Gabe Newell talked about this in an interview with Eurogamer[1]. Seems it's about more than selling hats in TF2, e.g they also need to understand what happens i

Gabe Newell talked about this in an interview with Eurogamer[1]. Seems it's about more than selling hats in TF2, e.g they also need to understand what happens if it becomes possible for users to trade games with each other on Steam. Valve is now a platform provider, more than an actual game company, so they need to understand these things. "We need to hire an economist, because we keep bumping up into these issues. You're starting to look at weird issues like currency and inflation and productivity and asset values and liquidity of asset categories. We just wish we were smarter about this stuff. We're reading frantically. We're brushing up, and all we're doing is convincing ourselves that we're more stupid. Half the time people are saying, oh, well, illiquid assets inherently have a penalty, so this argues for trade-ability, that we're essentially becoming a Russian currency model in the 1970s. Everybody races off to try to read papers on the implications of that." [1] http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-08-25-valves-gabe-newell-interview?page=3 http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-08-25-valves-gabe-new...