Gabe Newell quotes

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. (Gabe Newell)
The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future.
Gabe Newell
Piracy is almost always a service problem.
Gabe Newell
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.
Gabe Newell
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.
Gabe Newell
This isn't working.
Gabe Newell
C'mon, people, you can't show the player a really big bomb and not let them blow it up.
Gabe Newell
I'm a handsome man with a charming personality.
Gabe Newell
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
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.
Gabe Newell
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)
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.
Gabe Newell
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.
Gabe Newell
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.
Gabe Newell
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.
Gabe Newell
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.
Gabe Newell
Traditional credentialing really doesn't have a lot of predictive value to if people will be successful.
Gabe Newell
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
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.
Gabe Newell
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
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.' (Gabe Newell)
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
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
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.
Gabe Newell
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.
Gabe Newell