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- Comment on Amazon tried to buy part of Valve in the days before Steam, according to former exec who says she's been "erased" from Valve's history 2 months ago:
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.
- Comment on Acer’s announces its first handheld gaming PC: the Nitro Blaze 2 months ago:
circles look like it sat on squidwards face
- Comment on Oof ouch owie 2 months ago:
get armed and get trained? how will that convince a trump voter to vote kamala? doesn’t make any sense to me tbh
- Comment on Oof ouch owie 2 months ago:
idk how else to downplay supporting trump at this point.
public shaming is the last line of defense we have against these types of people since polite conversation clearly doesn’t work once you put the red hat on. what alternatives do you suggest? 🙂
- Comment on Black Myth: Wukong shows very clearly Valve are selling a lot of Steam Decks 2 months ago:
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
- Comment on Black Myth: Wukong shows very clearly Valve are selling a lot of Steam Decks 2 months ago:
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.
- Comment on Black Myth: Wukong shows very clearly Valve are selling a lot of Steam Decks 2 months ago:
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
- Comment on What is going to happen when AI becomes extremely advanced? 2 months ago:
imo, its uncharted territory, so we do not know yet. all I can guarantee is the displacement it will cause won’t be to our benefit and will hurt us more than it will help
- Comment on Steam sets a new record with 37.2 million concurrent users online 2 months ago:
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?
- Comment on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is coming to last-gen consoles next month 3 months ago:
it is pretty terrible, I was one of the people who purchased it. I stopped playing because it crashed three times at the same mini boss. but porting backwards gives me some hope for a verified status. time will tell
- Comment on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is coming to last-gen consoles next month 3 months ago:
does this mean it will be steam deck verified?
- Comment on Xbox Console Sales Continue To Crater With Massive 42% Revenue Drop - Slashdot 3 months ago:
I’m getting rid of my xbox when the ps5pro comes out. the fact that the Xbox just keeps regressing in features (I can’t plug in a USB microphone wtf???) and rising costs of game pass just pushed me back to Playstation.
- Comment on Every August 3 months ago:
it’s just too depressing that winter is coming soon.
you gotta live in the moment brother. maybe practicing some stoicism would help alleviate thinking and worrying about the future. it helped for me! 🙂
- Comment on Bungie lays off 220 people, will set up spin-off studio 3 months ago:
The finals is pretty damn fun though I will say.
the finals is AMAZING. I picked it back up this season, every complaint I had with the beta and first season was fixed. it’s just so damn fun to play with friends, I can’t praise it enough
- Comment on Every August 3 months ago:
fall is, and forever will be, the best season.
- Comment on 3 months ago:
didn’t some programmers go fight in the Ukraine war, hence the delays? or am I mixing that fact up with another game?
- Comment on Announcing the Kawaii - A keychain-sized Nintendo Wii 3 months ago:
whoa! on top of this being really cool, the whole website seems littered with interesting things. thanks for sharing!
- Comment on Palms 3 months ago:
science has gone too far with this one!!
- Comment on [deleted] 4 months ago:
you are aware you can click the link and read through the articles, right? lol
- Comment on Rockstar might be bringing GTA+ to Nintendo Switch 4 months ago:
I hope the wait will be worth it. may be the first game to me that’ll fully utilize all the horsepower between the ps5 and xsx
- Comment on Rig the game in Pip My Dice, a Yahtzee roguelike experience inspired by Balatro 4 months ago:
now THIS is a gaming fad I’m all for!
- Comment on Student Debt Has Reached $1.3 Trillion, compared to just $243 billion in 2003 5 months ago:
I feel that our current leaders are not wired to think proactively, and that will be our downfall
- Comment on Marvel Vs Capcom Collection 5 months ago:
yup! haven’t played mvc2 since the 360 days. excited to finally have it forever on steam!
- Comment on Perfect Dark - Gameplay Reveal - Xbox Games Showcase 2024 5 months ago:
I’ll have to wait and see how this one pans out, this trailer did nothing for me. its a shame, as I really did like perfect dark zero
- Comment on Socrates was ahead of his time 5 months ago:
TIL, thanks!!
- Comment on Socrates was ahead of his time 5 months ago:
whats your source? i can’t find anything on google when I search anechoic chambers and hellen keller visiting one
- Comment on Microsoft's new Recall AI will take screenshots of everything you do - freaky 5 months ago:
this isn’t a literal keylogger, do you know what a literal keylogger is?
- Comment on Socrates was ahead of his time 5 months ago:
- Comment on The “Require videogame publishers to keep games they have sold in a working state” petition just got a response. 6 months ago:
one way of complying would simply be to only sell a 1-mo. “lease” to your game. You don’t own it, and at some point they stop selling more leases, and then kill the game.
I prefer this route, to be completely honest with you. it will be easier for me to tell which games are just trying to suck dollars out of me and which games want me to just have fun.
- Comment on HOAs suck 6 months ago:
amazing thread lmfao
