The co-founder and managing director (and gaming god) of Valve Gabe Newell made an appearance at Casual Connect, an annual videogame conference in Seattle, Washington Tuesday evening. During an evening dinner, Newell had a chat with former VP of game publishing at Microsoft, Ed Fries in which he unveiled some of his odd and secret projects in true Newell fashion. All Things D has the report:
“Everything we are doing is not going to matter in the future, “ said Newell, “we think about knitting together a platform for productivity, which sounds kind of weird, but what we are interested in is bringing together a platform where people’s actions create value for other people when they play. That’s the reason we hired an economist. We think the future is very different [from] successes we’ve had in the past. When you are playing a game, you are trying to think about creating value for other players, so the line between content player and creator is really fuzzy. We have a kid in Kansas making $150,000 a year making [virtual] hats. But that’s just a starting point.”
Newell also stated that because of this, they approached Adobe and stated the next version of Photoshop should look like a free-to-play game, and although they stated this sounds like a bad idea, Newell stated that, “…we say, ‘No, no, no. We think you are going to increase the value being created to your users, and you will create a market for their goods on a worldwide basis.’ But that takes a longer sell. This isn’t about videogames; it’s about thinking about goods and services in a digital world.”
Newell also commented on Valve’s interest in Linux, stating that, “the big problem that is holding back Linux is games. People don’t realize how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behavior. We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well. It’s a hedging strategy. 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. If that’s true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality.”
Newell also discussed the importance of touch, and what the post-touch era will be like:
“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. Post touch, depending on how sci-fi you want to get, is a couple of different technologies combined together. The two problems are input and output. I haven’t had to do any presentations on this because I’m not a public company, so I don’t have any pretty slides. There’s some crazy speculative stuff. This is super nerdy, and you can tease us years from now, but as it turns out, your tongue is one of the best mechanical systems to your brain, but it’s disconcerting to have the person sitting next you go blah, blah, blah, blah.”
He concluded his thought with, “I don’t think tongue input will happen, but I do think we will have bands on our wrists, and you’ll be doing something with your hands, which are really expressive.”
Newell ended the interview by discussing the future of wearable computers:
“I can go into the room and put on the $70,000 system we’ve built, and I look around the room with the software they’ve written, and they can overlay information on objects regardless of what my head or eyes are doing. Your eyes are troublesome buggers.”
What does this mean for PC gaming in the future? Will we eventually be able to throw away out mouse and keyboards and play games using an input method more advanced than touch? Will we someday have the luxury of wearing helmets and viewing our games through lenses that will fully immerse us in a game’s world? Only time will tell, but one thing is certain: Gabe Newell is clearly a man of imagination, and wants to change the world of gaming and technology as a whole for the better and with the consumer in mind.
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