Consolidation in games must “create value for customers,” says Gabe Newell

rockpapershotgun.com:

The consolidation of the games industry – that is, games companies being bought up and absorbed by bigger games companies – has been increasing, intensifying, and giving poor Ed the aches. Exhibited most dramatically by Microsoft stumping up $69 billion for Activision Blizzard, this trend towards conglomerification has raised worries about both creative expression and the potential locking-down of more games to certain platforms.

Valve president and co-founder Gabe Newell is no stranger to making some additions. Valve famously hired the student developers of Narbacular Drop to work on what eventually became Portal, and acquired Firewatch developers Campo Santo in 2018. In our recent interview, I asked him whether he thought consolidation could be a problem for the industry going forwards.

“Any sort of acquisition or consolidation has to actually answer the question: how are you creating more value for customers, at the end of the day?” Newell replied. “How are you making your game developers better developers? If you aren't doing something like that, then those sorts of acquisitions and consolidations don’t end up positively. And if you do do it, then you know, good, you're making the gaming market better. So I tend to sort of be more on the sceptical side about what sort of value is being created.”

“I mean, it's a lot of fun. If you're a CEO, it'd be like, ‘Look, I'm making a big deal to make the world better.’ When in fact, most of the time, it's really boring stuff about ‘how do you make your product better? How do you make your QA processes better?’ that are real determiners of success.”

Newell is also sceptical that attempts to build closed-off platforms, though consolidation or other methods, would succeed on the