Top 34 Quotes by Gabe Newell

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.

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.

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.

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.

I consider Apple to be very closed. Let's say you have a book business, and you are charging 5 to 7 percent gross margins; you can't exist in an Apple world because they want 30 percent, and they don't care that you only have 7 percent to play with.

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.

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.

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.

What's the right way to think about the distribution part of Steam? You need to worry about viruses and people trying to publish other people's content, but the underlying thing is to eliminate that barrier between people who create stuff and people who want to have access to it.