Valve is a private company - their best investors basically are their customers, this is opposed to most public game publishers where they live and die by the shareholders
@@GenerationZero18 maybe not graphics, but damn. No game even now in 2022 has the insane physics system Half Life 2 had. You'd figure as technology evolved physics in games would be times better than Half Life 2's but that never happened. Only game i can think of is BoneLab, tho it only works in VR
What Gabe has described here also explains the rise of music piracy that occurred in America back in the late 90s and early 2000s. With the rise of MP3 players around this time there was an increased desire among consumers to get music electronically as opposed to buying physical media. The record industry took to attacking Napster and others instead of filling the void themselves by allowing people to pay for and buy legit MP3s online via their own companies.
This. Spotify has made a big dent in music piracy because it actually has a good service. It will never abolish the problem but since all the music I want is so easily available to me right now with a cheap price and I can play it on every device (phone, tablet, PC, TV with speakers, and car even without internet), I don't see a need to take the effort and risk to Yar har. Gabe is right that accessibility is king.
@@marcopeterson805 I see both sides like Chanel. Yes it'd be more freeing to download all the music you want for yourself and put it on your phone/mp3, especially for artists that aren't on Spotify. Spotify does make it very accessible though and dare I say fun to use, the features it provides like discovering new music or jamming out with a friend group at a party makes it much more inviting to use especially when you can't share your mp3 files and can just queue up any song at any given moment when you're in a session with your friends. I've done both, I just put my local mp3 files on my Spotify playlists and remain a happy camper 🎉 🎧🎶
It's the truth. I was planning on pirating System Shock 2, I downloaded the torrent, couldn't be bothered to spend time trying to find the right DirectX package to run it. The other day it shows up on Steam for $10, I grabbed it right away.
@@bigboysdotcom745 Steam does mean it's easier to download community patches and use updated community guides for making outdated games run well on your system (and look good doing it).
lol this is not an example of a service issue, it's a pricing issue...you were trying to get the game for nothing, happened to run into an issue and then saw you could get it for cheap anyway
@GriffinTracker how so? He said he already had the game but it was such a hassle to play it. He just bought the game on steam because it was easier. How is that not an example of pirating being more of a service issue?
Gabe was right. Just yesterday, I wanted to play a childhood game of mine, 20+ years old. I hoppend on Steam and bought it for 10 quids, and it runs. If Steam would not have provided the game, I would have searched for it elsewhere
steam is great, but if you want to play old 20+ year old games, you should really get them from GOG. Their platform is seemingly curated far better than steam when it comes to old games, like they'll update them with 3rd party patches and whatnot so they work with new systems. Zero DRM is a nice plus too, you can put your old games on a thumb drive and they'll work anywhere
He definitely can't count to 3 as he can't give us all Half Life 3. I'm grateful for what we got with HL and all it's mods and I understand if he's moved on from a third game.
@@slipgate_warlord Half-Life 2 episode 3 would never be able to live up to the hype, and ultimately will hurt Valve in the long run if they were to release it.
@dsadkasdk8658 Absalutely. It's the same thing that happened with Duke Nukem Forever. Even though that eventually did release the hype didn't pay off for what we actually got. It's best to just leave some good games in the past. Not every game needs another sequel.
@@bigboysdotcom745When you word “complete expansions with new storylines, weapons, characters, and more” as “paid mods”, it really doesn’t sound appetizing, huh?
It absolutely blows my mind that in the same industry we can have a great guy like Gabe Newell, who cares about his customers just as much as the product and wants to make sure they're happy, and Bobby Kotick, a guy who looks at all of his customers and just sees dollar signs and criminals and has on several occasions stated how he wants to basically ruin the gaming industry. Thank god for Gabe.
Gabe is a very smart man. I remember at first how crappy steam was, but its grown into a great platform over the years. The fact that I always have my games on any PC I can access steam is wonderful. No more lost disks, no more serial number hunting. Everything is great and I think that plays a large role as to why Valve isn't stressed about pirating
Indeed Infact I often wish the Gaming and Infotech industries had more people as smart as Gabe Newel himself including game developer companies too that way games can be developed much sparter with Gabe Newel's knowledge hell We could even have the best operating systems and computers built and made faster and more amazingly advaced too with this mans knowledged and smarts too.
@@FLAME4564because investors want return NOW or they legally sue company for not making money NOW. While Valve has no investors which means they can do whatever they want. Their vision was to be sustainable long term and look where it got them
@@bigboysdotcom745 your statement only applies to ubisoft, ea and rockstar games. Rest of the games stay in the library forever. Valve never revokes your license
Great interview. He's right about some piracy happening due to game companies mistreating customers and considering certain countries as something that consists only of thieves.
@@cliffturbo2146 mistreating isn't the right word so much as forgetting. To fight piracy on a platform they made any legitimate means of getting their game for that platform or in that region nonexistant, so people turned to piracy just to have access to games.
Honestly, the more i watched this, the more i beginning to think Nintendo is blind on why their games getting emulated or roms of their games exist They think, its the people who caused the problem but in reality, its their fault for not giving availability (bad service)
Yeah. How difficult is it to make pokemon, but with the option for Nuzlock, or a hard mode where the enemy AI is smarter, better pokemon moves, and more pokemon than 2 or 4 to a gym leader.
I honestly agree with Gabe. If a company does terrible practises to services like Netflix removing and cancelling popular shows and movies (even Shrek lol) or Nintendo giving you no way of playing some of their old games, then people are obviously gonna pirate stuff. I feel like piracy is honestly inevitable, even if a company gives great service for cheap, if there's a free option people are always gonna take it, but it's gonna be a lot less than if you do scummy business practises.
Russian here btw. I remember that my first licensed game was the result of me wanting to get into creating levels for half-life. I went to the store to buy a half-life game, and the seller just so happened to have a licensed half-life 2 episode 1 which was a new game that I didn't know about at the time. So I bought it, and since then I started playing licensed games, and more and more of them were integrated into Steam with time. Steam was the reason why I started to buy licensed games. I still have my Orange Box and Portal 2 with that holographic picture standing on the shelf. And how did Valve try to sell the very first "collector's edition" in Russia? They used very cheap dvd boxes with cheap paper, but sold 5 licensed games on one DVD for 650 rubles, which was a price of eating well at McDonalds 2-3 times at the time. And then, fortnite game store shitstorm happened a few years ago, and piracy for videogames in Russia suddenly became relevant again.
Yes this is true. When I'm still teenager I always pirate game or play free games on steam / flash game(before it died). When Steam added DANA (one of service to paid the games) slowly I was buying and playing legit games due to Having acces to paid for it. (Previously I dont have access to visa or paypal)
it's so true, not just to videogames but TV as well, take a show called "The Expanse" literrally impossible to watch LEGALLY outside the US/canada until over 6 months after a season ends for it to turn up on netflix, so you have a show you want to watch and that your willing to pay for but can't because the only way to watch it is through piracy, and this quote suddenly resonated with me about piracy being a service problem rather than just people being unwilling to pay for something
@@ELFanatic Are you young? Back in the day, you "owned" the physical CD it came with. Like even right now Steam will straight up delete games in your library when they feel it's necessary to so you never really "own" the games. Not to mention back then you had to manually run patches for games. Currently the convenience of previous method.
@@ELFanatic do you not remember how valve was pushing steam onto people with physical copies of their games requiring it starting with hl2? do you not remember how steam's original business model in 2003 was a monthly subscription to games a lot of people already owned?
so true on russian piracy. not only we usually have to wait couple months before game comes out and then it's usually translated worse than fan or pirate translation which were made much earlier.
Gabe just gets it. Even though I saw "15 years ago" on the thumbnail before opening this, while he was talking about piracy and copy protection I had to check the upload date a second time, as it's just so incredibly relevant today all these years later. His presentation on productivity and economics and how they structured Valve is great.
i fucking love Gabe. if i ever met him i would give him the biggest, greatest hug ever. he understands exactly what PC gamers want and goes above and beyond to provide it did i mention i fucking love Gabe? because i do :D
What he said about piracy still lives up today. It is still a service problem and not a pricing one. Okay, let's say there's a way to get the game for free. Yes, they got the game for free. But did they get the platform's and creators' "Thank You" service for buying their game? Definitely not. What I mean by a "Thank You" service are the achievements, freebies, and Steam Levels for buying a certain game online. They are very appealing and give you challenges of what to do so that you can enjoy the games you buy. You can add this on your page like a figurine collection. Heck, you can show this to your friends as your proof for finishing a game and show yourself as an avid enjoyer. Another thing that piracy can't apply are multiplayer and online forum services for registered buyers of a game. This may mean nothing for singleplayer gamers as it is very subtle, but the point being that you won't have access through its community via the Steam page. Buyers can have a sense of fulfillment and enjoying a whole game to its core if you buy that game with the right service, and Steam's services really excels in that category. As someone who pirates games a lot, these are the things I never got to experience that I wish I really could.
Left 4 Dead was made by VALVE, not Turtlerock. . . so everytime you see Turtlerock studios announcing a game with the headline "by the creators of Left 4 Dead" and if the developers are not Valve then that marketing headline is a LIE!
i wish to give gabeN a hug and a pat on the back. i listened to the entire video and now i feel all warm inside. to think that someone behind such a big company actually cares on this level for his customers is heartwarming to say the least :D
1:38 He was talking about $2000 PCs back in 2009. Imagine if he did this interview today with today's inflation and especially with today's overpriced components. He will probably say something like $5000.
he would be talking about prebuilt PCs if it was talking about 5'000 dollars today, because a 2'000 dollar custom PC could still give out the equivalent, except the lack of software optimisation.
This ideal is one of the big reasons why Steam is so popular and is the largest platform for buying and downloading games. People are more willing to buy the games on Steam because Steam is so much better than any other platform even to this day.
I just LOVE what he said about piracy in a way I didn't think in the direction of before. Very insightful man. It's no wonder why Steam and Valve is successful as they are.
It's absolutely true about Russia. My russian friends when saw that Ghost of Tsushima is not available for them they simply thought of it as "well I can't buy it, here's the link to pirate it (shares with other russians)"
it was the same with music. I used to pirate albums constantly when I was younger. Now I just pay my monthly YT premium or whatever, and I just...don't think about it anymore, got that music problem solved. Looking for seeds and files doesn't even feel worth the effort to me now.
gabe is a real bro. he is the guy that does his job because its fun and he likes others to have fun with it too. he thinks of the future with his community financial thing which is great in my eyes. i would happily invest 200€ to remake games like jagged alliance but not in the way big companies would redo them but in the way the community loves and wants the game. bobby kotick on the other hand seems like his evil twinbrother from bizarroworld.
Somebody please teach this lesson to the CEO of Ubisoft. Maybe the reason that everyone pirates your games on PC is because your service is worse than hemeroids. I would rather bleed out of my ass than use Uplay ever again. I pay for your games but playing them makes me wish for a pirated version that doesnt stop me from playing the game every 2 mins to reconnect me to your crappy servers in a singleplayer experience (Splinter Cell: Conviction).
intellectual property never should protect any services/products stating that they can revoke their services/rights to use provided at any time consumers initially legally paid for. especially for piracy cases where someone rips out a service and uses it without affecting the official ones.
The man speaks so much truth, i regular buy stuff on steam for this reason. The only downside with this is the "offline mode", i think the guys at valve really need to rethink that one. sometimes i can't even start source SDK, because my school blocked steam connections
Thats why I ONLY play rockstar games on Xbox, i refuse to download their stupid launcher. Id rather play their games in an inferior way, than to use their stupid launcher..@@orlandofurioso7329 And on top of that, I ONLY buy them used, so rockstar doesnt get any of my money. lol.
I had literally pay for games after pirating and fully completing them beforehand simply because I ended up wanting to support the devs and it was faster to get updates from the source instead of possibly waiting a week for a pirate site to update depending on the case. In an era where demos are seen as pointless it not really a surprise remorse buys also increase. Games I "gotten for free" otherwise I often time don't even play more than a hour. With Steam refund policy it is less of a thing I do nowadays but depending on the game 2 hours might not be enough time and I find myself giving me a personal demo first. I'm sure a ton of people pirate without the intention of buying whatsoever but I'm just adding some people pirate but have the willingness and funds to buy the game but don't want to be stuck with what is basically a Steam scar claiming to be a game. Stuff like Bad Rats can get away with it being only cents on a dollar but AAA slop wanting 70 dollars not counting day one dlcs and special edition bullshit, I can't afford trusting the company have my best interest in mind when they put more time and effort into marketing than the game itself.
haha Right on :). Hell people in busnisess like Nintendo, Microsoft and mabey even Apple could also learn alot from this man and be inspired to improve a lot from him.
This video explains why people pirate and it's not just games, it's movies, and music. And it's most likely to do with too many exclusives and the prices are too high.
Goddamn, Gabe, it felt like listening to a mirror image. You're brilliant! Truly one of the very few big people in the gaming industry who are truly admirable.
This man is 100% right. I love steam because its very simple and fun to use. I dont want to jump hoops to pirate the games that will give me a trojan virus
This quote applies to anime so much, I live in central/eastern europe and even If i subscribe to sites like Crunchyroll I am not guaranteed access to their full library and I have no way to know if what I want to watch will be avaible to me when I do subscribe.
I really, really want to work for Valve. Theyre the only company I have ever seen when it comes to video games that isnt a greedy cash cow. AND their games are awesome.
As far as I'm concerned he's right in that copy protections increase piracy. I don't ever buy a game that comes with a DRM. Ever. I probably won't even want to play it, but if I do, then I'll pirate it. Why? Because I know the DRM will only make my experience worse.
Increasingly in every industry we see a lot of higher ups adopt the mindset of "How can I reap the benefits of helping people without actually helping anyone?" And to nobody's surprise their efforts repeatedly fail at everyone's expense.
For everyone who makes a Gabe is Fat/Delay episode 3 joke... NEVER forget: THIS is the true face of your jokes; the face of Gaben. Doesn't mean you can't make jokes, just don't actually think he's stupid.
I've got two bachelor's degrees, and I feel like cheating in school is the same way. If the teacher's had course layouts with material deliveries that made students who wanted to do things the right way have a fighting chance to, cheating would be eliminated.
that is so funny because I stopped gaming for a while in the past and kind of switched to console alltogether. It's *always* an issue to afford games, even older ones. One of the reasons (I mostly use/used PS4 and then Switch) I 'switched to switch' in the end was not just nostalgia, but also because in my mind, I thought of Nintendo as this 'wholesome company'. games in the past always were pretty cheap in comparison, many older classic titles get ported to switch, yada yada. truth though is, that switch is actually *pretty* expensive, not to mention all the unfortunate drifting sticks, or not responding of sticks, ports are mostly laggy, sometimes *cost more* than even on other console platforms, it's ridiculous. Not even mentioning how frickin *exclusive as hell* playstation became, console expensive as heck, pay *extra* for disk slot, pay *extra* for internet features, pay *extra* for titles - and what is the library? barely anything new even. I seriously consider switching to a steam deck, as soon as I can afford one. So many people of us played all of their games via steam *ages* ago, literally decades ago for some - their library of games, *huge* - the amount of free and accessible games, even for the steam deck? *huge* you got discounts all the time, sometimes even getting *insanely good* games for a couple of cents in some cases, or *huge* discounts on Triple A titles as well. if you're patient, you can build up a huge library even from scratch with not a lot of money. the console itself is basically right at that sweet spot in terms of pricing and also still having enough power to run even new games that seem to be impossible for the switch to port to as well for example. and even on the other console counterparts its very unprobable to have such big discounts like you can have on steam, sometimes with pretty good Triple A titles, pretty much always with many many other games that might be very fun as well and that you would've never heard about otherwise. lots of amazing indie titles in that sense as well. Gaben is just so wholesome, truly an icon in the gaming industry, gaming *history* even at this point. He seems to just 'get it' - gets what gamers want and need. I'm really curious what the future holds. I know this video is 15 years old and even the steam deck has been on the market for like, what - 2 years I think? but the gaming world just has changed a lot over the recent years and right now especially I feel like everyone is fed up with consoles by how sony, microsoft and nintendo are treating them in some cases. (faulty controllers, rising costs, less games/exclusive games/expensive games - you name it). When I finally get a steam deck, it will be so amazing. I have so many timeless games from the past like Counter Strike, Team Fortress, Command and Conquer, some assassins creed titles, some cod titles, Sandboxes like Garry's Mod, Resident Evil, Bioshock, Terraria, GTA IV - not to mention basically *all of the free games* that you had on your other consoles anyway. pretty much a little bit of everything already. I could also buy the games like Elden Ring, Dark Souls 3 that are somewhat 'stranded' on my PS4 currently because of faulty controllers , an unreasonably loud console and also lets not forget that I would need to actually start paying monthly to actually enjoy the fun parts in those games in the endgame - the multiplayer. I would have the convenience of my switch lite but with better controls and a wider range of games to play. I wouldn't need to pay extra for Internet features. I would have access to modding via workshop in many many games, etc etc. It almost feels as if Valve, in terms of games, might be going full circle with their handhelds, beating consoles in the end entirely by basically 'converting the biggest library of games into a console experience' so to speak. Affordable Hardware. Endless Games. Both,mouse and keyboard and usually easy Controller support for basically any game via Steam settings adaptable to personal needs (that even allow you to use the gyroscope in pretty much any game - I mean how cool is even that alone? Having the Ability to give yourself the 'most precise controlling scheme possible on a controller compared to mouse and keyboard). HDMI support so you can basically treat it like a computer, too. it's just both now. but neither with ridiculous PC pricing nor with the whole arrange of other issues that console experiences might bring on their own. The Gaming world will be a surreal place when Half Life 3 will finally release, I'm telling you. 😝
It's not just about localization, but also companies getting greedy and stack more price and call it "exclusive" while it's easier to just pirate it and save your money to buy some snacks that will last for a week or less while enjoying the game. But nowadays, there are more countermeasures of piracy such as denuvo, or client that makes you play while staying online. There are only two ways I can see where the future of gaming is going; Pressing forward for free to play games with microtransactions, or go back to the old, dated, and polished games. Companies like Activision is getting more of a killjoy than a smile on a face. They treat gamers like some sons of corporate CEOs with endless flow of cash. Gaming is slowly dying, but it still can be saved by following the steps of From Software's examples.
The more exercise Gabe does over the course of the development cycle for any one of his games, the less time he actually gets to spend improving the game. If Episode 3 comes out and he's twice the size as he is in this video, it's going to be fucking KICK-ASS.
He's the biggest legend. He doesn't blame people for pirating, he puts the problem on himself...
fun fact when i saw this video i started crying and stoped pirating forever but only valve games ;)
Gabe is the embodiment of Extreme Ownership. That is why he is so successful.
@@LiquidToast12and yet you dont own anything on Steam
@@GewelReal Yep, that's why I'm almost no buy games
which is a valid fucking point.
"Your best investors are your customers."
Wow I wish more businesses embraced that.
dang man if we heard that these days it would be "controversial" and outlandish to dare say that in public lol
CEOs nowadays have never even had that thought once in their lives
Product (goods / services) > reputation > sales
Valve is a private company - their best investors basically are their customers, this is opposed to most public game publishers where they live and die by the shareholders
funny how the investors are spilt in two when it comes down to politics ..
When a Gabe dies, we will all lose a great man that made this world a better place, in a ways even he will fail to realize :(
+D3w10n and what's that?
He's one of the smartest people on this planet and he doesn't have that many interviews.
@@BigBrosFilms You right,He make Half life 2 on 2004 and the graphic is better than Cyberpunk 2077 too :)
tf2 Heavy Update when?
Gabe - "Soon"
@@GenerationZero18 maybe not graphics, but damn. No game even now in 2022 has the insane physics system Half Life 2 had. You'd figure as technology evolved physics in games would be times better than Half Life 2's but that never happened. Only game i can think of is BoneLab, tho it only works in VR
Gabe is really something else, he just nails it every time he speaks or writes anything.
Especially if he's talking about Half-Life 2 Episode 3
@@sparkle_on He nailed it too. He nailed the coffin he put Half Life into.
What Gabe has described here also explains the rise of music piracy that occurred in America back in the late 90s and early 2000s. With the rise of MP3 players around this time there was an increased desire among consumers to get music electronically as opposed to buying physical media. The record industry took to attacking Napster and others instead of filling the void themselves by allowing people to pay for and buy legit MP3s online via their own companies.
This. Spotify has made a big dent in music piracy because it actually has a good service. It will never abolish the problem but since all the music I want is so easily available to me right now with a cheap price and I can play it on every device (phone, tablet, PC, TV with speakers, and car even without internet), I don't see a need to take the effort and risk to Yar har. Gabe is right that accessibility is king.
@@Peglegkickboxerto be willingly bound to an external proprietary service; how unfree...
@@marcopeterson805 I see both sides like Chanel. Yes it'd be more freeing to download all the music you want for yourself and put it on your phone/mp3, especially for artists that aren't on Spotify. Spotify does make it very accessible though and dare I say fun to use, the features it provides like discovering new music or jamming out with a friend group at a party makes it much more inviting to use especially when you can't share your mp3 files and can just queue up any song at any given moment when you're in a session with your friends. I've done both, I just put my local mp3 files on my Spotify playlists and remain a happy camper 🎉 🎧🎶
@@Peglegkickboxerdownloading music and videos off of internet is risk free
@marcopeterson805 wait until you find out about marriage lmao
It's the truth. I was planning on pirating System Shock 2, I downloaded the torrent, couldn't be bothered to spend time trying to find the right DirectX package to run it. The other day it shows up on Steam for $10, I grabbed it right away.
Pssst.... steam doesn't mean the game is updated
@@bigboysdotcom745 Steam does mean it's easier to download community patches and use updated community guides for making outdated games run well on your system (and look good doing it).
lol this is not an example of a service issue, it's a pricing issue...you were trying to get the game for nothing, happened to run into an issue and then saw you could get it for cheap anyway
@GriffinTracker how so? He said he already had the game but it was such a hassle to play it. He just bought the game on steam because it was easier. How is that not an example of pirating being more of a service issue?
Piracy is a service problem not a pricing problem - Gabe Newell
Timestamp?
@@justoneweek6983 this was a paraphrase of what Gabe said, but anyways the timestamp you are looking for is from 01:30 - 02:00. Cheers!
He's not wrong. People will buy a good game almost irrelevant of price. The price just sets the minimum bar.
@@justoneweek6983 1:52
@@justoneweek6983 it's a six minute video lol just watch it
Gabe was right. Just yesterday, I wanted to play a childhood game of mine, 20+ years old. I hoppend on Steam and bought it for 10 quids, and it runs. If Steam would not have provided the game, I would have searched for it elsewhere
Steam is nice because you can (mostly) buy old games on the newest update.
@@Halberds8122 and if not on steam then GOG will have them almost certainly
steam is great, but if you want to play old 20+ year old games, you should really get them from GOG. Their platform is seemingly curated far better than steam when it comes to old games, like they'll update them with 3rd party patches and whatnot so they work with new systems. Zero DRM is a nice plus too, you can put your old games on a thumb drive and they'll work anywhere
He may not be able to count to 3, but he puts the customer first
That’s a lot more than any other game company can claim
He definitely can't count to 3 as he can't give us all Half Life 3. I'm grateful for what we got with HL and all it's mods and I understand if he's moved on from a third game.
@@slipgate_warlord Half-Life 2 episode 3 would never be able to live up to the hype, and ultimately will hurt Valve in the long run if they were to release it.
@dsadkasdk8658 Absalutely. It's the same thing that happened with Duke Nukem Forever. Even though that eventually did release the hype didn't pay off for what we actually got. It's best to just leave some good games in the past. Not every game needs another sequel.
Paid mods and drm lmfao, yeah customer first
@@bigboysdotcom745When you word “complete expansions with new storylines, weapons, characters, and more” as “paid mods”, it really doesn’t sound appetizing, huh?
It absolutely blows my mind that in the same industry we can have a great guy like Gabe Newell, who cares about his customers just as much as the product and wants to make sure they're happy, and Bobby Kotick, a guy who looks at all of his customers and just sees dollar signs and criminals and has on several occasions stated how he wants to basically ruin the gaming industry.
Thank god for Gabe.
and 11 years later we only knew what went wrong with poor old bobby
Oh it got worse
Dont forget Tim Cuck Sweeney
Damn, I didn't realize people hated him for this long!
@@M.C.11Mc7i guess when you always were a piece of shit, people always hated you
Chad Steam owner
Virgin Nintendo corporate
Gabe is a very smart man. I remember at first how crappy steam was, but its grown into a great platform over the years.
The fact that I always have my games on any PC I can access steam is wonderful. No more lost disks, no more serial number hunting. Everything is great and I think that plays a large role as to why Valve isn't stressed about pirating
Indeed Infact I often wish the Gaming and Infotech industries had more people as smart as Gabe Newel himself including game developer companies too that way games can be developed much sparter with Gabe Newel's knowledge hell We could even have the best operating systems and computers built and made faster and more amazingly advaced too with this mans knowledged and smarts too.
@@FLAME4564because investors want return NOW or they legally sue company for not making money NOW.
While Valve has no investors which means they can do whatever they want. Their vision was to be sustainable long term and look where it got them
I LOVE DRM I LOVE OWNING NOTHING
@@bigboysdotcom745 your statement only applies to ubisoft, ea and rockstar games. Rest of the games stay in the library forever. Valve never revokes your license
@abhi.dx2345 a five word Google search and a 20 second look at their TOS says otherwise, chief. Stop meatriding.
Think of Epic Games Store and replace the words "copy protection" with "exclusivity"
Ah yes, the thing I use simply to occasionally get free games I never play.
I kinda forgot about that one...
@@traderofgoods6500 gabe is a legend
Steam literally pays devs for exclusivity, chief
@@bigboysdotcom745you have source for that?
@@bigboysdotcom745 name a single one, captain
Great interview. He's right about some piracy happening due to game companies mistreating customers and considering certain countries as something that consists only of thieves.
Even back then?
@@cliffturbo2146 mistreating isn't the right word so much as forgetting. To fight piracy on a platform they made any legitimate means of getting their game for that platform or in that region nonexistant, so people turned to piracy just to have access to games.
One of the most based human beings in history, don't you ever forget it.
Honestly, the more i watched this, the more i beginning to think Nintendo is blind on why their games getting emulated or roms of their games exist
They think, its the people who caused the problem but in reality, its their fault for not giving availability (bad service)
"Am I so out of touch? No, it's the gamers who are wrong." - Nintendo
Yeah. How difficult is it to make pokemon, but with the option for Nuzlock, or a hard mode where the enemy AI is smarter, better pokemon moves, and more pokemon than 2 or 4 to a gym leader.
Good services like Spotify and Steam prove Gabe's point.
Spotify is awful now. Oh wait, this comment is 7 years old. Nevermind.
@@sleepysteev2735 hahahahahah xDD sorry that was funny! :D
This aged poorly
After 9 years in development it wasn't worth the wait
@@sleepysteev2735 wait, im not aware of whats happening. What is happening?
I honestly agree with Gabe. If a company does terrible practises to services like Netflix removing and cancelling popular shows and movies (even Shrek lol) or Nintendo giving you no way of playing some of their old games, then people are obviously gonna pirate stuff. I feel like piracy is honestly inevitable, even if a company gives great service for cheap, if there's a free option people are always gonna take it, but it's gonna be a lot less than if you do scummy business practises.
I guarantee most of the emulation problem would vanish if a proper service was provided. Imagine the plumber man if he realized it.
Nintendo could learn a thing or two from this guy.
Right, but Nintendo's audience is stupid, so they're gonna keep getting away with it for a long time.
@@FreshTillDeath56 until they disappear
@@lautarogomez9711 you will disappear way before nintendo or any of its fans disappear
@@mum-your true, as much as I hate Nintendo's business practices, they aint goin anywhere
@@lautarogomez9711 We will get PC ports of Nintendo games before that happens
Russian here btw. I remember that my first licensed game was the result of me wanting to get into creating levels for half-life. I went to the store to buy a half-life game, and the seller just so happened to have a licensed half-life 2 episode 1 which was a new game that I didn't know about at the time. So I bought it, and since then I started playing licensed games, and more and more of them were integrated into Steam with time. Steam was the reason why I started to buy licensed games. I still have my Orange Box and Portal 2 with that holographic picture standing on the shelf. And how did Valve try to sell the very first "collector's edition" in Russia? They used very cheap dvd boxes with cheap paper, but sold 5 licensed games on one DVD for 650 rubles, which was a price of eating well at McDonalds 2-3 times at the time.
And then, fortnite game store shitstorm happened a few years ago, and piracy for videogames in Russia suddenly became relevant again.
hope you're doing well with everything going on over there right now!
Yes this is true. When I'm still teenager I always pirate game or play free games on steam / flash game(before it died). When Steam added DANA (one of service to paid the games) slowly I was buying and playing legit games due to Having acces to paid for it. (Previously I dont have access to visa or paypal)
Nice to see a Russian's perspective
Hope steam is still treating you well friend
it's so true, not just to videogames but TV as well, take a show called "The Expanse" literrally impossible to watch LEGALLY outside the US/canada until over 6 months after a season ends for it to turn up on netflix, so you have a show you want to watch and that your willing to pay for but can't because the only way to watch it is through piracy, and this quote suddenly resonated with me about piracy being a service problem rather than just people being unwilling to pay for something
I think what sets gabe apart from other CEOs is that at the heart hes a fan of video games and a consumer
I used to hate steam for several years when it came out. Now when I purchase a PC game, the first thing I ask is "Does it have Steam support?"
why would you ever hate it? that makes no sense. What's wrong with you?
@@ELFanatic Are you young? Back in the day, you "owned" the physical CD it came with. Like even right now Steam will straight up delete games in your library when they feel it's necessary to so you never really "own" the games. Not to mention back then you had to manually run patches for games. Currently the convenience of previous method.
@juscallmeehx they do that? Thats strange
@@ELFanaticwere you even alive when the original comment was made lol
@@ELFanatic do you not remember how valve was pushing steam onto people with physical copies of their games requiring it starting with hl2? do you not remember how steam's original business model in 2003 was a monthly subscription to games a lot of people already owned?
I've spent so much money on Valve, and I've pirated so much other stuff, then I see this. Gabe is truly spectacular
Fans: Let me buy your games
Nintendo: No
Fans: Ok we will pirate our games
Nintendo: Don’t do that
@@admiralAlfonso9001 Pretty much.
Defiantly understands how to get progress and doing it the right way.
so true on russian piracy. not only we usually have to wait couple months before game comes out and then it's usually translated worse than fan or pirate translation which were made much earlier.
Gabe just gets it. Even though I saw "15 years ago" on the thumbnail before opening this, while he was talking about piracy and copy protection I had to check the upload date a second time, as it's just so incredibly relevant today all these years later. His presentation on productivity and economics and how they structured Valve is great.
i fucking love Gabe. if i ever met him i would give him the biggest, greatest hug ever. he understands exactly what PC gamers want and goes above and beyond to provide it
did i mention i fucking love Gabe? because i do :D
Lol
14 years ago
When you get banned on a game on Steam you don't lose any games, as opposed to psn or battlenet
Kinda? If you get VAC banned, you're banned from all other valve games, but I see your point about PSN by comparison
@@CatfishBradley You're banned from VAC-protected servers, not the game.
im always happy to pay for good product. if the product is shitty or not available, well you know
What he said about piracy still lives up today. It is still a service problem and not a pricing one.
Okay, let's say there's a way to get the game for free. Yes, they got the game for free. But did they get the platform's and creators' "Thank You" service for buying their game? Definitely not.
What I mean by a "Thank You" service are the achievements, freebies, and Steam Levels for buying a certain game online. They are very appealing and give you challenges of what to do so that you can enjoy the games you buy. You can add this on your page like a figurine collection. Heck, you can show this to your friends as your proof for finishing a game and show yourself as an avid enjoyer. Another thing that piracy can't apply are multiplayer and online forum services for registered buyers of a game. This may mean nothing for singleplayer gamers as it is very subtle, but the point being that you won't have access through its community via the Steam page.
Buyers can have a sense of fulfillment and enjoying a whole game to its core if you buy that game with the right service, and Steam's services really excels in that category. As someone who pirates games a lot, these are the things I never got to experience that I wish I really could.
Great comment
Just what will happen to steam when Gabe no longer with us? It's scary
Fuck this is a sad reality
Do you hear that Denuvo? :)
Gabe is the hero the gaming industry deserves.
He's a fucking genius. I mean seriously, nobody talks as open and explains problems and solutions in such an accessible way. I love this guy.
Left 4 Dead was made by VALVE, not Turtlerock. . . so everytime you see Turtlerock studios announcing a game with the headline "by the creators of Left 4 Dead" and if the developers are not Valve then that marketing headline is a LIE!
The last minute explains exactly why steam early access exists, and why it always should.
i wish to give gabeN a hug and a pat on the back. i listened to the entire video and now i feel all warm inside. to think that someone behind such a big company actually cares on this level for his customers is heartwarming to say the least :D
**Nintendo SEETHING right now**
He made Steam so he doesn't have to worry about piracy, making the most reliable and most popular game store / launcher in the world in the process
1:38 He was talking about $2000 PCs back in 2009. Imagine if he did this interview today with today's inflation and especially with today's overpriced components. He will probably say something like $5000.
he would be talking about prebuilt PCs if it was talking about 5'000 dollars today, because a 2'000 dollar custom PC could still give out the equivalent, except the lack of software optimisation.
There's such an interesting business model to this games world which has come to be so massively lucrative.
This ideal is one of the big reasons why Steam is so popular and is the largest platform for buying and downloading games.
People are more willing to buy the games on Steam because Steam is so much better than any other platform even to this day.
I just LOVE what he said about piracy in a way I didn't think in the direction of before. Very insightful man. It's no wonder why Steam and Valve is successful as they are.
It's absolutely true about Russia. My russian friends when saw that Ghost of Tsushima is not available for them they simply thought of it as "well I can't buy it, here's the link to pirate it (shares with other russians)"
he truly is an awesome person and genius he is one of the rare people in the game industry who are awesome
I will buy every single Valve game, at full price, just to support GabeN and Valve
it was the same with music. I used to pirate albums constantly when I was younger. Now I just pay my monthly YT premium or whatever, and I just...don't think about it anymore, got that music problem solved. Looking for seeds and files doesn't even feel worth the effort to me now.
This man has more than just intelligence, he has WISDOM!
Gabe is able to read what direction the industry is going about a decade earlier than most other people.
Gaben fight pirates by loving them! Hey, it works!
I'm buying everything on STEAM. It comes with excellent support and a great community!
His statement on piracy is very relevant to the streaming services of today.
this man is a god. the way he so elegantly expresses his views on piracy made me bow down before him.
This is why only Gaben gets my filthy prate dollars.
I strive to be half as wise as Gaben ^-^
gabe is a real bro. he is the guy that does his job because its fun and he likes others to have fun with it too. he thinks of the future with his community financial thing which is great in my eyes. i would happily invest 200€ to remake games like jagged alliance but not in the way big companies would redo them but in the way the community loves and wants the game.
bobby kotick on the other hand seems like his evil twinbrother from bizarroworld.
he is the true mastermind of the gaming industry, such a lovable guy
That's why steam is still dominance unlike other streaming services.
aged very well. a true wizard
"YOU SHALL DOWNLOAD STEAM!!!"
Somebody please teach this lesson to the CEO of Ubisoft. Maybe the reason that everyone pirates your games on PC is because your service is worse than hemeroids. I would rather bleed out of my ass than use Uplay ever again. I pay for your games but playing them makes me wish for a pirated version that doesnt stop me from playing the game every 2 mins to reconnect me to your crappy servers in a singleplayer experience (Splinter Cell: Conviction).
intellectual property never should protect any services/products stating that they can revoke their services/rights to use provided at any time consumers initially legally paid for. especially for piracy cases where someone rips out a service and uses it without affecting the official ones.
I'm scared the direction steam would take when he retires...
The man speaks so much truth, i regular buy stuff on steam for this reason.
The only downside with this is the "offline mode", i think the guys at valve really need to rethink that one. sometimes i can't even start source SDK, because my school blocked steam connections
wow that old steam UI. nostalgic
As relevant today as it was back then.
Rockstar need to see this right now following the catastrophe of gta trilogy.
Don't forget their garbage online drm on the Rockstar Launcher
Thats why I ONLY play rockstar games on Xbox, i refuse to download their stupid launcher. Id rather play their games in an inferior way, than to use their stupid launcher..@@orlandofurioso7329
And on top of that, I ONLY buy them used, so rockstar doesnt get any of my money. lol.
I had literally pay for games after pirating and fully completing them beforehand simply because I ended up wanting to support the devs and it was faster to get updates from the source instead of possibly waiting a week for a pirate site to update depending on the case. In an era where demos are seen as pointless it not really a surprise remorse buys also increase. Games I "gotten for free" otherwise I often time don't even play more than a hour. With Steam refund policy it is less of a thing I do nowadays but depending on the game 2 hours might not be enough time and I find myself giving me a personal demo first. I'm sure a ton of people pirate without the intention of buying whatsoever but I'm just adding some people pirate but have the willingness and funds to buy the game but don't want to be stuck with what is basically a Steam scar claiming to be a game. Stuff like Bad Rats can get away with it being only cents on a dollar but AAA slop wanting 70 dollars not counting day one dlcs and special edition bullshit, I can't afford trusting the company have my best interest in mind when they put more time and effort into marketing than the game itself.
Gabe is fucking awesome wish there were more people like him in the gaming industry.
haha Right on :). Hell people in busnisess like Nintendo, Microsoft and mabey even Apple could also learn alot from this man and be inspired to improve a lot from him.
This video explains why people pirate and it's not just games, it's movies, and music. And it's most likely to do with too many exclusives and the prices are too high.
Goddamn, Gabe, it felt like listening to a mirror image. You're brilliant! Truly one of the very few big people in the gaming industry who are truly admirable.
His take on piracy is spot on. They're not actually pirates, more of like...motivated 3rd part developers.
This man is 100% right. I love steam because its very simple and fun to use. I dont want to jump hoops to pirate the games that will give me a trojan virus
Everything he said is completely perfect
In such a greedy and misguided industry, having someone like Gabe is an absolute blessing. I hope he’s with us for a long time
This quote applies to anime so much, I live in central/eastern europe and even If i subscribe to sites like Crunchyroll I am not guaranteed access to their full library and I have no way to know if what I want to watch will be avaible to me when I do subscribe.
Gabe Newell seriously is the Godfather of the gaming industry. Every company strives to become an entity like Valve.
I really, really want to work for Valve. Theyre the only company I have ever seen when it comes to video games that isnt a greedy cash cow. AND their games are awesome.
it feels like i was zoning out while listening to him but i can perfectly recite what he said
I really want to meet him, wish I can one day
I love gabe and valves treatment of its customers, few companys have looked after its consumers like they have.
Gabe is a pretty cool guy, this interview convinced me.
Exactly what Empress forward.
As far as I'm concerned he's right in that copy protections increase piracy. I don't ever buy a game that comes with a DRM. Ever. I probably won't even want to play it, but if I do, then I'll pirate it. Why? Because I know the DRM will only make my experience worse.
This makes me happy to throw money at Valve. Keep making great games and services!
I don't get why everyone hates Gabe, this man is one of the most intelligent people on the Internet of all time.
Increasingly in every industry we see a lot of higher ups adopt the mindset of "How can I reap the benefits of helping people without actually helping anyone?"
And to nobody's surprise their efforts repeatedly fail at everyone's expense.
I pray to god this man has picked someone to succeed him
Who could possibly live up to gabe newell?
For everyone who makes a Gabe is Fat/Delay episode 3 joke...
NEVER forget: THIS is the true face of your jokes; the face of Gaben.
Doesn't mean you can't make jokes, just don't actually think he's stupid.
Nobody think he stupid lmao. One of the smartest people on the planet arguably
What the hell is that portal scene at 4:50 ???
gmod
I've got two bachelor's degrees, and I feel like cheating in school is the same way. If the teacher's had course layouts with material deliveries that made students who wanted to do things the right way have a fighting chance to, cheating would be eliminated.
that is so funny because I stopped gaming for a while in the past and kind of switched to console alltogether.
It's *always* an issue to afford games, even older ones.
One of the reasons (I mostly use/used PS4 and then Switch) I 'switched to switch' in the end was not just nostalgia, but also because in my mind, I thought of Nintendo as this 'wholesome company'.
games in the past always were pretty cheap in comparison, many older classic titles get ported to switch, yada yada.
truth though is, that switch is actually *pretty* expensive, not to mention all the unfortunate drifting sticks, or not responding of sticks, ports are mostly laggy, sometimes *cost more* than even on other console platforms, it's ridiculous. Not even mentioning how frickin *exclusive as hell* playstation became, console expensive as heck, pay *extra* for disk slot, pay *extra* for internet features, pay *extra* for titles - and what is the library? barely anything new even.
I seriously consider switching to a steam deck, as soon as I can afford one. So many people of us played all of their games via steam *ages* ago, literally decades ago for some - their library of games, *huge* - the amount of free and accessible games, even for the steam deck? *huge*
you got discounts all the time, sometimes even getting *insanely good* games for a couple of cents in some cases, or *huge* discounts on Triple A titles as well.
if you're patient, you can build up a huge library even from scratch with not a lot of money. the console itself is basically right at that sweet spot in terms of pricing and also still having enough power to run even new games that seem to be impossible for the switch to port to as well for example.
and even on the other console counterparts its very unprobable to have such big discounts like you can have on steam, sometimes with pretty good Triple A titles, pretty much always with many many other games that might be very fun as well and that you would've never heard about otherwise. lots of amazing indie titles in that sense as well.
Gaben is just so wholesome, truly an icon in the gaming industry, gaming *history* even at this point. He seems to just 'get it' - gets what gamers want and need.
I'm really curious what the future holds. I know this video is 15 years old and even the steam deck has been on the market for like, what - 2 years I think? but the gaming world just has changed a lot over the recent years and right now especially I feel like everyone is fed up with consoles by how sony, microsoft and nintendo are treating them in some cases. (faulty controllers, rising costs, less games/exclusive games/expensive games - you name it).
When I finally get a steam deck, it will be so amazing. I have so many timeless games from the past like Counter Strike, Team Fortress, Command and Conquer, some assassins creed titles, some cod titles, Sandboxes like Garry's Mod, Resident Evil, Bioshock, Terraria, GTA IV - not to mention basically *all of the free games* that you had on your other consoles anyway.
pretty much a little bit of everything already.
I could also buy the games like Elden Ring, Dark Souls 3 that are somewhat 'stranded' on my PS4 currently because of faulty controllers , an unreasonably loud console and also lets not forget that I would need to actually start paying monthly to actually enjoy the fun parts in those games in the endgame - the multiplayer.
I would have the convenience of my switch lite but with better controls and a wider range of games to play.
I wouldn't need to pay extra for Internet features.
I would have access to modding via workshop in many many games, etc etc.
It almost feels as if Valve, in terms of games, might be going full circle with their handhelds, beating consoles in the end entirely by basically 'converting the biggest library of games into a console experience' so to speak.
Affordable Hardware. Endless Games.
Both,mouse and keyboard and usually easy Controller support for basically any game via Steam settings adaptable to personal needs (that even allow you to use the gyroscope in pretty much any game - I mean how cool is even that alone? Having the Ability to give yourself the 'most precise controlling scheme possible on a controller compared to mouse and keyboard).
HDMI support so you can basically treat it like a computer, too. it's just both now. but neither with ridiculous PC pricing nor with the whole arrange of other issues that console experiences might bring on their own.
The Gaming world will be a surreal place when Half Life 3 will finally release, I'm telling you. 😝
It's been 16 18 years later and I've bought the L4D set again It's still perfect
The gaming culture wont be the same without Gabe Newell
It's not just about localization, but also companies getting greedy and stack more price and call it "exclusive" while it's easier to just pirate it and save your money to buy some snacks that will last for a week or less while enjoying the game. But nowadays, there are more countermeasures of piracy such as denuvo, or client that makes you play while staying online.
There are only two ways I can see where the future of gaming is going; Pressing forward for free to play games with microtransactions, or go back to the old, dated, and polished games.
Companies like Activision is getting more of a killjoy than a smile on a face. They treat gamers like some sons of corporate CEOs with endless flow of cash. Gaming is slowly dying, but it still can be saved by following the steps of From Software's examples.
I could listen to Gabe talk all day
Love ya Gabe, fantastic credit to the gaming community.
1:39 stroke of genius, he deserves every dollar to his name.
damn. made u realize how genius this legend is
The more exercise Gabe does over the course of the development cycle for any one of his games, the less time he actually gets to spend improving the game.
If Episode 3 comes out and he's twice the size as he is in this video, it's going to be fucking KICK-ASS.