Game Pass Could Come to Steam, Says Gabe Newell; Valve’s NFTs Stance Explained

Valve founder and owner Gabe Newell did a few interviews as part of the Steam Deck launch, and in one of them, he said Game Pass could come to the Steam platform if Microsoft wanted.

Speaking to PC Gamer, he stated:

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I don’t think it’s something that we think we need to do ourselves, building a subscription service at this time. But for their customers, it’s clearly a popular option, and we’d be more than happy to work with them to get Game Pass on Steam. We’ve talked to people there quite a bit about that topic. If your customers want it, then you should figure out how to make it happen. That’s where we’re at.

Right now Game Pass titles still don’t work on the Steam Deck simply because it’s not possible yet to install Windows on the platform. This should happen as soon as GPU drivers are released by Valve and AMD.

In another interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Newell also explained Valve’s stance against blockchain and NFTs games. It is more about the actors currently in this space than the technology itself, he said.

You have to separate the underlying technology versus which actors are utilising that technology. It’s like, if you’re a chemist, and you’re looking at nitrocellulose, you’re like “Oh, yeah, we can do some really interesting stuff with that.” And then if everybody’s buying guns and shooting people with them, you’re sort of like, “Hey, this whole chemistry thing is great, but there are some outcomes that can be negative.” Not to equate NFTs with shooting people, but the underlying technology of distributed ledgers, and the notion of digital ownership, and shared universes, are all pretty reasonable.

The people in the space, though, tend to be involved in a lot of criminal activity and a lot of sketchy behaviours. So it’s much more about the actors than it is about the underlying technology, or the rationale for what we’re doing.