Valve co-founder Gabe Newell broke his latest period of silence in an interview with a YouTube channel that currently has 30 subscribers and seven videos to discuss his influencer-worthy daily routine, as well as his thoughts on the AI-filled future and how to build a business.
The bizarre interview shorts are legit, Valve confirmed to PC Gamer, and part of a bigger conversation coming later this month. Across two videos, Newell digs into his business background and industry predictions. Asked about the value of investing in the technical side of AI or simply learning how to use AI tools, he responded: “I think it’s both.”
“I think the more you understand what underlies these current tools, the more effective you are at taking advantage of them,” Newell says of AI. “But I think we’ll be in this funny situation where people who don’t know how to program who use AI to scaffold their programming abilities will become more effective developers of value than people who’ve been programming for a decade.
“Even if you’re just a pure tool user, you’re gonna find that the gains to utilizing those tools are very, very high. But I think your ability to use those tools will continue to improve the more you understand the underlying methods and mindsets of people developing machine learning systems. So I think it’s both, and I think they’re highly complementary.”
Gabe Newell helped shape modern gaming. Now he says AI is about to reshape everything. #gabenewell – YouTube
Newell’s argument seems to be that effectively integrating AI tools into programming practices could be a big difference maker, even when put on the scale opposite additional years of experience. He doesn’t sound quite as ravenous as folks like EA, which have been calling generative AI specifically “the very core of our business” since last year, but Newell clearly puts stock in the tech.
Last year, a Valve engineer working on Deadlock said he cracked the game’s new matchmaking algorithm using a code base provided by ChatGPT. “I think there are some skeptics who don’t get how amazing this tool is,” he wrote.
Separately, Newell fielded a more general question about advice to folks planning or starting businesses. He dismissed the “deeply distracted” idea that businesses start with a pitch to raise capital, focusing instead on “creating value for people.”
“The capital will come your way, probably at a reduced cost than it would be otherwise,” he says. “Having a big bunch of capital and then saying, ‘Oh, I guess all those lies we told in our pitch dek, now we have to go out and hire a bunch of people to be on this trajectory.’ I think that’s a great way of destroying a bunch of money and wasting a bunch of people’s time.
“So I think the key is to ignore all the distractions around it and just focus on, how do we make our customers happier? If you listen to your customers and focus on them, it’s ridiculously easier to build a business. The focus should always be on your customers and on your partners and on your employees. And then everything else will fall into place over time.”
It’s hard to argue with these comments in the context of Newell’s success and reputation as well as Valve’s growth, which were largely fueled by turning Steam into the most dominant store in PC gaming and, handily, the best store for game discoverability across all platforms. I’m sure plenty of devs and players would like Valve to listen to just a few more things, and it’s never good to be too trusting of any company, even a private one like Valve which certainly could’ve done worse things with the near-monopoly it’s established, but PC gaming is the way it is today in part due to the enormous impact of Steam.
Earlier this year, former Valve CMO Monica Harrington, who worked closely with Newell at many points, shared the inside story of forcing a publisher’s hand with the threat that Newell and his team “would never ship another game.”
Newell made another rare appearance last year for Valve’s 20th anniversary Half-Life 2 documentary.