As reported by IGN, citing two anonymous individuals within BARB, on July 2, Benzies finally addressed staff nearly a month after MindsEye’s disastrous release in a brief video call, blaming “internal and external saboteurs” for the mess Build A Rocket Boy and MindsEye have found themselves in – remarks that closely mirrored co-CEO Mark Gerhar’s bizarre claims that all the negative feedback MindsEye received before launch came from paid bots.
Allegedly, the CEO assured staff that BARB would bounce back and relaunch MindsEye, and while there’s hope among the studio’s developers for a No Man’s Sky-style redemption arc, they themselves are unsure BARB would be able to deliver, especially as the studio has confirmed plans to lay off at least 100 developers from its 300-strong UK office.
Speaking about the job cuts, IGN further claimed that Build A Rocket Boy has sent emails to all UK employees and to staff at PlayFusion – acquired by BARB in 2024 – informing them they’re at risk of being fired. With the PlayFusion team and all 300 of BARB’s UK workers potentially facing the same fate – metaphorically speaking – as King Leonidas’s army at Thermopylae in the coming weeks or months, the future of MindsEye and PlayFusion’s FPS project Ascendant appears, at best, uncertain.
LONDON (Reuters) -Stocks slipped on Friday as U.S. President Donald Trump got his signature tax cut bill over the line and attention turned to his July 9 deadline for countries to secure trade deals with the world’s biggest economy.
The dollar also fell against major currencies, with U.S. markets already shut for the holiday-shortened week, as traders considered the impact of Trump’s sweeping spending bill that is expected to add an estimated $3.4 trillion to the national debt.
The pan-European STOXX 600 index fell 0.5%, with banks, mining-related stocks and retailers among the top laggards.
U.S. S&P 500 futures edged down 0.6%, following a 0.8% overnight advance for the cash index to an all-time closing peak. Wall Street was closed on Friday for the Independence Day holiday.
Trump said Washington would start sending letters to countries on Friday specifying what tariff rates they would face on exports to the United States, a clear shift from earlier pledges to strike scores of individual deals before a July 9 deadline when tariffs could rise sharply.
Investors are “now just waiting for July 9”, said Tony Sycamore, an analyst at IG, with the market’s lack of optimism for trade deals responsible for some of the equity weakness in export-reliant Asia, particularly Japan and South Korea.
At the same time, investors cheered a surprisingly robust U.S. jobs report on Thursday, sending all three of the main U.S. equity indexes climbing in a shortened session.
“The U.S. economy is holding together better than most people expected, which suggests to me that markets can easily continue to do better (from here),” Sycamore said.
Following Thursday’s close, the House narrowly approved Trump’s signature, 869-page bill, which averts the near-term prospect of a U.S. government default but adds trillions to the national debt to fuel spending on border security and the military.
TRADE THE KEY FOCUS IN ASIA
Trump said he expected “a couple” more trade agreements, after announcing a deal with Vietnam on Wednesday to add to framework agreements with China and Britain as the only successes so far.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said earlier this week that a deal with India was close. However, progress on agreements with Japan and South Korea, once touted by the White House as likely to be among the earliest to be announced, appears to have broken down.
The U.S. dollar index had its worst first half since 1973 as Trump’s chaotic roll-out of sweeping tariffs heightened concerns about the U.S. economy and the safety of Treasuries, but had rallied 0.4% on Thursday before retracing some of those gains on Friday.
As of 1430 GMT it was down 0.1% at 96.94.
The euro added 0.2% to $1.1778, while sterling held steady at $1.3662 as British assets steadied following investor fright over the last two days at a tearful appearance by Finance Minister Rachel Reeves in parliament on Wednesday.
The U.S. Treasury bond market was closed on Friday for the holiday, but 10-year yields rose 4.7 basis points (bps) to 4.34%, while the 2-year yield jumped 9.3 bps to 3.882%.
Gold firmed 0.4% to $3,336 per ounce, on track for a weekly gain as investors again sought refuge in safe-haven assets due to concerns over the U.S.’s fiscal position and tariffs.
Brent crude futures fell 57 cents to $68.23 a barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude dropped 66 cents to $66.34, as Iran reaffirmed its commitment to nuclear non-proliferation.
(Reporting by Lawrence White in London and Kevin Buckland in Tokyo; Editing by Stephen Coates, Kim Coghill, Alexandra Hudson, Joe Bavier and Alex Richardson)
A study led by University researchers published on June 16 analyzed the clay terrains of the neighboring red planet, Mars, finding a possible history of a habitable environment.
The study examined Mars’ surface through NASA images and data. It found that clay formed near bodies of water and could have helped the planet with an environment where life could arise. The study also analyzed what the planet’s environment potentially looked like in the past.
“The takeaway of this study is sort of a fundamental re-look at how we view Mars’s history,” study lead Rhianna Moore said. “When planetary scientists think of past Mars climate, it used to have water and then it dried up on a global scale. Thinking about the planet in its entirety, this study tries to piece that part a little bit more (to) understand variations across the surface.”
Moore said a lack of plate tectonics prevented Mars’ environment from being stable, helping the clay preserve some history of the planet.
“On Earth, we have this cycle driven by plate tectonics and our oceans, and that cycle sort of keeps the climate relatively stable,” Moore said. “When you have a stable climate and generally a relatively consistent amount of water throughout time, that will enable you to have a sustained habitable environment. (Mars) did not have large-scale tectonics like the Earth has … because of this lack of recycling of materials through tectonics, everything we are proposing gets trapped in these clays.”
Through this preserved clay, Moore said inferences about the planet’s environment could be made, such as areas having sustained rainfall for a long period of time and a potentially habitable environment.
Moore said one of the most surprising finds from the study was the presence of clay close to the Martian dichotomy, a region of the planet with sharp contrasts in altitudes.
“It has been proposed that there was an ancient ocean in the north,” Moore said. “The fact that these trend along that possible shoreline of an ocean was really interesting to find.”
KARACHI – Pakistani rupee has recorded slight changes against various foreign currencies in open market as the buying and selling prices of Euro, Saudi Riyal and UK Pound witnessed slight changes.
On July 4, US Dollar’s buying rate stood at Rs285.1, while selling rate hovered at Rs286.5 after slight changes, according to forex.pk
Euro’s (EUR) buying rate stood at Rs336 and the selling rate at Rs338.6 while UK Pound buying rates settled at Rs391.5 and selling Rs394.5.
Several currencies, including the Australian Dollar (AUD), Canadian Dollar (CAD), Chinese Yuan (CNY), Danish Krone (DKK), Japanese Yen (JPY), Kuwaiti Dinar (KWD), Malaysian Ringgit (MYR), New Zealand Dollar (NZD), and Swiss Franc (CHF), showed no change in their rates compared to the previous update.
Anthrax. When the disease was the first thing on everyone’s mind last October, a team from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology here was poring over thousands of samples to answer the second: What’s going on?
Only 236 total cases were reported in the United States between 1955 to 1999, said microbiologist Dana Kadavy, who helped lead the AFIP team. The most recent inhalational anthrax fatality was in 1976, when the victim died after handling wool contaminated with anthrax spores. So anthrax normally isn’t seen much in the United States.
All that changed, however, when a newspaper employee in Boca Raton, Fla., died of inhalational anthrax in October 2001. By Nov. 20, almost two dozen confirmed cases of anthrax had been reported, including 11 inhalational cases. In all, five people succumbed to anthrax before the crisis seemed to abate.
Kadavy said anthrax bacteria can infect the skin, digestive tract or lungs, with the suspected infective dose for the lungs being anywhere from 8,000 to 50,000 spores. Anthrax is not transmitted from person to person, she said. Most typically, the disease appears in herbivores such as cattle and sheep. Humans typically contract the bacteria through contact with contaminated animal products.
AFIP staffers were caught in a swirl of public concern. The Defense Department routed requests for help from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the institute. A team of six scientists deployed to CDC’s Atlanta headquarters to conduct tests shortly after the first attacks took place.
Days later, scientists of AFIP’s Biosafety Level 3 lab commenced a weeks-long operation to identify suspected anthrax samples submitted from around metropolitan Washington.
“It was a very exciting, although stressful, time for our microbiology staff,” said Ted Hadfield, Microbiology Division chief in the institute’s Department of Infectious and Parasitic Diseases Pathology.
BSL-3 lab has for years studied organisms that could pose a threat to deployed service members around the globe.
“We’ve been involved in collaborative efforts with other DoD agencies to develop rapid diagnostic tests to support the identification of threat agents, including brucella, tularemia, plague and anthrax, all of which can be developed for biological weapons,” Hadfield said. Because such tests can identify agents quickly, treatment can start before the service member even becomes sick, he noted.
AFIP scientists and support personnel expertly diagnosed over 5,000 environmental and clinical samples of suspected anthrax following the October 2001 attacks, according to Hadfield. The AFIP team performed over 10,000 tests on the samples and confirmed the presence of anthrax in 62 cases.
Kadavy said the numbers could have been far worse. “The (Sen. Thomas) Daschle and (Sen. Patrick) Leahy letters sent to Capitol Hill each contained trillions of ‘weaponized’ spores — potentially equating to 200 million doses,” she said. “The Leahy and Daschle letters were processed alongside approximately 85 million pieces of mail, in sorting facilities found to be grossly contaminated, so the potential for tragedy was great.”
AFIP is a member of the CDC Laboratory Response Network and has a level C lab. As state health labs became overwhelmed with samples to process, CDC turned to AFIP and its microbiology experts to conduct testing in the institute’s BSL-3 laboratory.
Using full protective suits and respiratory systems, the microbiology team used the AFIP-developed polymerase chain reaction assay and three CDC-approved tests to find and confirm the presence of anthrax in the samples, Hadfield said.
“Our staff worked up to 15 hours a day for weeks to keep up with all the samples coming in,” he pointed out.
Staff members processed and cultured materials received from clinical sites within 24 hours. Several thousands of the environmental samples came from federal buildings and post offices. Samples included swabs, ventilation system filters, clothes, newspapers, trash, mail and packages, among others.
AFIP scientists typically wiped a swab on an environmental sample, such as a letter, surface or clothes; wiped the swab on a sterile culture medium; and then heat-shocked the specimen. After eight to 15 hours, scientists could read cultures for cloudiness, which indicates the growth of spore-forming bacteria. Other tests would tell whether the germs were anthrax and, if so, the strain.
“We were very pleased to see that the sensitivity and specificity of our own assays equaled those provided by the CDC,” Hadfield said. “It was a real affirmation of the quality of our scientific work.”
(Christopher C. Kelly is the public affairs director of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.)
Story by Christopher C. Kelly, National Guard Bureau
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08.26.2002
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In retrospect it all seems so obvious. Form a band, plunder the Beatles’ back catalogue for riffs, guitar tabs, chord changes and song structures, then bang it out in a key that a stadium crowd could put their lungs into but which suited the subway busker, too.
The resulting success now looks so inevitable. In 1994, dance music flooded the UK charts but not everyone thought a rave DJ wearing oversized headphones and playing records counted as a gig. Some people – a vast number, it turned out – still yearned for meat-and-two-veg pop-rock with guitars and drums, and for songs played by groups. Throw in some Manc bluster, the death throes of a Tory government that had occupied Downing Street since for ever, and the first glimmers of a cooler Britannia, and hey presto: Oasis.
Even if the dates don’t quite stack up, that’s how cultural theorists tend to describe the preconditions for one of the world’s biggest ever acts, staring at them through the rear view mirror of musical history after their 2009 implosion. But luck must have played its part, as it always does, along with something more elemental to do with brotherhood and chemistry: the sparks that flew between the Gallaghers were the same sparks that lit their creative drive.
Oasis at Knebworth prior to their two shows in August 1996. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
Oasis made seven studio albums, all hugely successful. The third, 1997’s Be Here Now, was released with so much fanfare and expectation that a commercial triumph was guaranteed. But it felt bloated and indulgent, and even if it wasn’t quite a parody of the group’s status and smugness, it had enough calculated familiarity to make them sound like their own tribute band. Upstart effrontery and spiky provocation are evidently hard to maintain when the millions are rolling in. Undeterred, Oasis pressed on, the music going through its motions with only the odd gem to be discovered here and there.
The first two records, though, remain magnificent. I can’t really remember (and don’t care) which is which – they were two halves of the same whole, both full of pounding, adrenalised songs that sounded great on a transistor radio and unbelievable on a proper stereo system. When most bands enter the studio, start dickering with all the toys and turn it up to 11, sonic elements usually get distorted or drowned out.
The audio clarity on Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory is astonishing – it feels as if you’re in the room with them. The lyrics are … interesting: rhyme-driven breeze block couplets for the most part, ranging from the rousing, to the mysterious, to the trippy, to the witty, to the laughable, to the moronic. And I’ve sung along with them all, at the top of my voice, especially in the car, where Oasis are the perfect in-vehicle karaoke. Maybe Noel and his studio engineers had figured this out; he always maintained that to be mega successful you need to appeal to the dudes and the squares, and a lot of the squares are motorists with cash to splurge.
In 1995, Oasis and Blur slagged each other off and slugged it out in the singles chart for the Battle of Britpop, Blur coming out on top among accusations of retail skulduggery on both sides. It made the news headlines, because this wasn’t just a popularity contest, it was a media-framed fight between rock’n’roll cats and dogs. Blur were the feline, slippery, ironic, unbiddable, enigmatic art school smart Alecs, and Oasis the muscular, barely-house-trained mutts with a bark and a bite (Suede’s Brett Anderson called Oasis “the singing plumbers”). Characterised by some as a battle for music’s very soul, Blur v Oasis was also seen as a conflict between north and south, and I probably wanted Oasis to triumph for regional rather than aesthetic reasons.
The Oasis back line came and went in the years that followed, with no noticeable effect. Most of its members turned out to be interchangeable and disposable, with fans not really caring who was beating the skins or twanging the bass. In essence, Oasis are the brothers Gallagher, like the twin stars of Sirius, pulsing in the firmament, forever revolving around each other in captured orbit but never able to embrace.
Liam was the couldn’t-give-a-toss gobshite, with not so much a potty mouth as the oral equivalent of a sewage works for a large metropolitan area, and that was OK because he had the cockiness and looks to back it up. He also had a fantastic voice: all tonsil, adenoid, teeth and tongue, loud enough to crowd-surf to the back of a stadium, sharp and sneery enough to enunciate. Noel took the role of scheming mastermind and ace guitarist. It was his idea to conquer the planet and his compositions that would do it. When he stepped into the rehearsal room of his kid brother’s wannabe outfit, he found a shambles, and he gave them material, discipline and direction. That’s the received wisdom, at least – he couldn’t have done it without a frontman like Liam.
Oasis on Channel 4’s The White Room in 1996. Photograph: Des Willie/Redferns
The brothers’ obscenity-ridden slander was a joint enterprise, tearing into other artists and bands with merciless and sometimes hilarious savagery, calling out banality, mediocrity and inability with a refreshing lack of caution. But for all of Liam’s bladed comments and boorish behaviour there was something funny and even innocent about him. Noel, by comparison, seemed wily and defensive; the role of lovable arsehole never came as naturally to him as it did to his younger sibling.
Across two decades the weird psychodrama of their fraternal dynamic has been hard to keep up with. Noel stormed off more than once, sometimes returning to the lineup when only the diehard aficionados knew he’d quit. And the barneys weren’t just artistic flouncing or creative hissy fits, they were proper brawls with weaponised tambourines, guitars and cricket bats. It felt tiresome on occasions, especially as Oasis’s significance waned and cultural sensibilities shifted, but undoubtedly it’s one of the elements that make the planned reunion so compelling.
Because the enmity can’t simply have melted away, can it? There was genuine bad blood between Noel and Liam, which found expression through genuine violence. It’s not impossible to imagine the upcoming tour abandoned on day one, with the brothers in separate luxury hotels, one soothing a bruised fist with a packet of frozen peas, the other with a cartoon rib-eye steak on his face taking the sting out of a shiner.
But when Oasis do finally appear together after a 16-year absence, fans will be back on each other’s shoulders or arm in arm, singing gnomic phrases and occasional nonsense, united by some irresistible bond. If they play Acquiesce – the verses sung by Liam, the choruses by Noel – it’s interesting to wonder what silent thoughts might pass between the warring siblings when they get to the bit about needing and believing in each other. The roar of the crowd, hymning back the lyrics, will be telling them it’s true.
Ministers are closely watching a court case in which Vodafone is alleged to have “unjustly enriched” itself at the expense of franchise operators, and have raised the prospect of a regulatory crackdown on the sector.
The small business minister, Gareth Thomas, has said he will “track very carefully” a £120m legal claim brought against Vodafone last year by a group of 62 of about 150 franchise operators.
They allege that drastic cuts to commission rates on selling Vodafone products in the group’s high street stores caused many of them to run up huge personal debts. They say they fear for their livelihoods or homes, and some have reported suicidal thoughts.
Their court filing claims the company “indiscriminately … operated to enrich Vodafone at the expense of its franchisees”.
Thomas told MPs on Wednesday: “There are without question some very serious allegations being levelled at Vodafone in this case.
“Until now there has not been sustained concern about the quality or effectiveness of the self-regulation of franchises in general. However, I recognise that this particular case has raised concerns across the House and I will track very carefully what happens in this case and the final outcome and conclusions that any court case might come to.”
Thomas was speaking in parliament during an adjournment debate secured by the the former Conservative minister John Hayes. He told MPs: “Franchising can be used as a method to exaggerate the power of the business at the heart of the franchise and to weaken the position of franchisees. My assertion is that is common and is particular in the case of Vodafone.”
Luke Akehurst, the Labour MP for North Durham, said: “There are major corporates that treat their franchisees very badly, that sign them up on one set of terms – one rate card – and then change the goalposts.
“And then when people dissent and complain about that, they find that their franchise is withdrawn and they lose their investment when they have put a great deal into that corporate giant. I think this is a matter that, in the near future, is going to require some ministerial attention.”
Talks to settle the franchisees’ legal claim against Vodafone ended without resolution in May, leaving the case potentially heading for the high court.
Vodafone was approached for comment. It has previously said: “This is a complex commercial dispute between Vodafone UK and some franchise partners and as we have said from the beginning, we refute the claims.”
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The company has also apologised “unreservedly to anyone whose experiences while operating their business has impacted [their health] in this way” , adding: “Where issues have been raised, we have sought to rectify these and we believe we have treated our franchisees fairly.”
Vodafone has just completed a deal to merge its UK operation with rival Three to create Britain’s biggest mobile phone operator.
Vodafone’s chief executive, Margherita Della Valle, said in May that the merger would involve job cuts where the two businesses had a duplication of functions and roles, although overall it would create jobs as it embarked on an €11bn (£9.5bn) upgrade and expansion of its 5G network over the next decade.
Here at FT Alphaville we love exploring “black hole” companies: those ultra-private businesses that must largely be observed by the influence they exert on others.
But even within that category, there aren’t many places quite like Valve Corporation, with its bizarre corporate structure, revenue-per-head figures that would make Silicon Valley or Wall Street giants hot and bothered, a product that seems to basically print money, and a seldom-seen leader deified in some corners of the internet — all without ever taking outside investment.
Few companies can claim a bigger role in video game history than Valve. Founded in 1996 by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington — both former Windows developers at Microsoft — the company’s first title, Half-Life, launched in 1998, is widely credited with transforming the first-person shooter genre. Harrington left the company in 2006, leaving Newell (known to some online obsessives as “Gaben”) as its de facto head.
Valve games have been few in number, but their influence is huge: Half-Life and its sequels for their storytelling; Portal for its creativity and humour; the Counter-Strike series for its role in the emergence of esports; Left 4 Dead for its use of artificial intelligence to create dynamic co-operative gameplay. However, its most influential title is arguably Team Fortress 2, the game whose cosmetics system brought microtransactions — where players pay small amounts to unlock in-game content — into the mainstream.
In doing so, it created a business model that has, for better and for worse, powered the mobile games revolution of the past two decades — and laid the groundworks for one of the zanier presentation slides we’ve seen outside of SoftBank:
Valve has even managed to find some success in the notoriously tricky hardware market. Its handheld console — which looks roughly like a military-grade Nintendo Switch — has sold “multiple millions”, the company claimed in late 2023, with market research firm IDC estimating it hit 6mn sales by early this year.
But its financial engine, powering almost all its other achievements, is Steam. For a generation of gamers, Steam needs no introduction — such is its dominance. But for those blissfully unaware, Steam is a storefront, distribution service and social media network for PC gamers that launched in 2003.
And it basically prints money.
Personal computers havebeen a tricky proposal for game developers. In the early ’00s, pirating PC games was pretty straightforward. Most titles sold as a physical disc with a unique serial code, but these could easily be faked.
For developers, this was obviously anathema. Digital rights management — controlling who could use game software — became an increasingly urgent topic.
In came Valve. After unsuccessfully pitching to companies including Microsoft, it developed Steam, which combined game-updating technology, anti-piracy and anti-cheating measures on one platform. It would sell users games and verify that they owned the game — virtually eliminating the need for discs and serial codes.
Steam landed in the right place at the right time, quickly becoming the default platform for PC gamers to download and manage their games. Safer and more convenient than piracy, it also introduced a social overlay that allowed players to communicate more easily while playing different games.
“The real value proposition for something like Steam is to have everything in one place,” says Clay Griffin, an analyst at MoffettNathanson. “It’s a one-stop shop.”
As a result, Steam has established a dominant position in the PC games industry, with analysts assuming it accounts for perhaps 70 per cent of all sales of such games. That equates to a significant chunk of what market research firm Newzoo reckons is a $40bn sector (including hardware). The platform has more than 100,000 titles available for download, dwarfing its competitors, and levies a typical 30 per cent commission on sales of games and their (often extensive) add-ons.
And it’s good to be the king. Amid a sustained period of stagnation for consoles, spending on PC games has seen healthy increases. In a presentation shared earlier this year, Matthew Ball, at investment adviser Epyllion, identified PC as a “big bright spot” amid a difficult patch for traditional gaming vectors (high res):
Steam’s concurrent player figures hit a record high earlier this year following double-digit annual growth, prompting Goodbody analyst Patrick O’Donnell to tell clients that Steam “now owns the PC distribution channel” — if it didn’t already — with “significant advantages” in engagement against its rivals. Based on Steam users’ language choices, much of the growth comes from China.
Advisory firm Ampere Analysis estimates that Steam had 170mn global active monthly users in May, up from 153mn the year before. Remarkably, average concurrent users are about three times the number who are actually playing games.
Piers Harding-Rolls, Ampere’s games research director, said this “highlights that many users automatically sign into the platform and also that Steam represents more than a PC game storefront — it’s a gaming community platform in its own right with millions visiting the app to engage with other users”.
If generative AI does — as some optimists hope — remove development barriers to create a supply-side revolution in gaming content production, Valve may find itself selling shovels in a gold rush.
Working out how much money Valve already makes from its dominance of PC gaming is tricky. Newell is presumed to be its biggest shareholder, and the company is intensely private. It makes almost no financial disclosures, and its employees seldom give interviews to the press.
Still, there are some clues.
In 2021, developer Wolfire Games sued Valve, alleging it was distorting the PC games market by imposing “platform most-favoured nation” clauses on sellers — forcing them to offer their best price on Steam.
Other individual customers launched a lawsuit against Valve over pricing last summer, and a judge ruled last year that their case could be brought together with Wolfire’s in a class-action suit — opening the door to other developers joining in. Their allegations are broad, but focus on the notion that without Steam’s dominance, average commission rates across the sector would be lower: improving developers’ margins and/or lowering consumer prices.
Improperly redacted documents from the initial Wolfire case — later hidden — indicated that Valve had only 336 staff in 2021, with just 79 of them working on Steam. We’ve remade it using data reported contemporaneously:
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The public docket also briefly contained another chart, which purported to show Steam’s commission revenues and, uh, healthy margins (high res here):
We’re all mature, grown-up blog writers/readers here, so let’s have a discussion about sources and numbers.
This is a screenshot of a document we can no longer access. Pavel Djundik, creator of SteamDB, a Steam data platform, is cited by contemporaneous reports as having spotted the data underpinning the staff headcount chart above. Djundik subsequently tweeted this:
Said Reddit thread (in r/fuckepic, “The premiere source for all Epic Games criticism”) can be viewed here.
Does that make the chart credible? Naturally, we reached out to Djundik and the Redditor who posted the charts to see if they still had the original documents. Their responses, respectively: “No” and (thus far) silence.
Let’s assume, for the sake of our collective sanity, that these figures are basically correct. They would suggest that with an effective commission rate probably somewhat beneath the 30 per cent baseline, and adjusted for costs, Steam handled perhaps $10bn of games sales in 2021.
Taken by itself, the chart indicates Steam had an operating margin of about 60 per cent and made $2bn of commission revenues, for about $1.3bn in profit just from Steam commissions in 2021.
If we assume that:
1) All Valve’s admin staff work on Steam (obviously untrue, and therefore conservative for per-head estimation purposes) 2) The numbers we’ve cited are roughly correct (not unfathomable)
It suggests Steam perhaps, maybe, possibly makes about $11.4mn per head in profit, per year, from commissions alone. Which is pretty spicy. For context, Wall Street money machine Jane Street can only boast a profit-per-head of $4.3mn. Even if you assume that the rest of Valve only breaks even, Steam’s cut from sales alone would mean the company as a whole makes nearly $3.9mn of profit per employee (higher than Citadel Securities, FWIW).
One thing that does perhaps support the chart’s credibility is how rapidly Valve’s lawyers moved to get the documents removed from the public docket.
Filed in the court docket for the active class action is this chart, which projects that Steam’s overall revenues will pass $10bn next year (high-res):
No source is given in the filing, but the chart is taken from the Global PC Games Market Report 2024 by Video Game Insights, a market research group that has subsequently been bought by Sensor Tower.
In its methodology, VGI explains that those figures were derived from a mix of factors, including the number of reviews, how often certain games appear on user profiles, bestseller lists and “proprietary research”. Logically, we would expect this to include sales of Valve’s own games via Steam.
Like with most market research, it ought to be taken with a bucket of salt, although it’s at least in the same rough ballpark as an estimate by Microsoft that Valve as a whole made $6.5bn in revenue in 2021. Again, assuming these figures are even roughly true, what can they tell us?
Chiefly, it would indicate that commissions — despite being extremely lucrative — aren’t responsible for the majority of Steam’s overall revenues (if both disclosed charts, or Microsoft, are correct, we can compare $2bn in Steam commission income in 2021 to $6.5bn to $7.4bn of overall sales).
It’s tricky to believe. Sure, Valve likely makes chunky direct revenues for its own games, and associated microtransactions for things such as Counter-Strike “skins” — on which margins are likely to be excellent — but we’d suspect things are more tilted towards commissions.
Or, of course, that VGI’s figures — or any of the others we’ve seen — are just wrong. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Hard profit figures remain elusive, but on overall revenues, at least, a court document from 2024 — shared by The GameDiscoverCo Newsletter — offers a teasing look inside the black box. In it, a heavily redacted email chain shows Valve employees discussing the company’s revenues per hour.
Kristian Miller, one of Valve’s data scientists, describes the company in the emails as a revenue “outlier”, sharing two charts that seem to put it above Silicon Valley’s top companies — possibly well above (high-res one and two):
It’s safe to assume that Valve is the redacted company at the top
In this, as with so many things, we invite readers to believe whatever it is they want to believe. If you work for Valve and want to tell us more, please get in touch. The company did not respond to our requests for comment on its financial performance or any other part of this article.
The prospect of a drawn-out court battle may mean more of the platform’s secrets spill out in the coming years. For now, Steam’s position — of an ultra-lucrative, efficient presence of a relatively small but healthy sector — seems secure. Yet as the games industry continues to grow, the temptation for a major tech company to take a serious swipe at it will only grow.
“Anybody who wants to put Valve out of business could do so, but nobody cares,” argues Michael Pachter, a gaming industry analyst at Wedbush Securities.
That said, it’s not like nobody has tried. Steam’s biggest rival is probably the Epic Games Store, which has been powered largely by the success of battle royale sensation Fortnite. Yet despite this huge draw, Epic “has failed to really impact Steam in any meaningful way”, according to Harding-Rolls:
This strategy has involved offering a better share of sales to developers and publishers and giving away lots of free games. This has prompted Steam to change its own revenue share policies. However, Steam continues to grow and is as dominant in terms of premium PC game sales as it has ever been. I think this illustrates that displacing Steam would be very challenging.
There are also several smaller distributors, such as Good Old Games — which made a sliver of profit on sales equivalent to about $55mn last year, and is owned by Poland’s CD Projekt — and indie platform Itch. Microsoft (which, in a different timeline, could surely have dominated this area) runs a somewhat unambitious store, while gaming heavyweight EA shut down Origin, its own launcher, earlier this year.
Visibility on market share across the sector is poor, but none, currently, seem to be approaching the reach and revenues of Steam.
Valve is a very weird company, and cheerfully admits it. Its 56-page Valve Handbook for New Employees lays out its unusual structure, and right at the start concedes that “it can take some time getting used to”.
And, pretty quickly, it’s made clear that Valve is indeed not like the other businesses:
Hierarchy is great for maintaining predictability and repeatability. It simplifies planning and makes it easier to control a large group of people from the top down, which is why military organizations rely on it so heavily.
But when you’re an entertainment company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value. We want innovators, and that means maintaining an environment where they’ll flourish.
That’s why Valve is flat. It’s our shorthand way of saying that we don’t have any management, and nobody “reports to” anybody else. We do have a founder/president, but even he isn’t your manager. This company is yours to steer — toward opportunities and away from risks. You have the power to green-light projects. You have the power to ship products.
The message is that Valve employees basically self-organise in what the company describes as a “flatland”, with even Newell (the “founder/president” referred to above) freed from hierarchical duties (the reality, according to one ex-insider, may be slightly less radical).
Flatness involves some interesting decisions. On a practical level, all desks at Valve have wheels, with staff physically shifting themselves around the office to be near the people they’re working with.
The handbook even includes a little illustration of how this should work:
Does this system produce results? On one level, yes: Valve seemingly makes loadsamoney. On another very visible level, absolutely not: Valve releases major new games at a glacial pace. The much-anticipated third title in the Half-Life series became the video game equivalent of Samuel Beckett’s Godot, until it was quietly cancelled.
“I’ve not met anybody who had a career there,” says Wedbush’s Pachter. “They all leave after, you know, 10 years. They last long enough to make money. But the developers I’ve known there have left for greener pastures because the company doesn’t publish games.”
Another oddity is the company’s use of “stack ranking”. Once a year, staff are asked to rank colleagues within their division based on skill level, productivity, group contribution and product contribution. These rankings are aggregated, and then used to determine compensation. As the handbook says:
By choosing these categories and basing the stack ranking on them, the company is explicitly stating, ‘This is what is valuable.’
This is potentially problematic, and not just from a financial planning perspective.
Whatever a company’s culture, it is bound to work for some people better than others. An investigation by YouTube channel People Make Games offers some interesting anecdata from people for whom it didn’t work, and explores the limitations of stack ranking (which, it suggests, rewards short-term, high-visibility work over less-glamorous, longer-term projects):
That’s not the only challenge. Valve presents itself as jocular, confident and unruffled, but the internet is a complicated place.
A report by the US’s Anti-Defamation League, published last year, claimed Steam’s forums were “rife with extremism & antisemitism”, with thousands of users deploying symbols such as the Nazi swastika, the sonnenrad and the Totenkopf. They found 1.18mn “potentially extremist” copypastas on Steam’s forums, with swastikas “by far” the most popular.
Their report suggests Valve has struggled — or ceased — to put a lid on such content:
A [ADL Centre on Extremish] analysis of copypastas on Steam also found evidence that Steam attempted to moderate certain extremist content before stopping for unknown reasons. From late 2019 through the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when users in gaming spaces reached an all-time high, the use of several swastika copypastas sharply dropped to near-zero rates. The same swastika copypastas then sharply increased in frequency in September 2020, suggesting that Steam moderated this content for a brief period. There is no observable difference between the variations in copypasta posted prior to November 2019 and those posted after 2020.
Moderation issues are not unique to Steam, but Valve’s approach to handling such content on its platform is certainly laissez-faire.
In 2018, after a backlash, the company pulled the game Active Shooter — in which players could simulate a school shooting — from sale ahead of its release. In the wake of that decision, Steam outlined its philosophy for “who gets to be on the Steam store”. Its conclusion:
Valve shouldn’t be the ones deciding this. If you’re a player, we shouldn’t be choosing for you what content you can or can’t buy. If you’re a developer, we shouldn’t be choosing what content you’re allowed to create. Those choices should be yours to make…
With that principle in mind, we’ve decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling.
Conveniently, it’s the kind of libertarian approach that will probably make Valve the most money.
Valve is made in the image of Newell, who is most easily categorised as a libertarian. And there seems little argument that it has been a fantastic financial success.
Newell is 62 years old. It has been a few years since he gave a press interview, but an interesting profile of him published by Forbes last year said Newell was “rarely” in Valve’s offices any longer, no longer attended company events and had apparently since Covid-19 been living at sea in one of his five ships to avoid the virus.
Newell’s taste for the outlandish is not restricted to his life aquatic. Here’s what The Verge reported in May:
Valve co-founder and CEO Gabe Newell, the company behind Half-Life and DOTA 2 and Counter-Strike and preeminent PC game distribution platform Steam, has long toyed with the idea that your brain should be more connected to your PC. It began over a decade ago with in-house psychologists studying people’s biological responses to video games; Valve once considered earlobe monitors for its first VR headset. The company publicly explored the idea of brain-computer interfaces for gaming at GDC in 2019.
But Newell decided to spin off the idea. That same year, he quietly incorporated a new brain-computer interface startup, Starfish Neuroscience — which has now revealed plans to produce its very first brain chip later this year.
Speaking as part of a Valve-produced documentary about Half-Life, released last year (and not, apparently, on a boat at the time), Newell said:
I always have absolutely nothing interesting to say when people say ‘Would you reflect on your legacy?’. I really don’t look back a whole lot. I’m always excited by the future, right? So to me it’s like, I can look back at the things that we did, but to me they’re just the stepping stones to what we’re gonna be able to do in the future. That’s just how I’m wired.
While its founder takes strides towards becoming literally wired, Valve has settled in a strange spot. Under Newell’s leadership — geographically proximate or not — the company has been able to carve out and defend its own unusual niche, by doing things differently, and — for better and for worse — going where others have feared to tread.
But if he were ever to exit the picture, Valve would surely become a tempting takeover target. In the meantime, we hopefully have lots of fun legal discovery to look forward to, which might give us more information on the black hole of PC gaming.
