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Valve's Gabe Newell, who is apparently rocking a new beard, sat down with PA Report's Ben Kuchera to talk about the meaning of life and how he delivers all of those presents at Christmas.
Well, not really, Newell talked about the growing tension over Half-Life 3 or Episode 3 related news. He also discussed the hope and potential for wearable computers. Huh? He also hit upon what his day to day activities were around the Valve HQ.
Now we’re talking about things like wearable computers and biofeedback and we’ve touched on Steam a little bit but there’s millions of people out there who are gnashing their teeth when they read this who just want to play Episode 3 or Left 4 Dead 3. Is there ever tension between all the different things that Valve is interested in doing?
Newell: Oh absolutely. We’re acutely aware of how much we annoy our fans and it’s pretty frustrating to us when we put them into that situation. We try to go as fast as we can and we try to pick the things that we think are going to be most valuable to our customers and if there’s some magic way we can get more work done in a day then we’d love to hear about it, but we recognize that it’s been a long time whereas we have so many games that people really love–Counterstrike, Half Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, not a whole lot of Ricochet enthusiasts out there, and at the same time we want to be making sure that those games and those stories and those characters are moving forward while also making sure that we don’t just get into terminal sequelitis.
But we’ve always somehow, you know, part of the reason that we backed off talking so much about what was happening in the future is that when we’ve done that in the past, you know, with Half Life 1 it was a year after we originally said it would be, Half Life 2 basically if you go and read the forum posts apparently took us fifty or sixty years to get done so we’re trying to be careful not to get people too excited and then have to go and disappoint them. So we’re sort of reacting in the other direction and saying “okay, well let’s have things a little more baked before we start getting people all excited about it.”
Newell: Oh absolutely. We’re acutely aware of how much we annoy our fans and it’s pretty frustrating to us when we put them into that situation. We try to go as fast as we can and we try to pick the things that we think are going to be most valuable to our customers and if there’s some magic way we can get more work done in a day then we’d love to hear about it, but we recognize that it’s been a long time whereas we have so many games that people really love–Counterstrike, Half Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, not a whole lot of Ricochet enthusiasts out there, and at the same time we want to be making sure that those games and those stories and those characters are moving forward while also making sure that we don’t just get into terminal sequelitis.
But we’ve always somehow, you know, part of the reason that we backed off talking so much about what was happening in the future is that when we’ve done that in the past, you know, with Half Life 1 it was a year after we originally said it would be, Half Life 2 basically if you go and read the forum posts apparently took us fifty or sixty years to get done so we’re trying to be careful not to get people too excited and then have to go and disappoint them. So we’re sort of reacting in the other direction and saying “okay, well let’s have things a little more baked before we start getting people all excited about it.”
Newell continues on in the three page long interview. It's well worth the read and there is more there than just about how Valve is remaining quiet about Half-Life 3. It's an interesting look inside the mind of the man behind Valve and what his vision is for the future of gaming and the Steam platform.
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