Business is booming at Valve.
The Bellevue-based gaming company is thriving, according to CEO Gabe Newell, who said that Valve saw a 50 percent spike in sales in 2012. He credited the success to having open platforms and gave an example of a recent Dota 2 update.
“We were generating 3.5 TB per second — that’s about two percent of all the mobile and land-based internet activity, just for a single game update,” he said. “That gives you an idea of the scale of what’s happening.
“I think we are going to continue to see tremendous innovation coming out of that potential, out of the unusual, crazy, weird, disgusting but ultimately wonderful experiences that people will create for each other.”
Newell made the comments during an interview after accepting the British Academy of Film and Television’s fellowship. He was also asked about the future of gaming and said that it will be created more and more by the gaming community itself.
“It will be challenging for awards show like this to deal with the fact that more and more of the experience will be created by the people who are participating in those experiences,” he explained. “How do you give an award for best game design when it’s a community of 10 million people building the experience? That will be one of the challenges we face in the next five years.”
Things may even get better for Valve if its move into the living room proves profitable. The company is designing its own “Steam Box,” or a device that run Steam-based games on your TV.
Valve is also in the midst of a back-and-forth with hardware maker Xi3, who is building its own Steam Box-esque hardware.
Newell was the keynote at last month’s DICE Summit and spoke about how Valve is re-thinking what games are and how you sell them. He said that Steam for Linux gives people freedom to innovate on an alternate operating system. “It’s a get-out-of-jail free pass for our industry if we need it,” Newell said.
Finally, Newell made more headlines when he and director J.J. Abrams sent excitement throughout the gaming and movie worlds when discussing making games and movies together.
Previously on GeekWire: Valve CEO Gabe Newell: Valve Steam Box controller may measure your heart rate
