Hey, do you know these Valve guys are doing fairly properly for themselves? Handily going toe-to-toe with Amazon, making more cash per worker than Apple, and having a middle of gravity so enormous that even Microsoft seems to be set to return crawling again to it. And I am keen to wager that Monica Harrington, one of many firm’s authentic executives and its first chief advertising and marketing officer, has a fairly stable thought of why.
Throughout a post-talk interview with PC Gamer’s personal Ted Litchfield at GDC 2025, Harrington revealed the large, shiny secret to Valve’s success—apart from her personal technical competence and industry-savviness that noticed her going to warfare with Sierra over its therapy of Half-Life. Merely put, “Should you’re on this {industry}, folks need to belief you if you are going to be in it for a very long time.”
Within the discuss earlier than this interview, Harrington spoke a few sport she was engaged on at Microsoft: “I felt assured I knew the best way to market a sport. I simply wanted a sport that was worthy of being successful. However over time, I began to appreciate I wasn’t listening to nice issues about this sport.
“I used to be fairly near the technical groups then, and one of many issues I’d do is form of stroll up and down the halls to try to get the thrill that basically wasn’t mirrored within the stories that I used to be studying frequently. The underside line was I simply wasn’t getting a great vibe.” Later, in a gathering, Harrington was capable of, by proxy, cancel that sport by simply asking, “Are you positive?”
She used that unnamed sport as a first-rate instance in her dialog with Ted. “I knew—like the sport that did not get shipped, proper, at Microsoft. I could not ask the individuals who’d labored on advertising and marketing that sport to place it or to say unfaithful issues about it.” Finally, Harrington posits, “We’re all the time making an attempt to say the factor that is trustworthy, that places your product in one of the best ways, however you may’t dissipate your credibility, and you’ll’t lose it.”
Even at Valve, Harrington explains, “new initiatives acquired killed” because of this. “I do know there have been instances the place folks would say—reviewers, and these are folks the place it is their job to judge these merchandise … you’d discover, should you’re paying actually shut consideration: Hey, this factor that we’re all enthusiastic about? There’s some motive that individual’s not lighting up.”
It is that stage of make-or-break pleasure, Harrington argues, that permits folks like her to be on the heartbeat of videogames as an entire. “Lots of people who had been advertising and marketing geniuses had been folks in PR, and a few of them labored on the companies, however what made them so sensible is they might discover the refined undercurrents—and they’d categorical them again to the folks throughout the firm by simply asking questions, virtually the way in which psychiatrist or psychologist would.” Once more, that “are you positive?” from Harrington rings in my thoughts.
It is fairly frankly a powerful stage of {industry} savviness—and possibly just a little extra actionable than some concepts put ahead on the convention, like that one man who mentioned that some video games simply have the magic. Although, in equity, it is getting at an identical thought. Nevertheless, for Harrington, it is vital to both reduce off video games with out the juice earlier than they make it out of growth—and battle like hell to maintain the nice ones going.
