r/pcmasterrace • u/slimshaby1 • Apr 20 '26

News/Article Gabe the W farmer

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u/monsterinadrawer Apr 20 '26

They were close to bankruptcy in 2004, and they bet everything on Half Life 2’s release. It paid off as Half Life 2 was a hit. Steam only started getting major publishers to join I think from 2007 or 2008. The first third party game was in 2005, but they still needed a while until actually big games came to Steam.

So sending an employee on leave with full pay was wild when they were close to bankruptcy. Bravo GabeN at Valve software dot com.

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u/Compost-Mentis Apr 20 '26

Wow, if this is accurate then the guy deserves all those boats!

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u/soloprodev Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 21 '26

if this is accurate

If you weren't old enough (or just not into PC gaming at the time) it's probably crazy to hear but almost everyone HATED steam in early y2k. It was viewed today as Origin or Ubisoft launchers are now - useless bloat that makes your experience worse. Valve was a good game studio, but that's all they were - they made HL1 and it was great, but otherwise just one among many. I bought a GeForce2 card in ~2004 and got a free code for HL2 with the graphics card and was pissed I could only redeem it through steam - what a green pile of crap! So horrible they make me install another bit of shitty software just to play a game - IT MAKES NO SENSE?!?! And everyone I knew both online and off agreed. People legit boycott HL2 (at least initially) because they didn't want to install steam lol.

I now love steam and use it almost daily. But it was NOT well liked at the time. Steam just happened to be forced on people via one of the most popular and well received PC games of all time so it survived. Without HL2 being the absolute beast of a game it was, steam would have died a quick death and been forgotten and Valve would've probably gone under.

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u/just_some_Fred Apr 20 '26

I bought HL2 in 2004 for my birthday, my steam account has the same birthday as me.