Valve are a big player in the gaming industry. Not only do they have the largest online distribution system on the planet in the form of Steam, they are also leaping into the console market and have millions of fans in the foetal position 24 hours a day waiting for Half-Life 3. However according to Gabe Newell co-founder of Valve, during an interview with The Washington Post the dawn of the internet has changed the relationship between consumers and service providers.

"The lines are a lot blurrier between who is a customer and who is a creator. It used to be it was pretty easy, right? You make cars, you send them out to some form of indirect distribution, and customers buy them, and you basically never hear from them again," Newell said. "Whereas in our world, sometimes people are producing as much as they are consuming in the experience. If you look at a multiplayer game, it's the people who are playing the game who are often more valuable than all of the animations and models and game logic that's associated with it."

Those are big words, however he goes on to saying "You can't pretend that it's just a canonical experience that lives in your head and is violated by being turned into bits, and a customer's job is to approach it and try to understand the auteur's vision of the experience," he said. "If you come to it with that sort of model, you'll never ship a game. So the useful thing about having to recognize that you're collaborating just to even ship the simplest kind of game is that it starts making you think about all of the other ways you should be collaborating with your customers."

Naturally, this level of collaboration is massively beneficial for all involved. The consumer gets what they want, and Valve makes more money. It is a classic win-win scenario.

Valve may have PC gaming wrapped around their little finger, but in this case, it does not seem to be a bad thing. Gabes rock solid ideals seem to be fuelling a great future for not only Valve, but for everyone else involved. Hopefully other companies take a leaf out of Gabes book, then the gaming industry can really thrive.