Gabe Newell Quotes

I'm a handsome man with a charming personality.

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.

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.

I'd like to thank Sony for their gracious hospitality, and for not repeatedly punching me in the face. If I seem a little nervous, it's because Kevin Butler was introduced to me backstage as the VP of sharpening things.

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.

The internet is super smart. If you do something that is cool, that's actually worth people's time, then they'll adopt it. If you do something that's not cool and sucks, you can spend as many marketing dollars as you want, [they] just won't

The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.

I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that's true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality.

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.

The PS3 is a total disaster on so many levels, I think It's really clear that Sony lost track of what customers and what developers wanted.

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.

We just always focus on quality, which can be frustrating during the wait, but which pays off when we're done (we hope).

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.

I think it's really clear that Sony lost track of what customers and what developers wanted. I'd say, even at this late date, they should just cancel it and do a do over. Just say, 'This was a horrible disaster and we're sorry and we're going to stop selling this and stop trying to convince people to develop for it'.

Don't ever, ever try to lie to the internet.

Piracy is almost always a service problem.

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.'

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.'

We started off with a set of objectives for what we needed to communicate with the company's identity, created several proposals intended to meet those objectives, and picked the one that did the best job.

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.

It feels a little bit funny coming here and telling you guys that Linux and open source are the future of gaming. It's sort of like going to Rome and teaching Catholicism to the pope.

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. There's a strong tempation to close the platform, because they look at what they can accomplish when they limit the competitors' access to the platform, and they say 'That's really exciting.'

I think that Windows 8 is kind of a catastrophe for everybody in the PC space.

The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future. You're going to look like you have magic powers compared to everybody else.

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.

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.

Steam is about creating tools for content creators and customers.

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.

I think it's highly likely that we'll continue to have high-performance graphics capability in living rooms. I'm not sure we're all going to put down our game controllers and pick up touch screens - which is a reasonable view, I'm just not sure I buy into it.

I consider Apple to be very closed. Let's say you have a book business, and you are charging 5 to 7 percent gross margins; you can't exist in an Apple world because they want 30 percent, and they don't care that you only have 7 percent to play with.

The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future.

Greenlight is a bad example of an election process. We came to the conclusion pretty quickly that we could just do away with Greenlight completely, because it was a bottleneck rather than a way for people to communicate choice.

Valve wouldn’t have gotten its start

Computing lets people express their creativity and unlock solutions, and code is computing's universal language. All young people, including girls, deserve to be fluent in the language of the future.

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.

Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customer's use or by creating uncertainty.

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.

I've always wanted to be a giant space crab.

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.

We came up with the name and logo pretty much the same way we do everything else.

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.

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?'

Traditional credentialing really doesn't have a lot of predictive value to if people will be successful.

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.

One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It's a service issue.

George Lucas should have distributed the 'source code' to Star Wars. Millions of fans would create their own movies and stories. Most of them would be terrible, but a few would be genius.

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.

I'm a utility infielder. There's always somebody who is better at a specific task than I am, but I can pitch in at a bunch of different things as needed.