Do we like them?

Do we like Gabe Newell?

Our score: 6 out of 10. Nothing harmful found and some real charity work, but too little of the record could be opened to score him higher.

Gabe Newell is the president of Valve, the company behind Steam and the Half-Life games, so he is about as big as it gets in PC gaming. Most of what the internet says about him is memes, yacht gossip and net-worth guesses, and a lot of it comes from junk sites. This column sticks to what we could actually open and read.

The cleanest evidence of his character is the charity stuff. In 2009 he and a Valve colleague paid their own way to Australia, and fan donations that had been raised to cover the trip, about $3,100 from 233 donors, went to the Child's Play charity instead.

In 2020 he had a titanium garden gnome sent to space on a Rocket Lab launch and pledged $1 for every person who watched the stream. The Starship Foundation in Auckland ended up with $286,092 from it. It's a gimmick, sure, but kids' hospitals got real money out of it.

On the harm test, we looked for anything he has said or done about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines or the climate, and nothing turned up in the pages we could open. The wider fights over what gets hosted on Steam are about the platform, not his own words, so we haven't counted them against him. That is an absence of evidence, not a clean bill of health.

There are reports of him losing his cool at work and of a long-running antitrust fight over Steam, where he argued in testimony that gamers have choices. We couldn't open the full articles, so we're not building a verdict on them. Treat them as leads, not findings.

So where does that leave us? A bloke with a good record on charity, no harm we could find, and a few open questions about how he runs his company. We'd say lean yes, with a footnote that this one is thinner than we'd like.