Story time: in college, I played a lot of the Team Fortress 2 beta. When the release came around, performance tanked. Absolutely went straight to hell. Annoyed, I fired a snippy email off to Gabe. Not impolite, but snippy, something around "I expect performance regressions like this out of companies less awesome than Valve." The next day, a senior engineer at Valve reached out to me, we hopped on Skype, played a few rounds with a bunch of Valve employees, and we monitored my system perf. A few days later, I got an email, "next patch should help you out, let me know if not"--happy as a clam afterwards.

These days I have more than a few beefs with Steam, but that sort of reaction sticks, and generates a lot of goodwill.

Just for those of you looking at the URL slug and thinking, holy cow, $55bn! ... it's $5.5bn.

Still impressive, but I had to click to find out how a videogame guy could possibly be worth fifty-five-thousand-million dollars. :-/

About 15 years ago I emailed Gabe Newell about something and got a response. It was just "Thanks, I forwarded this to someone in department x" and then the person in that department helped me but it was still cool to get that single sentence back.