The Steam boss had a peculiar profession for a while. He was a gold farmer in World of Warcraft.
Gabe Newell, better known as “Lord GabeN” on the internet, is likely familiar to most gamers. After all, he is the co-founder of Steam and Valve, creating one of the largest gaming empires in existence. But who would have thought that Newell once pursued a rather unusual profession? He was a gold farmer in World of Warcraft. Gold farming is still lucrative in WoW Classic as well.
What happened? In the magazine EDGE, Gabe Newell gave a very extensive interview and talked about many topics (via wccftech). One of the topics was gold farming in World of Warcraft. Newell had devoted some time to it. He tried to gather as much gold as possible to sell it to other players.
Why did Newell farm gold? The gold farming did not arise out of necessity but to prove a point – that it is possible to earn good money as a player from gaming. Newell says:
As a “Proof of Concept”, I decided to be a gold farmer in World of Warcraft for a while. I earned $20 per hour through gold farming. I achieved something that would be a fantastic wage for most people in most regions of the world.
This experience also led to the inclusion of features in Steam like the workshop, where players act as content creators, create content, and can earn real money.
Concerned parents reached out to Steam: However, the resulting Steam Workshop also had some funny side effects. Some concerned parents contacted Steam Support, believing that Steam was selling drugs to children.
This could be attributed to PayPal contacting the parents, according to Newell, with this message: “Your child is exceeding the limits of how much money they can deposit into a PayPal account per month. They are probably selling stolen goods or drugs, as there is no other explanation.”
Newell had to explain to the parents that their child was creating items for Team Fortress in the workshop and was earning $500,000 a year.
This was an indicator for us that we need to see games as a platform, and it has influenced all our decisions regarding multiplayer games in the future.
Who would have thought that this decision was due to Newell farming a bit of gold in WoW?
Newell also believes that we are very close to scenarios like in the anime Sword Art Online.
