Gabe Newell Games Quotations

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?'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ninety percent of games lose money; 10 percent make a lot of money. And theres 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.

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.

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.

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.