Valve to Stay Independent

Gamesindustry.biz has an interview with Gabe Newell, head of Valve, regarding its plans to remain an independent player in the video game world. Newell cites the fact that the company has no interest in moving to a publisher owned business model at this time, and that unlike the movie industry self financed third party companies are actually in a good position to continue producing works because they maintain some amount of creative control.
"I'm glad that we have orders of magnitude greater ability to make those decisions that we think are the right ones, that customers will say 'Good job' rather than worry that some third party's going to step in and tell us to ship on a particular date or take this out or put this out or whatever."
Valve is currently at work on Half-Life Episode 2, the latest version of Team Fortress and the new Portal game mode while pre-production has begun on the third and final Half-Life 2 episode as well.

steam

Everyone has heard of MaddoxX, the hacker who has stated that he hacked the Steam servers, gaining access to Valve financial information, user information, and even credit card numbers. The alleged hacker gained access to a third-party site that Valve uses to manage the commercial partners in its Cyber Café program. This Cyber Café billing system is not connected to Steam. The hacker continues to states that he has credit card information, and even posted photos of credit card info from game sales dated March 12, 2007. Valve maintains that Steam is secure, but what do the consumers think? You'll have to tell us that.

Valve Marketing Need User-Created Content

"Half-Life 1 was okay as a multiplayer game and Team Fortress Classic was really good, but Counter-Strike kicked both their asses no question." Lombardi goes on to praise the PC's open multiplayer channels, saying," The PC has that great advantage; has had that great advantage, and it comes from multiplayer and modding starting in the early '90s and [online] multiplayer only showing up on consoles in 2000 or 2001. You've got a good 10-to-15-year lead there and you still have broken pathways on both consoles, so the PC has the advantage of time and a clear pathway."