Welcome to our collection of quotes by Gabe Newell. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Gabe Newell
Gabe Logan Newell (nicknamed Gaben, born November 3, 1962) is an American businessman and the co-founder and president of the video game developer and digital distribution company Valve.
Newell was educated at Davis Senior High School in Davis, California, and attended Harvard University in the early 1980s. He dropped out to join Microsoft, where he helped create the first iterations of the Windows operating system. With Mike Harrington, he left Microsoft in 1996 to found Valve. Harrington left in 2000, leaving Newell as the sole owner.
Newell led development of Valve's digital distribution service Steam, which launched in 2003 and controlled most of the market for downloaded PC games by 2011. He is one of the wealthiest people in the US, with an estimated net worth of $5.5 billion as of 2017.
The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future.
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.'
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.
Piracy is almost always a service problem.
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.
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.
I've always wanted to be a giant space crab.
We just always focus on quality, which can be frustrating during the wait, but which pays off when we're done (we hope).
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.
Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customer's use or by creating uncertainty.
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.
We came up with the name and logo pretty much the same way we do everything else.
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.
One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It's a service issue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. You're going to look like you have magic powers compared to everybody else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ninety percent of games lose money; 10 percent make a lot of money. And there's a consistency around the competitive advantages you create, so if you can actually learn how to do the art, the design, and the programming, you would be consistently very profitable.
Traditional credentialing really doesn't have a lot of predictive value to if people will be successful.
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.
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.
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.
One of the things that's important about family is the narrative history they create for themselves.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
I'm a handsome man with a charming personality.