I have praised Valve on here before and now figures have been released by Game Informer that show exactly how good Gabe and his company are. These figures are for sales of boxed games at retail and do not include the substantial sales on Steam.

Half Life: 9.3 million
Opposing Force: 1.1 million
Blue Shift: 800,000
Half Life 2: 6.5 million
Half Life 2 Episode One: 1.4 million
The Orange Box: 3 million
Counter Strike series: 10.7 million

Impressive stuff. Valve failures sell as many as some company’s hits. There is a lesson here. Quality matters above all else. You are taking people’s money from them an you have a duty to give them the best possible value. All you have to look at are the companies struggling to churn out masses of shovelware for the Wii and the iPod/iPhone to see the contrast.

Valve are in an incredible position. Everything they produce is guaranteed to be a hit with massive sales. And they own the best PC gaming portal in Steam. So where do they go from here?

One thing they could do is to offer a gaming portal for console owners, in competition with the platform holders, that would give us some fireworks. Another route would be to offer sever based PC gaming to the huge massses who are going to buy netbooks over the next few years. The world is their oyster and anything they do will almost certainly work. Just look at what they have done in the last ten years.