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Eurogamer: You recently announced Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. What was the driving force behind this project?
Gabe Newell: We'd been doing updates to Counter-Strike: Source, but we needed a bigger investment to push that forward on the PC side. We also needed a way of giving it to console players, since the only console version is a 2003 Xbox game. It's not Counter-Strike 2. It's just keeping it refreshed and updating it for the players who've been playing it for so long, and giving the opportunity to a bunch of console players who don't have a good version to play on.
Eurogamer: Have you decided how to monetise that?
Gabe Newell: We're still trying to figure that out. The stage we're at with that is, we had a bunch of pro players come out, and right now we're going through all the feedback they gave us to make sure we're going to be a good platform for what they're doing, and to think through how to have both a good competitive platform and at the same time maintain a popular game as well.
Eurogamer: Is it your hope that the console versions will have Steamworks integration like Portal 2 on PS3 did?
Gabe Newell: We certainly can deliver a lot of value to customers to the degree to which we have those capabilities. With the PS3 obviously we made a lot more progress with that. The PS3 customers of Portal 2 are going to start to see the benefits of that with Portal 2 DLC coming out in September. So we'd really like to be able to do that for Xbox customers as well.
Eurogamer: What are the challenges around bringing Steamworks to Xbox?
Gabe Newell: The main thing is having Microsoft get comfortable with it and let us do it. Right now, there's a huge amount of updates and free content we've been able to deliver to people who have The Orange Box that we haven't been able to deliver to the Xbox because of the restrictions that have been placed on us on Xbox Live.
We'd love to see those relaxed. Other developers on the PS3 are starting to benefit from Sony's more open approach. Hopefully that will help Microsoft see that's a good strategy for making customers happy, that the barbarians won't tear down the walls of Xbox and turn it into some chaotic wasteland.
Eurogamer: How would you describe Valve? It's much more than a game developer these days, isn't it?
Gabe Newell: I don't know about that. Where did Valve get its start? We got our start because the guys at id Software were building stuff that's not only cool for gamers, they're also saying, how can these be tools for other people? If id hadn't done that, then Valve wouldn't exist.
We just think we're following in that same tradition that goes back to the earliest days of the PC gaming environment. You're not just building a game, you're also building tools for other game developers. We look at Steam the same way. We're building value for our customers, but we're also building, hopefully, useful tools for other developers. We think like a developer, so when we think about building a service or a feature, we think it is often times going to be really useful to other people.
If you look at the tournament software here, it involves a bunch of code that runs inside of the game. It involves a bunch of back end services. It involves a bunch of web development. We think it's really useful in Dota 2. We're going to try putting it in some of our other games to make sure we can generalise it. And then we put it into Steamworks and all of our Steamworks partners can look at that and say, that's super useful to us, or it's completely irrelevant to us.
One of the characteristics we've always loved about the PC gaming environment is how much collaboration there is and how much everybody is thinking about how they can build tools and technologies. We're really following in those footsteps. Tim Sweeney [founder of Epic Games] embraces that. John Carmack [co-founder of id Software] has embraced that. It's always been there and it's part of why the PC gaming industry has been as vibrant for as long as it's been.
Eurogamer: So what is Valve?
Gabe Newell: Valve is a company that tries to build value for customers and its partners. We're trying to do the same thing today we did when we were working on Half-Life 1. We try to bring together the best, smartest people in the world and build an environment in which they can get more done and deliver more stuff to customers than they could some place else. I think we do a pretty good job of bringing those people together and helping them get more work done rather than dealing with a bunch of bullshit or worrying about quarterly reports or what some banker or producer is telling them ought to be in the game, rather than what they know should be in the game.
Eurogamer: What's the grand ambition with Steam? How do you perceive its evolution in the coming years?
Gabe Newell: I don't think grand ambitions really help us make our decisions. Everything just has to be grounded in whether it's going to make a gamer's life better or not. Is it going to be making other game developers' life better or not? Once you start having grand ambitions you start to lose sight of the basic usefulness you can do.
As a blue collar worker, you pick up your lunch bucket and your hammer and you go into the mine and you get to work - but that sort of attitude helps a game company make better decisions as to be not thinking in terms of grand ambitions, but what have we done today to make gamers happier? What have we done today to make something easier or better for one of the partners who want to work with us? It's hard to go very wrong if that's your attitude. It doesn't make a great headline.
Eurogamer: Will it eventually lead to players being able to trade in games on Steam?
Gabe Newell: We need to hire an economist, because we keep bumping up into these issues. You're starting to look at weird issues like currency and inflation and productivity and asset values and liquidity of asset categories. We just wish we were smarter about this stuff. We're reading frantically. We're brushing up, and all we're doing is convincing ourselves that we're more stupid. Half the time people are saying, oh, well, illiquid assets inherently have a penalty, so this argues for trade-ability, that we're essentially becoming a Russian currency model in the 1970s. Everybody races off to try to read papers on the implications of that.
We think we want to move in the direction where everything is an item of exchange. We just aren't totally sure how to do that right. We're sure there are economists out there who understand this really well. We feel like we're this third-world developing country. We've discovered rocks! And we've discovered sticks! And there's this other thing out there and we should move our economy in that direction. There must be somebody at the World Bank who can tell us what we ought to be doing. We just don't know what that is yet.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-08-25-valves-gabe-newell-interview
