One of Valve’s most popular games, 1998’s Half-Life, could have been the one and only game the company ever released, until a deal was struck that changed the company’s fate forever. Monica Harrington, Valve’s first chief marketing officer, said at the Game Developers Conference that publisher Sierra had the option for two more games, and after the first Half-Life became a gigantic success, Valve attempted to renegotiate with Sierra.
The terms of the deal, Harrington said, was that Valve would fund all but $1 million of the development costs of Half-Life’s sequels, with Sierra retaining IP rights and giving Valve back 15% of revenue. “It felt insane,” Harrington said, as reported by GamesRadar.
Harrington said that if she and her husband Mike Harrington were to make real money out of being co-owners of Valve at the time, she knew Valve’s prospects had to be “much, much brighter,” and that included renegotiating with Sierra.
After getting the OK from Valve co-founder Gabe Newell, Harrington worked with Valve’s attorney to hammer out a strategy for getting Half-Life’s IP rights back, for the original Half-Life and all future titles. But how?
Harrington said she pushed for Valve and Sierra to strike a deal with the threat that Valve would abandon making games altogether if Sierra didn’t come to the table. “Valve would never ship another game,” Harrington recalled of the bargaining tactic.
“It wasn’t an idle threat–we weren’t going to take on all of the risk to make other people rich,” Harrington said. “Besides, I knew Gabe had interesting ideas that had nothing to do with games.”
One of those ideas was for Valve to create an “online entertainment platform” with Amazon, but this fell through. In the end, Valve won back control of the Half-Life series from Sierra. Valve went to release Half-Life 2 in 2004 and later the VR title Half-Life: Alyx in 2020–that game won GameSpot’s Game of the Year. Valve’s massively popular Counter-Strike series also traces its roots back to Half-Life, originating as a mod for that game.
Valve is much more than a game developer today, as it owns and operates the massively popular PC game store Steam. Companies have attempted to buy Valve over the years, but the company remains independent. Newell, for his part, has become a billionaire and now owns a half-dozen yachts that are valued at over $1 billion.
One criticism of Valve today is that the company no longer releases many games, instead focusing more on Steam and hardware with its Steam Deck. It does have more games in the works, though, including a 6v6 MOBA called Deadlock. There is still no word on Half-Life 3, however.