Gabe Newell Speaks

[Chris D]

Today an e-mail was sent out by Valve's Managing Director, Gabe Newell in relation to the recent Steam updates, Condition Zero pre-orders and the latest Half-Life 2 hardware survey. No new information, but certainly worth a read.

There are a couple of Steam-related things that I thought were worth bringing up.

#1) We've been re-running the hardware survey as we do periodically. We're up over 500,000 respondents. The running tally is at http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html


The previous survey is at: http://valve.speakeasy.net

There's lots of interesting info, for example Windows 98/Windows ME users going from 62.8% down to 8.25%. It will be cool when more people realize they can play localized versions (Chinese, Korean, French, Italian, German, and Spanish) of the games over Steam.

#2) We've been able to increase the level and speed of our Steam upgrades by direct reporting of client bugs back through Steam. If a Steam client reports a problem, we can replicate it on our machines and jump directly to the line of code in our debugger. This is hugely valuable, and just a fundamentally better way of supporting our customers than we've had in the past.

#3) We've started taking pre-orders for Counter-Strike: Condition Zero over Steam. It is way cool that the people who have been supporting us over the years can now buy our games directly from us. When the first pre-order went through, we all cheered. We're going to be contacting the person who did it and doing something to commemorate the occasion. I was trying to be first, but couldn't type fast enough and ended up #6.

Gabe

 

[wonkers]

A little self involved to be buying your own game to try and be the first don't you think? I am glad, they are glad that steam is working. Little to stop HL2 now (or at least there better not be).

 

[Runteh]

True, but its the first time anything has been done like this before over the net. Maybe they had fears that steam would be as unsuccessful as we believe it to be :| (obviously not though)

 

[sundance]

We're going to be contacting the person who did it and doing something to commemorate the occasion. I was trying to be first, but couldn't type fast enough and ended up #6.

Busy as usual then Gabe, wanna slow down there my friend, might hurt yourself.

 

[Xenome]

omg..some simple-minded f*cks here..

 

[Runteh]

yeah, simple minded :upstare:

 

[HybridM]

Busy as usual then Gabe, wanna slow down there my friend, might hurt yourself.

Valve don't need people like you playing their game, just **** off.

 

[The Dark Elf]

hey, the lot of you, knock it off.

 

[Mr. Redundant]

Yeah, wouldnt you guys be excited if you and your company had slaved away, developing an original system to deliver content to end users... overcome bugs, whining and thousands of man hours.

I mean think about it, it MUST be exciting for him, the first purchase of a game on Steam... the very reason steam was created.... thats gotta be huge.
finally seeing all that work wasnt for nothing, I mean now that things are rolling along smoothly how long do you think it will take them to get HL2 on steam?

If you ever watched the Gabe newell interview by gamespot (before E3) you can relate to Gabe on a more "human" level, seeing his eyes light up when he says "We want to release our game so bad" ".. Seeing what people say" etc etc.

 

[The Dark Elf]

Yeah, wouldnt you guys be excited if you and your company had slaved away, developing an original system to deliver content to end users... overcome bugs, whining and thousands of man hours.

I mean think about it, it MUST be exciting for him, the first purchase of a game on Steam... the very reason steam was created.... thats gotta be huge.
finally seeing all that work wasnt for nothing, I mean now that things are rolling along smoothly how long do you think it will take them to get HL2 on steam?

If you ever watched the Gabe newell interview by gamespot (before E3) you can relate to Gabe on a more "human" level, seeing his eyes light up when he says "We want to release our game so bad" ".. Seeing what people say" etc etc.

Exactly, ok so he runs Valve, but he's also a gamer, he plays World of Warcraft and other games, Steam is something he's probably wished existed for years, he probably wanted to be the first person to play HL2 through full before anyone else too. I can't blame him, I'd be the same.