The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future. You’re going to look like you have magic powers compared to everybody else.
I’ve always wanted to be a giant space crab.
Don’t ever, ever try to lie to the internet...
The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.
Valve wouldn’t have gotten its start.
I’m a handsome man with a charming personality.
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.
Steam is about creating tools for content creators and customers.
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.
George Lucas should have distributed the ‘source code’ to Star Wars. Millions of fans would create their own movies and stories. Most of them would be terrible, but a few would be genius.
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.
I think that Windows 8 is kind of a catastrophe for everybody in the PC space.
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.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
One of the things that’s interesting is that the PC has always had a huge amount of scalability. It was sort of the wild dog that moved into Australia and killed all the local life because it could just adapt. There used to be these dedicated devices, like dedicated word processors.