Gaben Of The Pool Shares His Pricing Strategy

The "Gaben of the Pool" meme takes the classic "Panzer of the Lake" format and replaces it with Valve's CEO Gabe Newell floating in a pool. The joke here is that after 15+ years of fans begging for Half-Life 3, Gabe's mythical wisdom is to bundle it with some hardware nobody asked for. It's the gaming equivalent of your ISP bundling AOL CDs with your internet service in 2023. Valve's strategy of "here's the game you've been desperately waiting for, but first buy this random cube" is peak corporate wisdom. The cube exists solely to make you pay for what you actually want - a pricing strategy so transparent even enterprise software salespeople would blush.