Gabe Newell comments on Apple’s model

Gabe Newell

Gabe Newell is the reason many of us love video games. He is the co-founder and CEO of Valve, the company that created Half-Life, Portal, Counter-Strike, and Portal series. Sure he can’t count to three, but he is a successful man who runs Steam, the biggest store on PC. Last year, Epic Games decided to enter this market and compete with Valve’s Steam. It caused many people to hate Epic’s model but Newell is on board when it comes to the completion.

Gabe Newell: “Everybody Benefits”

That’s what the godfather of PC gaming said. “Competition in game stores is awesome for everybody. It keeps us honest, it keeps everybody else honest,” Newell said. “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.” What’s really interesting in his interview with Edge Magazine is what he said about Apple’s model with its store.

Gabe Newell Apple

According to Newell, it’s not the competition that is bothering Valve. He referenced Apple’s model which very carefully curates what it allows on its store. Of course, it’s a hit to Epic Games Store too. In the interview he said the following:

We get a lot more freaked out not by competition, but by people trying to preclude competition. 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 minimizes software’s value-add to experience and stuff like that.

About Newell

He is mostly known by his nickname Gaben, he co-founded Valve in 1998 with former Microsoft colleague Mike Harrington. According to Forbes, his net worth is $3.5 billion. Also, Valve takes a completely opposite approach from Apple with Steam, by allowing nearly unrestricted access to developers. What do you think about Gaben Newell’s statement?

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