Gabe Newell, boss at Valve, one of the best game companies ever!, held an AMA on Reddit this week to discuss some questions put to him by fans. It was relatively short but when given the opportunity to talk almost face to face with someone at Valve it's always an enjoyable experience. Here are a few of the questions Gabe answered, some more technical than others and some just fun questions.
Some questions about Gabe's personal life and interests, like;
Q- What sparked your interest in video games?
A- Playing Trek on a mainframe using punch cards.
Q- Do people recognize you in public often?
A- Yes.
Q- How do you like your steak?
A- Medium Rare.
Q- If you could go back in time, what would you change about Steam?
A- The biggest issue has been how we structured support.
A couple of fun questions;
Q- Wasn't there a movie (or set of 2 movies) coming in that universe be Valve and JJ Abrams?
A- Yep, they're coming.
Q- What is the status of Half-Life 3/Half-Life 2: Episode 3? Is Valve still working on any fully fledged single player games? An I identified anonymous source at Valve has said that HL3 has been cancelled, is this source legitimate?
A- The number 3 must not be said! Yes, I personally believe all unidentified anonymous sources on the internet.
Q- What are your favorite Steam games?
A- I think Portal 2 is our best single player game, I play DOTA 2 the most of our multiplayer games.
And some questions that are more business related;
Q- Do people often ask "When's Half-Life 3 coming?" Or similar things?
A- Yes.
Q- What's going on with Half-Life 3?
A- The issue with Half-Life for me is that I was involved in a much higher percentage of the decisions about the games, so it's hard for me to look at them as anything other than a series of things I regret. There's no information in my response about the what we'll do in the future. It's simply easier for me to be a fan of things that I was less directive.
Q- What do you regret about Half-Life then? That's an interesting thing to say, regarding that the Half-Life series is one of the most critically acclaimed of all time.
A- if you're involved in a game, everything ends up being a set of trade-offs. Anything in a game is a sacrifice of things not in the game. I just feel those more personally about Half-Life for a bunch of reasons.
Q- Why does Valve not talk to its community about the games/apps it's developing as much as other companies?
A- Because our decision making is way more conditional than most other companies. The one thing we won't do is waste our customers time and money, which means we will cancel or change stuff much later in development. Tracking out choices would be annoying and frustrating.
Another way to think about this, and the way we talk about this internally, is that we prefer to communicate through our products. We are all pretty devoted to reading and listening to the community - everyone here believes it is an integral part of their job to do so. And when it comes time to respond, we generally use Steam - shipping update that address issues or add functionality, obviously this doesn't work for everything. Working this way imposes latency on our communication - It takes long to ship and update than to do a blog post. This can lead to the feeling of an echo chamber, where it seems like Valve isn't listening. We're always listening. So sometimes the latency is rough for everyone, including us when we want to address issues quickly. On balance we things it's usually worth the trade off.
Q- Does Valve plan on doing anything with Source 2 in the coming year? If so, what?
A- We are continuing to use Source 2 as our primary game development environment. Aside from moving DOTA 2 to the engine recently, we are using it as the foundation of some unannounced products. We would like to have everyone working on games here at Valve to eventually be using the same engine. We also intend to continue to make the Source 2 engine work available to the broad developer community as we go, and to make it available free of charge.
Q- Any chance that there will be a new IP set in the Half-Life/Portal Universe? I feel like there's a lot of story left to explore there.
A- Yep
And finally...
Q- What is your view on the direction Valve as a company should take in the future? Such as what would you like to see the company achieve/what improvements would you like to see Valve undergo/ what role would you like to see Valve serve/undertake in the industry as it evolves etc, and if any, have you made any past decisions that you look back on now with regret/could've handled differently?
A- The big thing right no is broadening the range of options we have in creating experiences and we think investing in hardware will give us those options. The knuckles controller is being designed at the same time as were designing our own VR games. Much more narrowly, some of us are thinking about some of the AI work that is being hyped right now. Simplistically we have lots of data and compute capability that looks like the kind of areas where machine learning should work well.
Personally I'm looking at research in brain computing interfaces.
These have been a selection of questions from the AMA held by Gabe Newell on Reddit, hopefully we'll be hearing from the guys from Valve again soon, but until then keep checking back to Game Changers for more news and updates
Q- Does Valve plan on doing anything with Source 2 in the coming year? If so, what?
A- We are continuing to use Source 2 as our primary game development environment. Aside from moving DOTA 2 to the engine recently, we are using it as the foundation of some unannounced products. We would like to have everyone working on games here at Valve to eventually be using the same engine. We also intend to continue to make the Source 2 engine work available to the broad developer community as we go, and to make it available free of charge.
Q- Any chance that there will be a new IP set in the Half-Life/Portal Universe? I feel like there's a lot of story left to explore there.
A- Yep
And finally...
Q- What is your view on the direction Valve as a company should take in the future? Such as what would you like to see the company achieve/what improvements would you like to see Valve undergo/ what role would you like to see Valve serve/undertake in the industry as it evolves etc, and if any, have you made any past decisions that you look back on now with regret/could've handled differently?
A- The big thing right no is broadening the range of options we have in creating experiences and we think investing in hardware will give us those options. The knuckles controller is being designed at the same time as were designing our own VR games. Much more narrowly, some of us are thinking about some of the AI work that is being hyped right now. Simplistically we have lots of data and compute capability that looks like the kind of areas where machine learning should work well.
Personally I'm looking at research in brain computing interfaces.
These have been a selection of questions from the AMA held by Gabe Newell on Reddit, hopefully we'll be hearing from the guys from Valve again soon, but until then keep checking back to Game Changers for more news and updates
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