Is there a single games company that cultivates the kind of hushed, awed whispers that Valve does? As a private company, Gabe Newell's baby doesn't have to concern itself with putting out all the information that companies with masses of shareholders have to. And yet, it pretty much props up all of PC gaming with Steam. It's a perfect recipe for theorising, rumour-mongering, hypothesising. Are they making Half-Life 3 in there? Do all their desks really have wheels? What goes on in that black box? We may never know, but we can damn well estimate.
Today's look into the crystal ball comes from research firm Alinea Analytics (via Tom's Hardware). In a post on X, the firm's head of market analysis, Rhys Elliott, posted some estimates for just how many scads of cash Valve has pulled out of Steam this year.
