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
creating use drm
Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customer's use or by creating uncertainty.
successful people together
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.
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.
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.'
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.
texas years guy
When I worked at Microsoft, I got to go and visit a bunch of different companies. Probably a hundred different companies a year. You'd see all the different ways they'd work. The guys who did Ventura Publisher one day, and then United Airlines the next. You'd see the 12 guys in Texas doing Doom, and then you'd go see Aetna life insurance.
successful technology games
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.
apples expectations people
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.
microsoft able nine
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.
play safe entertainment
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.'
problem piracy
Piracy is almost always a service problem...
kevin littles faces
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.
issues piracy pricing
One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,
successful people traditional
Traditional credentialing really doesn't have a lot of predictive value to if people will be successful.