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DARK SECRETS: 2 | Vintage Vibes

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

Portal 2's development was especially wild

GamesRadar

Enjoying Valve's famous paid "vacation in Hawaii," engineer jokes he's "in a dark room like a vampire" on Github anyway – a fitting use of Steam bucks

The all-expenses-paid trip is a famous Valve perk

GamesRadar

Decades ago, Gabe Newell revealed that Super Mario 64 influenced Half-Life, and it seems future Steam god GabeN was a lot better at Nintendo's platformer than Valve's FPS classic

Newell figured somebody needed to "add a deathmatch mode to Mario 64" so he could prove his chops at Valve

GamesRadar

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"SteamGPT" mentions in Valve's code flagged by online sleuth, sparking fears of an AI Steam chatbot that will screw up your support requests and hallucinate anti-cheat

Valve hasn't commented on the nature or validity of "SteamGPT"

GamesRadar

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

"What Steam did better than anybody else was to create a community"

GamesRadar

A contributor to GameStop's long-forgotten Steam competitor explains why he thinks Valve came out on top: 'What Steam did better than anybody else was to create a community'

In hindsight, who would have guessed that Valve would win against the likes of Microsoft, EA, or Ubisoft?

PC Gamer

Gabe Newell stepped back from game design during Portal 2's development, because 'he always wanted to be part of the team, but being Gabe and being in his position, that never really worked'

Portal 2 project lead Josh Weier says Newell didn't want to impose his ideas on designers, but being one of them wasn't an option.

PC Gamer

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Valve veteran slams Tim Sweeney and Epic Games for laying off 1000 people while making 'as much money as possible… and hey Tim, Gabe's better at that than you'

"I worked my ass off at Valve, and I could retire today. I made more money than I'll ever make."

PC Gamer

'Golden goose' indie games get Gabe Newell's attention, says Steam expert: 'You're like a little goblin that has a magical power to turn straw into gold'

"He will say to you, 'oh god, please spin these wishlists into gold.'"

PC Gamer

"Gabe cannot buy yachts with wishlists": Steam expert begs devs to make the most of their hit games, because to Valve "you're like a little goblin that has a magical power to turn straw into gold"

Behold, a man – a man with a need for Steam sales

GamesRadar

"It's hard to make sense of such a huge number" — Valve delivered 100 exabytes of data through Steam in 2025, and it's not showing any signs of slowing down

Valve's Year in Review breakdown for Steam shows off some mind-boggling numbers to do with data delivery. Can any other PC gaming platform ever hope to be as popular?

Windows Central

Valve says Steam users downloaded 100 exabytes of games in 2025, and are averaging 274 petabytes of installs and updates every day

Today I learned what an exabyte is.

PC Gamer

Valve just scored a historic win against a prolific patent troll — and even got $152K out of it

Serial patent litigator Leigh Rothschild tried to sue Valve in 2022 despite an existing agreement, so Valve went on the offensive and just won its case. Setting a precedent for the patent troll industry.

Windows Central

Steam reportedly raked in a record-breaking $1.6 billion in December with Arc Raiders alone moving over a million copies

PC gaming remains a big deal.

PC Gamer

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Tom’s Hardware

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman raises $252 million for brain computer interface venture — but Merge Labs is still in an early research phase

OpenAI has signaled its intentions to become a major player in brain computer interfaces (BCIs) with a $252 million investment in Merge Labs.

GamesRadar

A 16-year-old, 180p clip of Valve's Gabe Newell nailing the piracy issue is making the rounds online and only feels more relevant today: "People are happy to pay money" for "a great product delivered on their terms"

It's always been that simple

Tom’s Hardware

GameStop trolls Valve's Gabe Newell for his 'inability to count to three' — playful jab for never releasing a third installment for blockbuster game franchises like Half-Life, Dota, or Counter-Strike

GameStop just released a press release saying that it will help Valve co-founder Gabe Newell learn how to count to three.

GamesRadar

Rockstar co-founder and former GTA lead writer Dan Houser says "AI is eventually going to eat itself," and that the people behind chatbots and AI models "aren’t fully rounded humans"

Houser's now working on his own franchise

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PC Gamer

Estimates peg Valve as a capitalism fusion reactor, making such ungodly money per employee that it's no wonder Gabe Newell bought all those yachts and the whole damn yacht company

But bear in mind estimates are all we have to go off until an accountant leaves Valve's books in a bar.

GamesRadar

Joining Valve's Gabe Newell at the altar of AI, Ubisoft CEO says the controversial tech will be "as big a revolution for our industry as the shift to 3D"

Ubisoft is using generative AI "in all our studios and offices"

TechRadar

Windows 1.0 released 40 years ago today - and started Microsoft's road to success

Windows 1.0 didn't exactly blow the industry away, but it laid the groundwork for Microsoft's future success.

Fortune

Inside billionaire Gabe Newell's new $500 million superyacht, which has a submarine garage and its own hospital

Newell, 62, has a lot to celebrate this month, including his gaming company Valve announcing three new pieces of hardware.

PC Gamer

Gabe Newell caps off Steam Machine week by taking delivery of a new $500 million superyacht with a submarine garage, on-board hospital and 15 gaming PCs

"We knew we were asking for unusual things," says Newell, "and Oceanco embraced it with open arms."

PC Gamer

I reported on the failure of Valve's first Steam Machines 8 years ago—this time I think they have it right

The original Steam Machines didn't kick off a new era of PC gaming, but Valve's second attempt just might.

PC Gamer

Valve on viral marketing and leaks: 'Everybody assumes we have some sort of like grand plan... and it's literally just somebody fat fingering something'

You're probably thinking about this sort of stuff a lot more than Valve is.

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