And it had such a large impact on him that he changed a thing in one of Valve‘s games.

„We were always used to thinking about games as entertainment experiences, but then we started thinking of them as productivity platforms. As a sort of proof-of-concept, I decided to be a World of Warcraft gold farmer for a while. I was making $20 an hour farming gold. I was making what was a spectacular wage for most people in most parts of the world.

That’s when we started focusing heavily on things like the Steam Workshop and trying to think of everybody as a content creator. There’s this story of the parents that called us up because they thought we were selling their kids drugs. What happened was PayPal pinged the parents and said ‘Your kid is exceeding our limits of how much money they can put into PayPal per month. They’re probably selling stolen goods or drugs because there’s no other explanation’. So the parents called us up and I said ‘He makes items on the Team Fortress workshop. He’s making $500,000 a year’. That to us was an indication that this was a helpful way of thinking of games as platforms and it has informed all of our decisions about multiplayer games subsequently,” Gaben told EDGE magazine, quoted by WCCFTech. So World of Warcraft inspired him to make hats in Team Fortress 2…

He also talked about how Steam hasn’t started development until they had to do it themselves: „We went out and we pitched people the ideas for Steam, saying ‘Look, we’re a game developer, it would be super helpful if somebody provided these sets of services to us’. It seemed pretty obvious that there was a much better way to provide value for customers and reduce the complexity of distribution, in a way that would also be a really powerful way of improving the development process. That ended up being Steam, but the funny thing is we originally were just trying to get somebody else to build it because we desperately needed something like that,” he added.

Valve’s newest game, Half-Life: Alyx is available from today, but you need a VR headset and a beefy PC for it.

Source: WCCFTech

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