the ancient annals of Rock Paper Shotgun and learning about the site’s formative early interactions with Valve, while thinking about RPS’s future under Ian Games of the Ian Games Network. It’s useful to get some perspective on one of today’s weather-makers from the other side of the aisle.

multiplayer only works with the current year’s version.

WHAT? they turn off multiplayer after the new release is out? no way…

edit: just looked it up, wow. speechless

thank you :)

hi, what does FTA mean? google shows a lot of different answers, thanks

the people who need to read and understand that book will not absorb the message

The interview is scheduled to air in full at 8 p.m. Thursday.

In that interview, Harris says if elected, she would name a Republican to serve in her cabinet, according to CNN.

I think the second one

I purchased the 512 GB one. I upgraded the drive to 1tb and gave the 512 to someone else. If I want anti glare on my screen, I’ll just add it myself. extremely happy with my purchase, the colors are fantastic

i have no issues with my steam deck as it is now. just want a computer I can dock and have extra horsepower like the competitors have with their thunderbolt and usb4 support whenever steam decides to release a new one.

But, another thing, this also goes to show that Valve are likely in no rush at all on a Steam Deck 2. They simply don’t need to do one right now.

the only thing I need out of the deck 2 would be eGPU support. everything about my oled is basically perfect

igornace is truly bliss, what tf did I just read…

randy pitchford is such a weirdo, it’s not that hard to understand what is so likeable about steam: respectable prices with a storefront and customer service that is A+. they protect me as a consumer with their refund policy and positively push computing forward with their R&D work towards linux (proton as my shining example).

oh, it’s too expensive for a gigantic company to sell their game on steam? Then DONT sell it on steam and DONT be shocked when you have a large chunk of the pc gaming community not playing your game because you lost millions from your billions.

am I missing something? should steam not be on top?

companies can’t keep getting away with this

I’ll revise my opinion when Valve changes to a more overtly predatory model of capitalism, but for now, I’ll enjoy only needing to keep a partial eye open.

this is the correct approach towards how a society should support big buisnesses. the companies that don’t fuck us over will continue to get my public support and money

we just have to spread through word-of-mouth how ridiculous it is to want to invest anymore into the Windows ecosystem to our non-tech inclined friends. the benefits of owning a steam deck is way too massive, and that’s not just counting the software (I CAN OPEN UP MY STEAM DECK AND DO WHATEVER I WANT TO IT!!!)

we have to start rejecting this premise that we are powerless when it comes to a company that dominates the market share (operating system wise, not gaming), but it comes down to changing the minds of those around us.

for me, ALL of these windows handhelds are all missing the point that steam deck has PROVEN to be a winning formula: affordable, feature packed, durable, very consumer friendly, sustainability and top tier support (miss you every day I turn on my computer, EVGA 😢)

hell, I upgraded to the OLED (I am a sucker for OLED anything, lol) and offset the cost of the OLED by selling my perfectly fine, upgraded LCD model (added 1tb ssd and hall-effect joysticks) to a family member. they were so blown away by the deck, that they are ready to sell the LCD model to another lucky gamer and upgrade to an OLED.

this reads like a massive steam deck dick riding ad, but I do not care because the deck really opened my eyes to how easy it will be for me to change operating systems the next time it’s time for me to upgrade my main rig. if the next deck has support for an eGPU enclosure, it’s going to be very easy for me to make the switch to linux gaming. I don’t CARE what games do not support the steam deck, as they will not get my money.

/rant