Valve leads considered making a "mediocre" game before Half-Life to build the team up, but original marketing exec said "if you do that, the company will fail"
"I told Gabe that I thought the only way that Half-Life was really going to work was if it was named Game of the Year" ...
How a nephew’s CD burner inspired early Valve to embrace DRM
PC Gamer pulled that interesting tidbit from a talk Harrington gave at last week's Game Developers Conference. In her ...
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Valve Used ‘Game of the Year’ Sticker to Turn Half-Life into a Success
Monica Harrington from Valve shared some interesting facts about the company during her talk at the GDC 2025. One of the most surprising stories was about how Valve struggled to sell Half-Life due ...
Steam's DRM was inspired by an exec's nephew and his trusty CD burner
Harrington has a somewhat contentious relationship with Valve's origin story. In 2024, she said that her name had been erased ...
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Valve Used This Hilarious Half-Life Trick To Boost Sales
Half-Life was apparently a trailblazer for a marketing trend that has become a staple of the video game industry, but the ...
GameSpot9d
The Dramatic Half-Life Deal That Altered The Fate Of Valve Forever
The terms of the deal, Harrington said, was that Valve would fund all but $1 million of the development costs of Half-Life's ...
GameSpot5d
Valve's DRM Origins Include An Exec's 19-Year-Old Pirate Nephew
A fun myth to hear about relates to a friend's uncle working at Nintendo to get the scoop on secrets. But what if your ...
TweakTown4d
Valve invented the 'Game of the Year Edition' marketing strategy, former exec reveals
At GDC 2025, former Valve chief Monica Harrington explored the challenges of marketing a game, and how the Game of the Year ...
Valve literally gives Half-Life away now, but 27 years ago it was carefully crushing its angry pirates: "None of them had actually bought the game"
Takes you closer to the games, movies and TV you love Issues delivered straight to your door or device Half-Life is $2 on ...
Former Valve exec recounts the meeting where Half-Life's publisher almost killed the iconic FPS: "Half-Life would quietly die. I was stunned"
Ex-Valve CMO Monica Harrington, in a recent panel from the Game Developer's Conference, once again remembered an era where ...
Video Gamer9d
OG Half-Life publisher Sierra planned to “abandon” the game before Valve threatened them
The original Half-Life was almost abandoned by publisher Sierra On-Line before Valve threatened to reveal their unsavoury ...
GIGAZINE3d
Steam's Digital Rights Management (DRM) was introduced after the nephew of a Valve executive copied a game without permission.
The bottom line is that the authentication system worked really well.' After Monica Harrington's speech, Mike Harrington commented, 'When I heard my nephew's story, I thought at first ...