Gabe Newell

Businessman

1962-11-03

Quotes by Gabe Newell

• 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?'

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• 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.'

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.'

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• 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.

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• 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?'

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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