Valve slams stock market sell-outs

Two executives at independent outfit Valve have made clear their aversion to floating the studio on the stock market.

Game developers that go public “end up getting their customers changed”, said Portal project director Erik Johnson.

“Any bad decision I ever see out there is because somebody created this different customer that was whoever funds them, and not the consumer of the product,” Johnson added in an interview with PC Gamer.

The studio’s co-founder Gabe Newell said that involving outside investment makes a company “end up with a totally different set of decisions, and the person who’s trying to design the experience is like ‘okay, I guess we’ll put Christopher Walken in our game’.”

Valve has grown in the last ten years to become a cash-rich indie studio which takes significant revenues from its Steam digital games system.