Valve co-founder Gabe Newell has opened up on why his company doesn't have the 'churn 'em out' attitude towards its popular Half-Life franchise.

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"When we started out we were a single-player video game company that could have been really successful just doing Half-Life sequel after Half-Life sequel, but we collectively said let's try to make multiplayer games even though there's never been a commercial successful multiplayer game," Newell told The Washington Post in a recent interview."Then we tried to do Steam. There were a bunch of people internally who thought Steam was a really bad idea, but what they didn't think was that they would tell the people who were working on Steam what to do with their time. They were like "that's what you want to do with your time, that's fine, but we're going to spend our time working on Half-Life 2. We think you're kind of wasting your time, but it's your time to waste."Of course, Valve's willingness to try new things and adapt with changing trends has proved a massively successful attitude for the company, with Steam hitting the 7.6 million concurrent user mark at the end of 2013.Newell spent a great deal of time in the interview talking about his company's unique organizational structure, where job titles don't exist and emphasis is placed on flexibility with projects and time. This, according to Newell, frees his employees from marginalizing themselves into a single role or project. The key is to be adaptable, he says."So, if somebody becomes the group manager of X, they’re going to really resist it when X is not what you want to do in the next round of games. You don’t want them to sort of burrow into that – you want them to recognize that being really good at Half-Life level design is not as nearly as valued as thinking of how to design social multi-player experiences. You've had them feel like they have an organization and title tied up to something when the key is to just continue to follow where the customers are leading."Indeed, despite our collective rabid wolf howl for Half-Life 3 (which Newell did not address in the interview), Valve is always moving and adapting in accordance with its customers and their ever-shifting tastes."We definitely in a sense have an army of customers who are always helping us stay honest...We've essentially crowd-sourced supervision of a lot of these decisions to our customers and it works way better than almost any other system we could design. They're rabid, they're passionate, and there are a lot of them."You can read the whole interview with Newell here.

Lucy O'Brien is Entertainment Editor at IGN AU. Follow her ramblings on IGN or Twitter.