[UPDATED with second session] Gabe Newell - "Whether We Want to Or Not We're Becoming a Bottleneck"

[ríomhaire]

UDDATE:
The second session is also on Youtube, you can see it bellow the first video bellow.

UPDATE:
The LBJ School has released a video of one of Gabe's lectures. It looks like it was recorded during a different session, but some of the points are the same as the ones summarized below.

ORIGINAL STORY:
This morning we posted some choice quotes that Polygon revealed from Gabe Newell's talk to University of Texas students. As it turns out due to there being too many interested listeners to fit in a single lecture theatre Gabe gave two separate talks, one of which we have obtained a recording of from a member of the audience who didn't want to be named. You can click the icon bellow to listen to it from James' Tindeck page or click here to download it directly.

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For those who don't have the time to listen to the hour-long talk here's a few select bits:​

• Gabe spends much of the talk discussing Valve's flat management structure, why it works, how new employees react to it (as it turns out people from the film industry find it hardest to take in) and what you need to do to make it work. One possibly surprising comment Gabe makes is that "you have to be aggressive about firing people" when it's not working out.
• Moving on to talk about Steam Gabe talks about where he thinks Steam is headed. He says Valve are currently bottle-necking the digital distribution industry and wants to open up Steam more. "Rather than us sitting between creators and consumers we're going to get as far out of that connection as possible." It's clear with the Steam Greenlight, Market and Workshop that Valve care about user-generated content, but he wants to go further to a point where Steam is "a network API."
• As an example he says someone like Yahtzee could set up their own storefront using the Steam back-end with the games they want to get people to buy and would get a cut of the profits for every game sold through it.
• Coming up to the end of the talk Gabe says that he thinks "one of the biggest mistakes game developers make is to mistake a genuinely entertaining action by a player as hacking," citing the assassination of Lord British during the beta of Ultima Online as being poorly handled.

If that has piqued your interest then scroll back up and listen to the whole thing.

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

I ****ing love the whole Assassination of Lord British event and I'm glad Gabe uses it as an example. Using a Steam based framework to start up sub-stores or clients is an interesting idea, I wonder how that would culminate.

I think Gabe is genuinely concerned about a monopoly they have over the PC gaming market. I'm also not quite surprised at his method in aggressive firing, it's undoubtedly the only way a flat management structure could be managed. Individuals must be relied on to be productive if they're not constantly [specifically] tasked. Thanks for the great writeup riomhaire

 

[Lobster]

Valve have become the games industry equivalent of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Smoke keeps coming from the chimneys and trucks keep coming and going but no one ever seems to know what happens within.

I feel like I know more about the cafeteria menu at Valve than I do about their actual projects, and I can't help but picture Gabe showing visitors the Psychedelic Boat Tunnel of Mind-Erasing before they leave.

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

Haha, that's a perfect analogy, Lobster.

 

[ríomhaire]

I ****ing love the whole Assassination of Lord British event and I'm glad Gabe uses it as an example. Using a Steam based framework to start up sub-stores or clients is an interesting idea, I wonder how that would culminate.

I think Gabe is genuinely concerned about a monopoly they have over the PC gaming market. I'm also not quite surprised at his method in aggressive firing, it's undoubtedly the only way a flat management structure could be managed. Individuals must be relied on to be productive if they're not constantly [specifically] tasked. Thanks for the great writeup riomhaire

I wonder how far they're going to go with this. Just the ability to set up your own store and have purchases from it still go through the Steam client? People making their own Steam clients? It sounds like he wants people to be able to put games up somewhere, if not the main Steam store, without any approval from Valve at all. It's certainly very interesting.

 

[Doomination]

Damn, he gave this at UT Austin? I'm doing a summer research internship there starting in June.. why couldn't he have waited?

 

[trunk_slamchest]

I wonder how far they're going to go with this. Just the ability to set up your own store and have purchases from it still go through the Steam client? People making their own Steam clients? It sounds like he wants people to be able to put games up somewhere, if not the main Steam store, without any approval from Valve at all. It's certainly very interesting.

it is all ideas based off of modern trading sites like bazaar.tf, tf2tp and tf2 outpost where users have individual trading profiles with bp viewers and the likes of which essentially act as store fronts.

the only difference is valve has the ability to take it to much higher levels than community leaders can.

valve implemented Mann Co Store external links where site owners can externally link items to the steam store, and with the recent emergence of the community marketplace beta; it is simply more evidence that valve is planning on allowing the steam community to set up their own steam stores to generate their own revenue.

and since valve can control distribution of every item in the community, competition between individual users, and the steam store/mann co store will be generally non existent; along with the fact that the means of acquiring said items through the steam store/mann co store is extraordinarily different than how you would go about acquiring said items through the community market place.

 

[ríomhaire]

BabyHeadCrab the second session is up now too.

 

[trunk_slamchest]

Valve have become the games industry equivalent of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Smoke keeps coming from the chimneys and trucks keep coming and going but no one ever seems to know what happens within.

I feel like I know more about the cafeteria menu at Valve than I do about their actual projects, and I can't help but picture Gabe showing visitors the Psychedelic Boat Tunnel of Mind-Erasing before they leave.

Valve in a nutshell:

i feel like the creepy old dude that rattles around the cart of junk

"NOBODY EVER GOES IN...NOBODY EVER COMES OUT"

 

[MFL]

We're all that old dude.