I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we'll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. - Gabe Newell
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. - Gabe Newell
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. - Gabe Newell
Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customer's use or by creating uncertainty. - Gabe Newell
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. - Gabe Newell
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. - Gabe Newell
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. - Gabe Newell
The internet is super smart. If you do something that is cool, that's actually worth people's time, then they'll adopt it. If you do something that's not cool and sucks, you can spend as many marketing dollars as you want, [they] just won't. - Gabe Newell
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. - Gabe Newell
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. - Gabe Newell
To people who traditionally charge $10,000 for a 3D animating app, we say you should be free-to-play and generate a revenue stream. Think of a 3D modeling package almost like an RPG. - Gabe Newell
We tend to think of Steam as tools for content developers and tools for producers. We're just always thinking: how do we want to make content developers' lives better and users' lives a lot better? With Big Picture Mode, we're trying to answer the question: 'How can we maximize a content developers' investment?' - Gabe Newell
We think touch is short-term. The mouse and keyboard were stable for 25 years, but I think touch will be stable for 10 years. Post-touch will be stable for a really long time, longer than 25 years. - Gabe Newell
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. - Gabe Newell
At its very core, virtual reality is about being freed from the limitations of actual reality. Carrying your virtual reality with you, and being able to jump into it whenever and wherever you want, qualitatively changes the experience for the better. Experiencing mobile VR is like when you first tried a decent desktop VR experience. - John Carmack
Everybody's saturated with the marketing hype of next-generation consoles. They are wonderful, but the truth is that they are as powerful as a high end PC is right now. - John Carmack
High-end BREW phones aren't nearly as limited a gaming platform as you might think - they are a lot more powerful than an original Play Station, for example. Java phones, however, are saddled with a huge disadvantage for gaming. - John Carmack
I really do think VR is now one of the most exciting things that can be done in this whole sector of consumer electronic entertainment stuff. - John Carmack
In the information age, the barriers [to entry into programming] just aren't there. The barriers are self imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers. - John Carmack
It is difficult to make good scalable use of a CPU like you can of a graphics card. You certainly don't want 'better or worse' physics or AI in your game. - John Carmack
It is true that the gameplay for 'Orcs&Elves' was designed around the limitations of mobile phones, and that if we were starting completely from scratch for the DS, we would probably do things a bit differently, but the bottom line is that when we sit a random DS player down with the game, they have a lot of fun. - John Carmack
It wasn't too many years ago when we were lucky to have three triangles for a nose on our characters. Now we've got pores and moles. - John Carmack
Obviously, virtual reality is where I've placed my bet about the future and where the excitement is going. At this point, I could say it's almost a lock. It's going to be magical - it is magical - and great things are coming from that. Along the way, I was focused on the first-person shooters. I said we should go do something on mobile. - John Carmack
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