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.’
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.
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.
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.
Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customer’s use or by creating uncertainty.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?’
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.’
One of the things that’s important about family is the narrative history they create for themselves.
Piracy is almost always a service problem...
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.
Traditional credentialing really doesn’t have a lot of predictive value to if people will be successful.