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?’ Gabe Newell Read Quote
One of the things that’s interesting is that the PC has always had a huge amount of scalability. It was sort of the wild dog that moved into Australia and killed all the local life because it could just adapt. There used to be these dedicated devices, like dedicated word processors. Gabe Newell Read Quote
We tend to think of Steam as tools for content developers and tools for producers. We’re just always thinking: how do we want to make content developers’ lives better and users’ lives a lot better? With Big Picture Mode, we’re trying to answer the question: ‘How can we maximize a content developers’ investment?’ Gabe Newell Read Quote
We think touch is short-term. The mouse and keyboard were stable for 25 years, but I think touch will be stable for 10 years. Post-touch will be stable for a really long time, longer than 25 years. Gabe Newell Read Quote
The big problem that is holding back Linux is games. People don’t realize how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behavior. We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well. Gabe Newell Read Quote
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. Gabe Newell Read Quote
If you look at a multi-player game, it’s the people who are playing the game who are often more valuable than all of the animations and models and game logic that’s associated with it. Gabe Newell Read Quote
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. Gabe Newell Read Quote
When I worked at Microsoft, I got to go and visit a bunch of different companies. Probably a hundred different companies a year. You’d see all the different ways they’d work. The guys who did Ventura Publisher one day, and then United Airlines the next. You’d see the 12 guys in Texas doing Doom, and then you’d go see Aetna life insurance. Gabe Newell Read Quote
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. Gabe Newell Read Quote
