During the Game Developer's Conference 2025, Monica Harrington—one of Valve's founders and its first chief marketing officer, who once outright threatened Sierra over the rights to Half-Life—gave an illuminating talk on the company's infancy. Before, of course, it became the goliath-felling company it is today.
While this is interesting in itself—another fascinating snippet she shared was about how Gabe Newell, circa 1998 to the early 2000s, had his eyes set on a social network. Y'know, like Facebook, Instagram, or X. "Gabe had interesting ideas that had nothing to do with software," Harrington said. "I mean, with games—and some of those would have been really interesting."
Really interesting indeed, which is why PC Gamer's Ted Litchfield asked about it when he sat down for an interview with her after the talk. Harrington revealed the bombshell that, if a time traveller had gone back and stepped on a butterfly, we could all be yelling at each other on a Valve-owned social media platform instead.
- Valve CMO threatened the company would walk away from games if it didn't own the rights to Half-Life—'It wasn't an idle threat—we weren't going to take on all of the risk to make other people rich'
- Amazon thought it could compete with Steam because it was so much larger than Valve, but Prime Gaming's former VP admits that 'gamers already had the solution to their problems'
"One of them that just struck me—because this was not in a games context at all—an interactive social hub … I'm trying to remember some of the conversations we had at that time, but he was not talking about, like the community that exists on Steam or anything like that."
Harrington says that both she and Newell had a strong nose for where gaming was going—and how massive it could potentially be. But they also knew that the internet in general had the power to be an extremely effective social hub, too. She talks about it in almost prophetic terms:
"What he was very aware of—and I was too—was that the internet could be this incredibly social place, and people weren't thinking about it that way at that time. Y'know, people were doing transactions, tech companies … they weren't thinking about the psychology and the social aspects of it."
She's not wrong. To put a pin in the timeline, Myspace debuted in 2003 (may she rest in peace), Facebook arrived in 2004, Twitter in 2006, Tumblr in 2007, and Instagram dropped in 2010. Valve had its finger on the pulse of a thrumming network of social media giants that was about to bloom, its knee downright swollen from the approaching storm, and eventually decided nah. Let's not.
"Where Gabe's mind was going [was] about expanding that social element, but not in a gaming context … I think it probably wouldn't have looked anything like Facebook or what happened, but yeah."
The only question is, what would it have been called? Steam wouldn't change PC Gaming forever until 2003, so maybe Gabe 'n' Co would've cribbed the name for that. In some alternate universe, we're all posting Steets, or getting into arguments in quote-vents. Still, seeing as Steam barely felt the Amazon trying to muscle in on its corner of the market? Valve likely made the right choice.
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