Gabe Newell’s $5.5bn Net Worth Puts Him in US’s Top 100 Wealthiest

Megalith

Megalith

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There's a video games billionaire among the 100 richest people in America now: Gabe Newell is placing highly in the Forbes 400. The founder and CEO of Valve was valued at $5.5bn, up from the 4.1bn Forbes estimated in its March 2017 Billionaires list - not bad for a Harvard University drop-out. His net worth has increased fivefold from the $1.1bn it was reported as in March 2013.

Naturally, his success can be attributed to the ongoing dominance of Valve and its Steam marketplace that Forbes reports "sells game licenses to 125m users". Valve is not a publicly listed company and therefore doesn't share its financials, but Forbes estimates just over half the company is owned by Newell. Newell's self-made score - a 1 to 10 ranking that indicates whether their fortune was entirely inherited (1) or built from the ground up (10) - is an impressive 8.
 
That's sick. You can be a billionaire just from having a digital game store. You don't even have to stock anything like Amazon.
 
But trickle down economics means we will all get rich from Valve... right??
 
Never met him, but his little sister was in my little sister's wedding (nice gal--you can tell they are siblings).

She was behind on the rent a while back and asked him for a loan. No loan...but he solved the problem: "He just bought my whole building," she said. :D
 
That was a really great move shitting on PC gamers for a decade and a half and focusing on Xbox instead Microsoft, it really showed a lot of foresight.
 
Damn. 5 billion and we still think we're getting HL3 at some point...

He's got no need to sweat over a game that can potentially leave a stain his beloved franchise at this point. Might as well leave it hanging on the high it left off on.

Good for him and Valve, Steam has been a great boon for them and us PC gamers alike.
 
I think steam rocks! I remember how it use to be since I've been heavy into gaming since 1982. Yep that old. 52.
 
I'm old enough to remember when steam came out. No one at our LAN party wanted to put our money and trust into a digital service. Fast forward today and as a modest gamer I can happily say I own over 100 games I've never completed. And too this day I still add games of interest too my library I'll never finish. I'm not knocking Steam, I just think it's helped to breed a culture of "I want everything yesterday yet I have no time for it now." /mindless rant
 
Gabe is a genius for recognizing the digital platform early on as the wave of the future. Then we have the idiots, which unfortunately includes me, who buy games by the buttload with absolutely no intention of playing all the games we bought, 100% of Steam users are digital hoarders. I like to think that at least a quarter to a third of his networth are from us hoarders.
 
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snowcrash said:
Gabe is a genius for recognizing the digital platform early on as the wave of the future. Then we have the idiots, which unfortunately includes me, who buy games by the buttload with absolutely no intention of playing, 100% of Steam users are digital hoarders. I like to think that at least a quarter to a third of his networth are from us hoarders.
Click to expand...

O' I most certainly (momentarily) habour the intention to play all my games, its just that there are so many (more than 50% of my games have yet to experience their first installation).
 
Steam was the best thing to come out for PC games. Automatic patches where you didn't have to practically pay to download the damn things.

Also, the Xbox controller since all ports have plug and play. Having to configure old controllers before 2005 sucked ass.
 
Yea, Steam downloads was a magic idea at the time and they haven't missed any beats since then. Good on him for capitalizing on that success.

I am happy to make him richer if it means we get part 3 to.... well anything actually.
 
So your saying, waiting for him to need money and make HL3 probably isn't going to work?
 
You would think he could drop a small 100 mil to give us hl3 so people would stop bitching at him.
 
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