'Obviously we love the PC,' Gabe Newell told us 15 years ago, but his focus was on 'a responsibility to gamers and game developers'

Steam is, by a country mile, the premier power in PC gaming. If you own a PC and play games on it, then it's just about a guarantee you use Steam with some regularity. You might therefore expect that, like Sony with PlayStation and Microsoft with Xbox, Valve would feel obligated to promote and support the PC. But 15 years ago, when Steam was still relatively youthful, Gabe Newell said that's not quite the approach he takes.

"It's a lot easier for me to think of it as having a responsibility to gamers and game developers," the Valve boss told us back in 2011. "It's hard to test being the flagbearer for the PC. It's a lot easier to go out to customers and find out, 'Do you like this? What do you dislike about this? How can we make this better?' So we tend to be a little narrower in terms of how we try to think about what problems it needs to solve."

It's a small but vital distinction, and one that was made necessary to a large extent by what Newell said Valve "loves" about the PC as a platform: Openness, innovation, and the ability to move quickly in ways that consoles cannot. T...