Valve CMO threatened the company would walk away from games if it didn't own the rights to Half-Life—'It wasn't an idle threat—we weren't going to take on all of the risk to make other people rich'

It's the 2025 Game Developer's Conference, and one of this year's most interesting talks was delivered by Monica Harrington, a founding member of Valve and the company's first chief marketing officer.

Harrington's career has been very much on the business side of software development but, way back in Valve's early days, she suddenly realised "there were a few things I didn't know" about the deal the company had signed with publisher Sierra to distribute Half-Life (thanks, GamesRadar).

"Chief among them was that Sierra had the option for two more games, essentially under the same terms, and this is despite the fact that we had produced a monster hit," says Harrington. "So under this scenario, Valve would fund all but a million dollars of the cost of developing a game, and Sierra would retain all the IP rights and pay about 15%. It felt insane."

Harrington is not the type of person to mess about. "I knew that if Mike [Harrington, her then-husband and fellow co-founder] and I were to get anything out of our ownership position in Valve, the prospects for the company needed to be much, much brighter."

The big one was regaining ownership of the Half-Life IP, because Valve as a company was going all-in on Half-Life 2.

"With Gabe's OK, I met with Valve's attorney to plan out a strategy for regaining the IP for Half-Life and all future games," says Harrington. "And essentially, my bargaining position was that Valve and Sierra would either rework that contract, or Gabe and Mike and the team would pivot to something else entirely and Valve would never ship another game."

From a 2025 perspective, with Valve now arguably the single most important company in the PC gaming space, that seems an incredible prospect. But this was a studio packed with talent that could have gone in another direction.

"It wasn't an idle threat—we weren't going to take on all of the risk to make other people rich," says Harrington. "Besides, I knew Gabe had interesting ideas that had nothing to do with games."

One of these ideas was an "online entertainment platform" in partnership with Amazon, raising the interesting prospect of an alternative timeline where Prime Gaming is a passable user experience. C'est la vie.

These other paths would remain untravelled. Harrington was able to go back to Sierra showing Valve's ability to leave the publisher and games behind, and in 2001 the publishing agreement was amended, returning the Half-Life IP to Valve and, crucially, the online distribution rights for its own games.

It's funny that this is all about hard-nosed business realism yet, at the same time, without this approach we'd arguably never have seen Half-Life 2, Steam, and everything that comes from it.

Harrington told PCG last year that she was motivated by "an extraordinary sense of responsibility to the people we hired… the ethos at Valve was to hire only the people you actually wanted to work with and then set them free to do what they did best.

"I knew that while Sierra might claim the IP rights, it could never claim that it made Half-Life," Harrington said. "So yes, I felt that pressure in an extraordinary way, and it's part of what fueled me to begin the legal fight for the Half-Life IP and to do what I could to help set Valve up for long-term success."