Gabe Newell, the billionaire founder of Valve, has paid $70.8 million to buy a 20,000 square-foot seaside mega-mansion in Florida featuring seven bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, and an underground tunnel to the beach.

The home was listed for sale in 2025 with an asking price of $85 million. It officially sold for $70,851,054 on June 15, or about 16% under the asking price. You can see many photos of the humble abode on Zillow. A video you can see below (from five years ago) takes you through the home.

The Wall Street Journal said Newell was the purchaser of the home, which is right down the road from President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort.

The previous owners were Cindy and Ron McMackin, who founded Pan-Pacific Mechanical. They bought the home in 2020 for about $39 million, so they certainly turned a nice profit on the sale to Newell.

"We found a great family, it seems, to buy that home from us," Ron McMackin told WSJ.

The home exists in the exclusive Manalapan community. Fellow billionaires Larry Ellison and David MacNeil also own homes in the community. Sean Hannity and Tony Robbins also live there. Billy Joel sold his Manalapan home in 2024 for $43 million.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD5-8y3vTBM

Newell's purchase of the Florida mansion came during a lawsuit against the company pertaining to monopoly concerns.

This was just the latest major purchase for Newell, as he owns a fleet of super-yachts as well. Valve is based in Bellevue, Washington, but Newell is known to do a lot of work from sea. Newell was visiting New Zealand when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, and he had 48 hours to decide if he would stay or go--he stayed.

Newell is not the first gaming billionaire to spend big money on a home. Markus "Notch" Persson, who created Minecraft and sold it to Microsoft, paid $70 million for a Beverly Hills mansion in 2014, outbidding Beyonce and Jay-Z for it. Persson threw a housewarming party, and Selena Gomez dropped by.

Earlier this week, it was reported that Microsoft was planning to close, or spin out, Compulsion Games, Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and potential other studios as part of a round of layoffs and studio closures. Now, a report suggests that Microsoft knew it planned to close Ninja Theory before the studio announced its new Hellblade game, Senua, during the Xbox Games Showcase just ten days ago.

According to Stephen Totilo's Game File, Microsoft "had already planned to sunset or split" with Ninja Theory by the time Senua's trailer debuted, thinking that a newly announced game would "draw investor interest."

Totilo notes that it's unclear whether anyone in Ninja Theory's leadership team was involved with, or even aware of, that plan.

The report follows a bumper interview that Xbox Wire published about Senua, in which it said, "The original Hellblade famously ended with the line, 'There are more stories to tell.' Senua feels like Ninja Theory has expanded that to a philosophy of, 'There are new kinds of games to make.'"

Ninja Theory studio head Dom Matthews also noted that the gap between Hellblade 2 and Senua being small is deliberate. "It’s not about rushing something out the door--we would never do that--but we want to ship games."

https://youtu.be/H2eP2xtTEzw

It began with Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's "reset" memo, which noted that Xbox has spent over $20 billion on ongoing investments, but that the annual revenue has declined almost half a billion in the same time. "Going forward, this cannot continue," Sharma said. That was followed immediately by Xbox Game Studios boss Craig Duncan stepping down.

While Ninja Theory, Double Fine, and Compulsion are all reportedly in talks with Microsoft over potential buyouts, the studios will need investment to go independent if those negotiations are successful.

Alongside those imminent threats, it remains to be seen whether Ninja Theory would even be permitted to take its Hellblade franchise with it wherever it goes. When Microsoft closed Lionhead, there was investment interest, but those talks didn't amount to anything since Microsoft was unwilling to let the Fable name go.

It remains unclear what the future holds for the studios facing closure. There's a sliver of hope in the fact that Microsoft appears to be hoping for investors to buy the studios rather than shuttering them entirely, but only time will tell if that approach is successful.

Late last month, Kwalee Labs launched its first-person horror shooter Luna Abyss on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC. But not even a day-one Game Pass release was apparently enough to save the jobs of the team that made Luna Abyss.

Kwalee Labs CEO and production director Hollie Emery announced on her LinkedIn page that she and the other eight members of Luna Abyss's development team were laid off earlier this week for undisclosed reasons.

"Unfortunately as of yesterday, the entire team has been made redundant; a decision that was completely outside of our control," wrote Emery. "As a result, the entire team are available for work as of today."

Emery also stated that she and the rest of her team were "enamoured by the love and support it received both by our industry and critically by journalists and media. Whilst we faced many challenges along the way, it has been the highlight of our careers--and we are incredibly proud that it has finally seen the light of day."

According GameSpot's sister site Metacritic, Luna Abyss had an 81% score and was largely received well by critics. While the title's Game Pass numbers aren't available, its peak concurrent players on Steam was 18,597 near launch. However, its most recent 24-hour peak was only 310 players, which marks a dramatic drop-off.

Luna Abyss puts players in control of Fawkes, a woman who has been imprisoned on a moon called Luna and tasked to excavate and explore the deep passages beneath the surface while monitored by her A.I. prison guard, Aylin. As Fawkes uncovers the secrets of Luna, she's forced to fight for her life against cosmic horrors that defy description.

Presumably Luna Abyss will remain available on its current platforms. The layoffs of Kwalee Labs' developers comes at a time when even prominent first-party studios at Xbox are currently negotiating with Microsoft to avoid being shut down. The final fate of those studios is currently unclear.

When the Baldur's Gate TV show was announced in 2025, people quickly became suspicious when it was confirmed that developer Larian has no involvement in it. Now, actor Samantha Béart--who plays Karlach in Baldur's Gate 3--has shared a positive-sounding update about the live-action series.

Béart told GamesRadar that Craig Mazin, who is heading up the Baldur's Gate TV series, reached out to personally express that he believes the "key cast of Baldur's Gate 3 should be meaningfully on-screen on the show as someone familiar or someone new."

Those comments don't tell us much in the way of specifics, but it sounds positive that Mazin wants the cast of the game to be involved in the show in some part. That wouldn't be unprecedented for Mazin, as he also hired actors from The Last of Us game to be in The Last of Us TV show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-GDJDUD6B4

Before this, Larian boss Swen Vincke said Mazin reached out to the studio and discussed how he is a huge fan of the game.

The Baldur's Gate TV show, which is being made for HBO where Mazin also has The Last of Us, will depict events that occur after the video game, and fan concerns stem from the fact that there are several possible endings that the show can pick up from.

Vincke addressed this as well, saying, “The endings of BG3 were created so they could serve as narrative soil for new adventures. There’s plenty of directions they could go. I’m eager to find out which ones Craig and his team will pick. He’s reached out for a chat, so we’ll have the opportunity to tell him our thoughts.”

That Larian would have no official, public involvement in the Baldur's Gate TV show is hardly a surprise given that the studio ended its partnership with Baldur’s Gate and Dungeons & Dragons owner Wizards of the Coast. 

Up next for Larian is a new Divinity game. The developers used generative AI in the early stages of development, angering fans. The final game won't have any generative AI content in it, however, Larian is promising.

The next game from Gareth Damian Martin, the lead developer for Citizen Sleeper and its sequel, is a drastic shift away from playing as a sentient android desperately trying to survive while managing resources and relationships. Called Signet City, the first-person fungalpunk RPG sees you play as a sentient spore who must spread itself through a city by secretly infecting new individuals. As a spore, you become the new guiding psyche of those you infect, acting as a voice that influences how they feel, so you can then shape how they act, and ultimately direct how events play out in the city. Even if it doesn't work like how they do mechanically, narratively, it sounds like you're playing as the sentient skills in Disco Elysium or Esoteric Ebb--you're an outside perspective doing its best to guide your host to what you think is the best outcome.

"As a parasite, each day you choose which host to drop into and then you have a limited number of actions that day," Martin told me. "And each host kind of comes with a part of the city that they live in, like a little hub. I think it's better to think of it as more something like Dishonored where you have these little chunks of the city--you don't have a whole city that you can walk around."

"The key thing is the parasite feeds on emotion. And the skill system, the RPG aspect of the game, is all based on emotion. So let's say as the parasite, you want to get to this specific area of a [certain] hub. So you load in as that character and you're like, 'Okay, there's this door in my way. I'm going to have to find a way to get through it. One way that I could get through it is [kicking] it down, but if I want to kick it down, I [can] get a modifier increase if my host is angry. So I'm going to take him into the pub and I'm going to get him in an argument with somebody who's in the pub and that will get [my host] more angry and now I can [more easily] kick down this door.'"

Like both Citizen Sleeper games, you're still rolling a six-sided die in Signet City, so any choice you make can still fail thanks to the cruelty of chance. Martin talked about how, in the kicking down the door example, you could injure your infected host in the attempt. And that might lead you to try solving the same problem but with a different host. And since no two hosts are the same, the manner by which you can help them out is different. To push someone into a state of adrenaline, you might need to have them discover political posters of a person or policy they don't support, for example, or take them to the top of a skyscraper if they're afraid of heights. 

"In a weird way, there's a little bit of Firewatch to it in the sense that when you're one of these characters, you're walking around the space and you're kind of discovering it," Martin said. "And then when you find something that the character can do or react to, you find it by looking and then you hold the left trigger to then bring up the UI that relates to that."

What I find most interesting about this is how this type of storytelling plays with the concept of perception. As someone who plays a lot of tabletop role-playing games, I'm engaging in make-believe with other adults several times a week. And during those sessions, players often switch up how they refer to themselves and the character they're playing as. I'll always use first-person "I," when talking about myself, but I'll also use it when I'm pretending to be my character. But not always, though. I'll also say that my character does something as if I were a narrator directing them. So while I'm almost always using first-person, I'll sometimes use third-person, and even second-person on very rare occasions. 

In that same respect, Signet City is a game told in first-, second-, and third-person. The camera view is first-person, but the game refers to the parasite as "you," and then the various hosts are talked about in third-person. But it's still just you, the player, behind it all. When I spoke to Martin about it, they said that the relationship of perspective was the exact concept they wanted to explore in Signet City.

"The parasite is influenced by observing tabletop play and how when you're playing a character in tabletop role-playing games, sometimes you're using your name, sometimes you use [your character's] name," Martin said. "Sometimes you're like, 'Oh, it would be really cool if this really bad thing happened to my character right now, because that would be really interesting.' And sometimes you're more in their head and you're more like, 'Oh God, I really don't want this to go bad. I'd really, really like [a good roll] to just make this go well.' And I think that is a really interesting space. I think video games don't really get into that--they don't think about the player [as a conflicting perspective] that much. Maybe in Baldur's Gate [3], you get a bit of that when you do a Dark Urge playthrough. But that, for me, is a really exciting part of tabletop games, so that's something that I'm trying to get into."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO4uKabqRQo

"It opens up the writing because I have to try and figure out, 'How do I write this?' So the game is in second-person and third-person simultaneously because [when] I write what it's like to be the parasite, [I use] 'you, you, you,' and then I write what the host is experiencing. So, 'Sid does this, Sid does that, Sid feels this.' And so that is a really exciting and interesting space to play. And so for me, I find it interesting to set myself those challenges and those structures. And a lot of it is really based on things I found interesting in Citizen Sleeper, but that that form couldn't necessarily contain. But if I change the form and I do something a bit more out there [with Signet City], I can find space to do it.

Where these perspectives ultimately collide and begin to grate against one another is where Signet City seems to be delving into punk, creating friction and counterculture within its urban setting via the clashing perspectives of the city at large and the more personal battles between the fungal parasite and individual hosts.

"I think there are connections absolutely to authoritarianism, but there are also connections to revolution and radical ideas," Martin said. "And I think that's what really excited me about beginning to work on this, was that a parasite can represent both of those things simultaneously and you can engage with the idea." 

"If you are the most powerful being in [the city], then ultimately that's what you're growing to be. What are you driving the city towards and what do you see your role in it being? Are you a shepherd or are you a master? Do you instigate or do you control? Do you destroy, or are you like, 'Yeah, f**k the humans. They've destroyed ecology, ecology's coming for them now. They should actually die.' These are the things that I think you can really get into with having a protagonist like [a fungal spore] and having a structure like this game."

We'll have to wait a bit longer to get a better understanding of how Signet City will look and play, as only an announcement trailer for the game has been revealed so far. In my conversation with Martin, they said they're about midway through development, so there's definitely no chance of the game releasing this year.