During the Game Developer’s Conference 2025, Monica Harrington—one of Valve’s founders and its first chief marketing officer, who once outright threatened Sierra over the rights to Half-Life—gave an illuminating talk on the company’s infancy, mentioning Gabe Newell’s ambitions beyond gaming as he considered a social networking site.

“Gabe had interesting ideas that had nothing to do with software.”

This revelation hints that we could have been engaging on a Valve-owned social media platform had events unfolded differently. In discussing the internet’s potential as a social hub, Harrington added,

“What he was very aware of—and I was too—was that the internet could be this incredibly social place.”

Reflecting on the missed opportunity, she stated that although Newell had strong foresight of the gaming industry’s trajectory, they opted against entering the social media realm, believing it wouldn’t have replicated what platforms like Facebook became.

Ultimately, this prompts the question: What would a Valve social network have been called? Perhaps in another universe, we might have been posting on Steets instead of Facebook.