Gabe Newell quotes: Gaben’s greatest advice.
“The internet is super smart. If you do something that is cool, that’s actually worth people’s time, then they’ll adopt it. If you do something that’s not cool and sucks, you can spend as many marketing dollars as you want, they just won’t.”
“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.”
“Don’t ever, ever try to lie to the internet.”
“The most important thing you can do is to get into an iteration cycle where you can measure the impact of your work, have a hypothesis about how making changes will affect those variables, and ship changes regularly. It doesn’t even matter that much what the content is – it’s the iteration of hypothesis, changes, and measurement that will make you better at a faster rate than anything else we have seen.”
“The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting anti-piracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. Piracy is almost always a service problem.”
“We just always focus on quality, which can be frustrating during the wait, but which pays off when we’re done.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?'”
“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.”
“Someday down the road everyone involved in the process will look back and realize the consequences of what you’ve built with your creativity and your hard work.”
“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.”
“Traditional credentialing really doesn’t have a lot of predictive value [as to whether or not] people will be successful.”
“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 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.”
“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 lot of stuff’ story, but it’s going to have an impact on every single company.”
“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 think realism in some parameters makes other things have more emotional impact. If you start things at 11 you really have no place to go. Humor is super-valuable as an emotional tool in creating narrative experiences. Whether it’s horror or love stories, comedy is a really good component in the mix.”
“The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future. You’re going to look like you have magic powers compared to everybody else.”
“Ninety percent of games lose money; ten 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.”
“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.”
“One of the things that’s important about family is the narrative history they create for themselves.”
“I’ve always wanted to be a giant space crab.”
“I’m a handsome man with a charming personality.”
Related: Bill Gates quotes.
