Posted in: Games, Valve Corporation, Video Games | Tagged: gabe newell, Steam, valve, Valve Corporation

Gabe Newell Says Competition Between Online Game Shops Is Awesome

The last thing you'd expect a Valve employee to say is that competition with Steam is great. But that's pretty much what Gabe Newell recently said. In a recent interview with Edge Magazine, Newell basically said competition is a good thing as it "keeps us honest". You can read a couple of snippets of the quotes below from the Valve co-founder. He is right, with resources like Apple Arcade, Google Stadia, and the Epic Games Store all launching over the past couple years, it seems to have quelled a lot of the price gouging you would see some shady companies make. But we'll see in a few years how he feels about the longterm if any of them start eating away at Steam's business.

"Competition in game stores is awesome for everybody. It keeps us honest, it keeps everybody else honest," Newell says, "But it's ugly in the short term. You're like, 'Argh, they're yelling, they're making us look bad' – but in the long term, everybody benefits from the discipline and the thoughtfulness it means you have to have about your business by having people come in and challenge you."

"We get a lot more freaked out not by competition, but by people trying to preclude competition," Newell continues, "If you ask us which is scarier, it's people falling in love with Apple's model of controlling everything and having faceless bureaucrats who get to keep your product from entering the market if they don't want it to, or designing a store in a way that minimises software's value-add to experience and stuff like that."

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