Gabe Newell Wants To Discuss Relocation Of Developers With New Zealand Prime Minister
Gabe Newell the CEO of Valve has expressed his desire to discuss relocating developers to New Zealand with Prime Minister Jacinda Adern.
It is no secret that the world has been ravaged by Covid-19, but it seems one of the countries that was least hit was New Zealand, with under 2000 cases in the whole country and 25 deaths.
Gabe Newell has been living in the country since March this year enjoying freedom from the restriction that most other countries aren’t experiencing at the moment. Newell is now considered a tax resident of New Zealand due to his stay having exceeded the threshold of 183 days. As such he is making plans to have talks with the recently re-elected Prime Minister of the country Jacinda Adern about helping studios relocate to the country, at least temporarily.
The news came via VNN (Valve News Network), which has been allowed to “paraphrase” snippets of the game awards zoom meeting between Gabe Newell and Geoff Keighley that happened on Sunday.
VNN shared this paraphrased quote from Newell himself:
“Because I’ve been going on a pro-New Zealand campaign lately, I’m probably going to be meeting with the Prime Minister,” Newell said, “and one of the positions I’m going to be arguing for is that, given there is something super valuable that has been created here in New Zealand due to the hard work of the population of New Zealand, there is likely a large want to temporarily relocate production teams into the country.”
He had also suggested that the pandemic had halted productivity at Valve by 50-70% and that they hadn’t really come up with a workable solution to the challenges faced by working from home. This could be one of the major reasons for his desire to relocate developers.
Even though the CEO of Valve is in New Zealand, most of the company is stuck in the U.S.
This brings up a lot of questions such as who he is planning to relocate? Would everyone in the company qualify or just development teams? It will be hard to tell when “temporary” will end as no one knows when this pandemic will slow down not to mention end altogether. Are these “developers” to be separated from their families or will the families join them?
Along with trying to help his fellow game developers out, Gabe Newell has been keeping busy by raising money for various charities in New Zealand. One such effort is the Car racing team he created to help raise funds for NZ children’s charity “The Starship Foundation”.
Time will tell what Newell’s “discussion” with the Prime Minister will achieve and whether Valve will now be based in New Zealand. Stay tuned as we will keep you up to date with this story.