Here's the inside story of how one former Microsoft staffer turned Half-Life, a single best-selling game, into a nearly $10 billion fortune — and what he's working on next.around 20 employees and alumni of videogaming giant Valve gathered at The Lakehouse, a trendy restaurant nestled on the second floor of a corporate office tower in Bellevue, Washington, just outside of Seattle.
While Newell is still the company's leader , he’s rarely at Valve’s offices these days and hasn’t attended an in-person company event in years. Since the pandemic, Newell has apparently been living at sea on one of his five ships The increasingly reclusive mogul hasn’t given an interview since 2022 and declined to speak to Forbes for this story. He isn’t on social media. He doesn’t go to Davos or give TED Talks.
That money hose has freed Valve to do something almost no one has successfully done in decades: Break into the hardware side of the business. After a series of failed attempts spanning nearly a decade, Valve launched a console called the Steam Deck in 2022, to take on handheld devices like the Nintendo Switch. The Steam Deck’s big advantage is that it can play PC games, meaning players have access to their existing library of Steam games. Themodels, priced at $399, $549 and $649.
The bet paid off almost immediately when Half-Life became a runaway success in 1998. Two years later, Harrington sold his stake in Valve to Newell, cashing in on the company’s near-term success but missing a once-in-a-lifetime chance to become a billionaire . Then in 2003, Newell launched an early version of Steam. “ was light years ahead of everybody else's thinking, the idea of digital distribution,” says NYU’s Van Dreunen.
documents show he once emailed Valve executives, calling the idea of a flat 30% cut “untenable” and asking Valve to reconsider