Gabe Newell once thought Steam might get left behind
A 2011 interview shows Valve's co-founder warning that no digital store could stay on top forever, just as Origin was trying to challenge Steam.
Valve co-founder Gabe Newell helped make Steam the backbone of modern PC gaming, but he was far less certain in 2011 that the platform would stay there forever. His view was blunt: digital distribution kept changing, and any store that stopped adapting could be overtaken fast.
That caution landed at an interesting moment. Electronic Arts was pushing Origin as a Steam rival, and Crysis 2 had already been pulled from Steam as EA shifted its distribution plans. Newell’s response was not panic. It was a reminder that Valve had to keep proving its value to partners such as EA, Ubisoft, and Take-Two if it wanted those games on Steam.
EA even backed Origin with a comparison chart in a quarterly financial report, framing Steam as the yardstick it wanted to beat. That duel never really went EA’s way. Over time, Steam stayed the place most publishers came back to after trying their own stores or spending time on the Epic Games Store.
The bigger surprise is how little Steam has slipped since then. Valve kept layering in new features instead of chasing exclusives, and the store kept adding thousands of games every year while also hitting fresh user records. Even with Epic and Microsoft offering smaller cuts, Valve held firm on its standard revenue split, and developers kept showing up anyway.
This also fits with Newell’s earlier piracy comments, which aged just as well as this one. Tell us what you think in the comments, and join us on X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram.
