Video: Gabe Newell is a nice guy. We already know that from reading Portal 2: The Final Hours, a story in which described Newell’s response to a chronically sick employee offering to resign: “Your job is to get better. That is your job description at Valve.” The company, too, is infamous for the freedom it gives its employees to work on special projects. GabeN has completed his metamorphosis from good boss to Santa, though, giving out HTC Vive VR headsets to developers like they’re Christmas presents.
At the Unity Vision VR/AR Summit, the Valve founder talks about the company’s partnership with Unity, bringing SteamVR to Unity at no extra cost to the developers in the room, and releasing a rendering plugin to improve performance. And then he says that all the devs at the Summit get their own Vive — “you get a Vive, you get a Vive, you get a Vive.” Newell calls it his “Oprah moment”, but with the big and bushy beard he’s sporting in the video above, I reckon he looks more like Saint Nick. [YouTube]