Back in 1996, two former Microsoft employees used their money to make a game development company – Valve. It has successfully grown into one of the biggest gaming companies and created a leading DD service for games – Steam. However, there was a big layoff earlier this year with little commentary from the company. We have already heard about the further careers of some of the laid off employees, but the situation with Jason Holtman could have a much larger effect on the future of PC gaming.

Jason Holtman had been with Valve for 8 years and was responsible for arranging the Steam distribution deals with developers and publishers. He is credited with attracting big publishers, like EA, Activision and others to the idea of selling their games on Steam as well as advocating selling the games at the reduced price during Steam sales. GamesIndustry.biz reports Holtman's has joined Microsoft, where he will work on improving the gaming and interactive entertainment on Windows. It will be interesting to see how much he will be able to, or allowed to do, considering that in the last few years the major consumer products from Microsoft have received a lot of complaints and forced the company to make some quick changes.