Valve Faces Its Antitrust Moment as Gaming’s Anticorporate Hero

Gabe Newell, the co-founder and president of Valve Corp., spent a November morning in 2023 surrounded by lawyers at the Arctic Club Hotel in downtown Seattle, locked in a circular conversation. His company operates Steam, the dominant online marketplace for PC games, and was facing a lawsuit from independent game developers who alleged that Steam runs an illegal monopoly in the $40 billion industry. The developers argued that because they depend so heavily on Steam, Valve has been able to stifle competition and impose “supracompetitive” fees.

The lawsuit, still ongoing, focuses on what the developers claim is an unwritten company policy designed to penalize them for offering lower prices on competing platforms. Rather than defending that alleged rule, Newell simply denied its existence. “Valve does not have a policy or practice of dictating prices to third-party software developers on other platforms,” he stated, according to a previously unreported transcript of his deposition. When confronted with internal communications where Valve employees appeared to be enforcing that very rule, Newell repeated his denial, sometimes verbatim, over and over. Pressed by an attorney on how Valve would respond if a developer sold a game for less on a rival store, Newell hedged. “I’m confused by your question,” he said, later adding, “Many of our partners and many of our customers are quite happy with the service that we’re providing.”