Gabe Newell is the co-founder and CEO of Valve, the company behind Steam and games like Half-Life and CS: GO. In a recent interview, Valve CEO talked about the competition with the Epic Games Store and Apple’s model of controlling everything. Newell mentioned that in the long-run, competition is great and it keeps the platform honest. The following is what he had to say regarding the matter:
First of all, competition is great. That’s why we love the PC platform, everybody has to compete on a wide variety of dimensions. Competition in game stores is awesome for everybody. It keeps us honest, it keeps everybody else honest.
Newell admitted that in the short term, this can get pretty ugly and it might seem like Epic Games Store is trying to make Valve look bad.
But it’s ugly in the short term. You’re like, ‘Argh, they’re yelling, they’re making us look bad’ – but in the long term, everybody benefits from the discipline and the thoughtfulness it means you have to have about your business by having people come in and challenge you. When you’re in the service business, your partners may come to you and say, ‘We have some additional ideas’ , and then you say ‘Okay’ , but it doesn’t really change the underlying loop very much.
CEO of Valve went on to mention that while competition with Epic Games Store can be scary, Apple’s model of controlling everything is even scarier. The following is what he had to say regarding the matter:
If you ask us which is scarier, it’s people who are falling in love with Apple’s model of controlling everything and having faceless bureaucrats who get to keep your product from entering the market if they don’t want it to, or designing a store in a way that minimises software’s value-add to experience and stuff like that. That’s way scarier to us than competitors. In one case, somebody is challenging you to do a better job. And in the other case somebody is not letting you do your job at all, and that’s more unnerving.
Competition is great for the consumer as it means better pricing and cheaper products. On one hand, we have the Epic Games Store that encourages and challenges Valve to be better and honest. On the other hand, you have Apple that does not let anyone do its job. Let us know what you think about this statement by the CEO of Valve and whether or not you think Apple’s model is flawed in this case.