Gabe Newell
Gabe Newell
Gabe Logan NewellNovember 3, 1962) is an American co-founder and managing director of video game development and digital distribution company Valve. After having dropped out of Harvard University, Newell spent thirteen years working at Microsoft on the first three Windows versions. With Mike Harrington, he co-founded Valve in 1996 and remains its managing director...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth3 November 1962
CountryUnited States of America
thinking views games
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.
sorry thinking track
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'.
order years information-processing
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.
strong epic order
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.'
hurt sadness ecosystems
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.
art games people
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.
creating use drm
Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customer's use or by creating uncertainty.
election-process people choices
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.
firsts culture valve
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.'
jobs opportunity creating
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.
thinking people alternatives
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.
running games machines
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.
assets employee valuable
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.
thinking track levels
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.