Words matter. These are the best Gabe Newell Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I have no direct knowledge of this, but I suspect that Apple will launch a living room product that redefines people’s expectations really strongly, and the notion of a separate console platform will disappear concurrent with Apple’s announcement.
Everybody understands that you’re supposed to say ‘our employees are our most valuable asset’ to the point where, even if it’s really true, they’re not going to really trust you until you’ve earned that – same with customers.
Photoshop should be a free-to-play game. There’s not really a difference between very traditional apps and how they enhance productivity and wandering around a forest and killing bears.
About half the people at Valve have run their own companies, so they always have the option not just to take a job at another game company, but to go start their own company. The question you always have to answer is, ‘How are we making these people more valuable than they would be elsewhere?’
One of the things that’s important about family is the narrative history they create for themselves.
A store is just a collection of content. The Steam store is this very safe, boring entertainment experience. Nobody says, ‘I’m going to play the Steam store now.’
I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we’ll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people.
If I buy a game on Steam and I’m running it on Windows, I can go to one of the Steam machines and already have the game. So you benefit as a developer; you benefit as a consumer in having the PC experience extended in the living room.
The culture at Valve is pretty much crowdsourced. The handbook is a wiki. One of the first things we say to new hires is, ‘You have to change something in the handbook.’
It used to be that you needed a $500-million-a-year company in order to reach a worldwide audience of consumers. Now, all you need is a Steam account. That changes a whole bunch of stuff. It’s kind of a boring ‘gee, information processing changes a stuff’ story, but it’s going to have an impact on every single company.
I remember back in the early days of Microsoft that from the day that you decided that you were just going to put out an ad to a customer – and all you were usually able to tell them was that a new product was available – it was about nine months before you could actually reach the first customer.
The Internet is changing what entertainment and sports is. It’s not just a few people authoring an experience for others. It’s really growing out of what everybody does.
Traditional credentialing really doesn’t have a lot of predictive value to if people will be successful.
In order for innovation to happen, a bunch of things that aren’t happening on closed platforms need to occur. Valve wouldn’t exist today without the PC, or Epic, or Zynga, or Google. They all wouldn’t have existed without the openness of the platform.
A lot of times I make people better by getting stupid, distracting, bureaucratic stuff off their desk. That’s an incredibly easy way to make a senior person more productive.
What’s the right way to think about the distribution part of Steam? You need to worry about viruses and people trying to publish other people’s content, but the underlying thing is to eliminate that barrier between people who create stuff and people who want to have access to it.
People who are constantly looking for the opportunity to do something new are also people who are not going to be helped by having job titles – job titles create expectations of specialization and focus which don’t map really well to creating the best possible experience for your customers.
To people who traditionally charge $10,000 for a 3D animating app, we say you should be free-to-play and generate a revenue stream. Think of a 3D modeling package almost like an RPG.
If you look at the requirements for just one piece, like art, from one generation of games to the next, it will change radically. You need people who are adaptable because the thing that makes you the best in the world in one generation of games is going to be totally useless in the next.
The PC is successful because we’re all benefiting from the competition with each other. If Twitter comes along, our games benefit. If Nvidia makes better graphics technology, all the games are going to shine. If we come out with a better game, people are going to buy more PCs.
As somebody who participates in the overall PC ecosystem, it’s totally great when faster wireless networks and standards come out or when graphics get faster. Windows 8 was like this giant sadness. It just hurts everybody in the PC business.
Most people who end up being successful have good grades, but it’s orthogonal – there’s no extra information than if they put together a website and have bunch of fans who love coming and seeing what they’re doing.
