What We Have Learned from Gabe Newell AMA

Our Lord and Savior, Gabe Newell of Valve was the host of Reddit AMA yesterday. We of course knew that there can be no new information about Half-Life 3. Still, we’ve learned so much.

So, what did Gabe Newell talk about? Let’s see:

  • Valve is now working on some unannounced games powered by Source Engine 2. Hopefully, Source Engine will be the main engine of all upcoming Valve games and even the engine will be free of charge in the future.

“We are continuing to use Source 2 as our primary game development environment. Aside from moving Dota 2 to the engine recently, we are are using it as the foundation of some unannounced products. We would like to have everyone working on games here at Valve to eventually be using the same engine. We also intend to continue to make the Source 2 engine work available to the broad developer community as we go, and to make it available free of charge.”

  • VR is an important tool for interesting games.

“We think VR is pretty important as a tool for interesting games.”

  • Half-Life is a personal matter in his life which he sacrificed so much for.

“If you are involved in a game, everything ends up being a set of trade-offs. Anything in a game is a sacrifice of things not in the game. I just feel those more personally about Half-Life for a bunch of reasons.

And Xen.”

“The issue with Half-Life for me is that I was involved in a much higher percentage of the decisions about the games, so it’s hard for me to look at them as anything other than a series of things I regret. There’s no information in my response about what we’ll do in the future. It’s simply easier for me to be a fan of things that in which I was less directive.”

  • About Half-Life 3, he didn’t give any detailed information.

“The number 3 must not be said.”

  • They are working on fully-fledged single player games.
  • About his favorite games of Valve?

“I think Portal 2 is our best single-player game. I play Dota 2 the most of our multiplayer games.”

  • Half-Life and Portal movies are still coming.
  • Playing Trek on a mainframe using punch card was his ‘Spark’ for video games.
  • He likes his steak medium rare.
  • He says Valve has plans on making customer support better.

“Yes! We are continuing to work on improving support.

Since the last AMA, we’ve introduced refunds on Steam, we’ve grown our Support staff by roughly 5x, and we’ve shipped a new help site and ticketing system that makes it easier to get help. We’ve also greatly reduced response times on most types of support tickets and we think we’ve improved the quality of responses.

We definitely don’t think we’re done though. We still need to further improve response times and we are continually working to improve the quality of our responses. We’re also working on adding more support staff in regions around the world to offer better native language support and improve response times in various regions.”

If you want to dive deeper into Gabe Newell AMA, you can visit here. Still waiting for Half-Life 3 guys.

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More in:News

0 %