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Every now and then, we take a break from our usual explainers to go deep (and we mean really deep). Our Deep Dives are longform pieces built to unpack the full story: the context, the tradeoffs, the weird details most people skip over.
They’re heavier than our regular content, but that’s the point. These dives are where we stretch out, connect dots, and give you the full picture - not just what something is, but how it came to be and where it might go next.
If you’re one of the readers who makes time for these: THANK YOU!
Your curiosity is the reason we do this, and we’re grateful for every minute you spend with our work.
Let’s get into today’s Deep Dive.
Steam wasn’t built to sell games. It was built to fix a broken update system.
Twenty years later, it earns billions of dollars in annual game sales and powers around 70% of all PC game downloads globally.
What if one of the most important tech companies in the world...barely talks to the press, never went public, and lets employees choose their own projects by literally wheeling their desks across the office?
If you’ve ever launched a game on PC, chances are you’ve used Steam. It’s practically the backbone of modern PC gaming. But behind that blue logo is a company that’s done far more than just build a digital storefront. It quietly shaped the way we buy, play, and even think about games.
Valve is weird. And brilliant.
What started as a patch delivery tool for Counter-Strike has become the backbone of PC gaming with over 132 million monthly active users, a library of over 100,000 games, and one of the most loyal user bases in tech.
Founded by two ex-Microsoft engineers who got obsessed with Doom, it’s the company that turned a mod into Counter-Strike, a Half-Life sequel into a platform, and a Linux experiment into the Steam Deck.
While most tech giants chase quarterly earnings, Valve just builds.
This article is a deep dive into Valve’s past, present, and future. We’ll explore how Gabe Newell went from Harvard dropout to the most beloved billionaire in gaming, how Steam became the money-printer of PC gaming, and how Valve is betting on Linux to avoid a digital distribution monopoly.
You’ll also learn why Valve’s office desks have wheels, why they’ve never had managers, and why that freedom might be both their superpower and their biggest risk.
Let’s unpack one of the most unconventional companies in tech and why its success might be a blueprint worth studying.
Explaining Gabe Newell
We can't talk about Valve without first talking about the lord himself - Gabe Newell.
Gabe, who's also sometimes referred to as Gaben (that's his username), is the co-founder and CEO of Valve Corporation. He's one of the legends of the gaming industry and also one of the richest personalities in the scene.
Gabe is probably one of the most loved or least hated billionaires in the world. The gaming community has been memeing about it for decades now, and still they haven’t stopped. Some people literally see him as the savior of PC gaming.
While being a student at Harvard University back in the 1980s, Gabe once went to meet his brother who was working at Microsoft at the time. He'd occasionally visit his brother at the Microsoft office. After a couple of months, Steve Ballmer convinced him to work at Microsoft, and in 1983, Gabe officially dropped out to work at Microsoft simply because he liked computers.