The talismanic Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve and one of the minds behind Steam, has long been a fan favorite across gaming circles. The man has a backstory that would pique the interest of just about anyone; a Harvard dropout that made enough money working at Microsoft during their boom period to forge his own video game studio. Today, he’s a billionaire — but that doesn’t mean he’s lost his sight of the bigger picture.
The latest evidence of the man they call ‘GabeN’ being a great guy came last week, when a Steam user called upon him to help rectify an accounts issue. For all the benefits that Steam has given to the PC gaming scene, it’s support system remains infamously bad; this particular user found themselves locked out of their account, and had been waiting a week since they filed their issue with the service.
Desperate, the user decided to take a chance and send an email directly to Newell. Much to his surprise, just a few hours later he received a reply. Newell quipped that ’everyone here at Valve is in support’, a statement that will likely reverberate around the internet as confirmation of Valve’s customer-centric outlook.
Within two hours, the problem had been fixed, and the user once again had access to their account. It’s perhaps unsurprising that Newell would is so hands-on with Steam given recent events, but it has to be said that it’s a pretty cool move for the co-founder of Valve to take such an approach with a problem like this.
However, you can’t help but feel like the user missed out on a grand opportunity. This was his moment to have one wish granted by GabeN; and he chose to get his account back rather than get the scoop on Half-Life 3. Admittedly, the latter would be something of a long shot — but so was getting a response from Newell in the first place.
Source: Reddit
