Gabe Newell Talks Steam Deck's Origin, Goals, and Future

[Music] we are here at valve with gabe newell and pierre lou talking about the steam deck which is in front of us uh gabe first of all it's uh the world has changed a lot since i was last sitting here with you right before alex shipped welcome back from new zealand it's good to be back be back home here yeah it's great to be back in the offices and getting to work with everybody face to face so the steam deck uh we've been spending a couple days with it and i'm really happy to be sitting down here with you i'm curious how did the idea for this first reach your ears what was sort of the the first moment where this came up to you well a lot of times the conversations we're having internally are about you know what can we contribute how are we adding something to the to the pc gaming community so if you look if you look at index and alex that was for us trying to answer the question of you know how can we push forward when we're designing software and hardware hand in hand to allow us to take advantage of this this new opportunity of vr it was an important step and i think it sort of lays the ground for future work we're going to be doing on both the game side and the hardware side that's sort of how the conversation goes is what are we doing that's going to move stuff forward i think a lot of gamers have always felt that there's not a great uh mobile gaming hardware device out there for us to use so if i'm a customer i'm either using touch you know which is terrible for first person shooters or i have to go you know in a proprietary direction that has really limited access to titles and if i'm a developer i'm living with those things and saying i really hate having to apologize for the kinds of experiences we're giving people in the mobile device so that in that sense it was a pretty natural conversation for us to have and there are things at various time horizons that you're looking at so obviously i've been thinking a lot about brain computer interfaces and that's the kind of thing where you're public about it way in advance of any sort of products or things like that but it just sort of fits into that overall conversation so it wasn't that strange a conversation was like we're always talking about mobile gaming platforms and the trade-offs that we feel exist for ourselves as game players and as game developers so it was pretty natural so it sounds like you didn't really need much convincing it was a pretty organic idea it's like any gamer it's like somebody comes along and says here's actually you know the kind of gaming experience where you can take you know the the best games in the world and run them in a mobile environment you know there was we all have known that forever right i mean if you'd asked gamers 20 years ago they would have been saying the same thing it's just uh we're sort of at the point now where the the technologies of the enabling technologies advanced the mobile gaming hardware has reached the point where we can really pull that off uh what does success you just kind of mentioned what you're doing with index and with alex and trying to sort of move things forward there in that realm what does success look like for valve on this like monetarily does the whole project need to break even does it need to be profitable does that matter is it about driving street subscriptions engagement you know what's what's sort of the kpi here well i think it gets harder over time we're very financially very successful company right and the problem with lots of interesting things is they tend to have exponential curves and if you're looking at the wrong part of that curve you're not making good decisions about the future right so with vr our expectation is it's a very long haul and that they're fundamentally important technologies that are being developed and if at any point you're sort of narrowly defining the goal posts and saying well how's that doing against you know the latest cs go you know update you know it's gonna you're always gonna end up making bad decisions based on that so for us it's really how does the press react what are they saying about it what are they saying about it a year later right what's the perception uh you know what are gamers saying you know what are their reactions what are our partners saying are the kinds of things that are most helpful to us because our assumption is these are long-term decisions that we're making about how we can contribute to the health and the vitality of this ecosystem and we're always going to be successful as long as that's continuing to happen so you know you know they're people who have those kinds of opportunities and it's really a question of do they make smart decisions you know about how to keep the the ball rolling down the hill and for us this seems like an obvious opportunity for us to address that so in terms of feedback it's really how are people going to react right i mean we expect that we're going to sell a ton of these but it's more important where everybody says and we can't wait to see what comes next or developers coming to us and saying there are this opens the doors to a lot of opportunities so it's just about those expectations about the future which are going to be most critical in us determining whether or not uh we've been successful uh pierlo from your perspective what does success look like on this project i think uh games gabe subbed it up really well if you know if down the line we're talking to a bunch of developers on steam and they're saying oh wow this really helped us connect to you know either a new set of players or players are that much happier playing in the mobile space and we didn't have to do that much work for it or even no work at all i think this looks great from our perspective and if it opens up new opportunities for them when they're thinking about game designs right we've been we've been sort of blocking a set of things off as kind of being static and fixed and if they start viewing this as an opportunity to be more innovative how can we evolve the input side of this what are the other technologies that we can bring to this that uh enable new kinds of experiences and new gameplay mechanics well along those same lines what have your previous adventures in in hardware development taught you heading into this um well i mean that's a very long you know every time we do anything we're we tend to to learn a lot i think index taught us a lot about the value of doing things hand in hand and software and hardware development which is something that we expected right uh it was that i felt like we were really successful in capitalizing on you know designing controllers at the same time we're designing alex you know trying to do stuff in a game really really informs that um you know a lot of the technologies we've developed and some of these other hardware devices like the game controller applies directly to this the learning curve has to be zero right you just have to be able to hand something to them and say oh i know how this all works right it's like oh look it does exactly what i expected i used the touch screen and it you know worked properly i'm used to let's say an xbox controller oh this behaves exactly how i'm expecting when the games are working so that's an example of something that we learned there price performance is going to be one of the critical factors in uh in the mobile space and so we've had to be very aggressive in terms of uh pricing on the deck well speaking of which th this is i think this is the part where you get to tell me the price because the audience will know by now by the time this interview is up but but we've been seeing everything and so we've actually been curious while we've been here now we know we know that there are multiple versions all not not uh terraflop wise not power wise but just we've got this different storage level so what are what is the threshold here the three price points are um 399 for 529 and 649 and the only difference between those is the amount of storage and the speed of the storage so as you go bigger we're also making it faster and you've got an nvme drive in there yep yeah and uh so that's the difference but all of the other characters in terms of the gaming performance that you're going to get they're going to be going to be identical i'm curious what were some of the other names considered for steam deck on the whiteboard oh steam buddy steam pal very early on we had uh like pretty terrifying prototypes uh so we get we gave them appropriate names like ugly baby and things like that those weren't great steam ugly baby yep yeah so we we didn't go for that uh as far as name goes so uh one of the really interesting aspects of this that i i guess i don't i wasn't expecting coming in here uh since we know we're here just for full context we're here about a week before before this thing gets publicly announced uh is it is a pc and it can run other game stores so you can connect up it's you're not just locked into steam here which i think when you look at a device like this that's your your expectation at least it is for me as a gamer is oh well i'm i'm in that ecosystem and that's it so uh it basically means that this thing is the xbox handheld that microsoft never made because if you have game pass you can just sign in on your on the microsoft store download their pc games have you talked to to microsoft at all about this yet because obviously i'm sure you have a limited circle of trust here like do they know you're about to you're about to release an xbox handheld so you know more of the details uh that they they did than they do but our view is that the openness of the pc ecosystem is the superpower right that we benefit we all collectively benefit from so if you want to install the epic game store on here if you want to you know run an oculus quest on it those things are those are all great that's those are features right that's what i want to hear as a gamer i don't want to hear that somebody's got some trojan horse that's going to try to lock me down i want to hear whatever i want to do if there's hardware i want to attach to it if there's software i want to install i can just go go and do it and you know we think that's great yeah all the people working on this product are pc users themselves right and and we know that there's tons of value that is not necessarily on steam that we use on a daily basis either in gaming or non-gaming users so we we would have been pretty bummed to to try to deliver something that's essentially just a portion of what pc is all about what were the guard rails for this project from uh maybe from your from your level as as the person sort of encouraging and green lighting everything like it was it were there any sort of limitations for or was it just sort of make the best thing for and trying were you trying to hit a price point like i'm just kind of curious how it's shaped from like the 10 000 foot view of what of what we ultimately ended up with here the i mean the most fundamental one was great performance on your entire steam library right that's the fundamental thing that needed and it was and it had to be open and then that that was the thing is just like i want to be a gamer who's used to playing you know pc games i want to pick this up and says oh it all works it's all fast it's all and then price point uh was secondary and and painful but uh you know that was pretty clearly a critical aspect to it but the first thing was the the performance and the experience was the the biggest and most fundamental constraint that was driving this um you know you just want to hand this to somebody you know who plays pc games and have them go oh it was great like are you guys uh i know you know you hear a lot in in the console space of oh it's you know the the razer razer blades model of okay well we're selling the console at a loss to try and get you in the door on the software like is it are you guys trying to just break even with it and just get these out there or can it be something uh because for the price for what this thing is doing seems pretty impressive to me it as i'm literally hearing the price for the first time so is it are you guys just so our view our view is if we're doing this right that we're going to be selling these in millions of units yeah and it's clearly going to be establishing a product category that ourselves and other pc manufacturers are going to be able to participate in and that's going to have long-term benefits for us so that's sort of the frame in which we're we're thinking about this there aren't sort of explicit you know we're we think that this makes sense and we think that this makes sense going forward at this price point we don't have some tying ratio we don't say oh and then we have to sell eight games you know for each one of these eight incremental eight games for each one of these cells otherwise it doesn't make sense our calculus is more just sort of like is this the right product and is it a great way to test out the assumption that there's a huge amount of value both to game players and game developers to extending the pc ecosystem in this direction that's the the real test more more than more than anything else that that wider view of the curve you were talking about earlier rather than looking at it super narrowly right nobody has ever said oh we have a giant success where clearly there's huge demand for this uh but our margins are are too thin right and a lot of people have overpriced things and killed the opportunity uh uh and sort of convinced people that it's an uninteresting uh category from the get-go so we're definitely what you know our view is we're doing this for the long haul and there's a lot of opportunity and uh so far everything we're hearing from our partners mainly because they're the ones that we've talked about it the most there's a lot of enthusiasm that this is something that they're really going to be happy to see the the the pc community you know uh pushing into this space were there any gabe specific features that you re requested in the device did you kind of weigh in with any any wish list items that pierre lew and the team had to then go and uh and work in well i do immediately play dota with each new version that i get so i've probably been a little more laser focused on the usability testing so you're the track pad then that's uh that's that's a big big one for you makes sense but that's just me being a gamer right that's not me being exactly being a president um has the i mean you can't help well okay we as gamers can't help but look at this and and see you know a similar form factor to a nintendo switch i mean it's but and you guys you play everything so and nintendo of america's not far from here has the switch influenced this at all either either ergonomically or in terms of just showing hey there is a market for like you know high higher end uh handheld gaming or or is it just not normal for you uh i mean there have been attempts to provide mobile gaming platforms for a really long time and for me as a as somebody who's used to sort of high-end desktop pc gaming and console gaming they always felt like they were compromises so i think nintendo does a great job targeting the audience they do with the content that they have and that's going to be different like when you pick this up it feels much more like the ergonomics for somebody who's used to playing with you know an expensive game controller right and uh you know it's because of that it's bigger and and it's bulkier than um a switch and you know if we're right that's the right trade-off to be making for the audience that we're going after and obviously i mean i think they've sold 85 million switches doing all right well it's obvious that they've made the right set of trade-offs for those customers and that kind of content and we'll just have to find out whether or not we've made the right tradeoffs for me it feels supernatural and makes a lot of sense when i'm trying to play you know resident evil villages on this uh and uh you know we're going to find out pretty soon whether whether the where the whether those choices that we've made uh are are correct but i think there are so how about you in terms of you know is was there anything about the switch where you guys kind of collectively go oh well we like this about it so let's look at that or or we don't like this about the ergonomics of it that we need we want to address on our device i don't want to criticize i mean there are no no i'm not people who who love their switches as negative yeah we never really looked at it in those terms like we're focusing on as gabe said like our kind of our library and and what people are you know how they're engaging with pc and trying to get the best solution for that i i think they're really two parallel things there well how all right let's let's move this way yeah if you're a gamer and you pick up a switch and you pick up one of these you're going to know which one is right for you right and you're good you're going to know it within 10 seconds so um how what what can valve do to help avoid the pre-ordering nightmare that gamers endured with the xbox series and and the playstation 5 launches last year or if anything uh we're gonna have a reservation system people can as soon as uh the announcement goes live they can start reserving uh whichever sku they want so and that'll give them a sense of when those deliveries are gonna occur and all the deli you know we're not going through inner any sales intermediaries so they should have a pretty accurate understanding of when they'll get their devices so all all sales will go through valve similar to the index it won't just be in like you know target or we may end up doing that eventually but for now it's just a lot easier to communicate to customers about like delivery dates and things like that yeah when it's directly between what we know about our manufacturer production capability and the customers well over the last well decade but particularly maybe half decade valve's really become every bit as a hardware company as it ever is or was a software company are there any other areas that you're still looking to you see in the future for valve that you want to branch into you mean in addition to hardware yeah well hardware plus software is a pretty big that's that'll keep us busy for a while so oh unless i decide to go to medical research for brain computer interfaces well that's and that's uh that's exactly where i wanted to go next actually is you know that was a topic that i was surprised to hear from you about last time and it sounds like something you've been you've been putting a lot of time and energy into that um has has the pandemic changed your sort of thoughts on that at all either to try and accelerate that research or just sort of curious for you know one year later uh talking to you from a year ago to now is that still a big focus and yeah absolutely thing for you yeah yep super super exciting i think the things that we'll be able to do are you know it's it's one of those highly speculative that's you know and yeah and within our company it's the kind of longer range risky thing that it's probably easier for me to do than than other people simply because i've got a track record of making risky long-term bets some of which have paid off and some of which have not so that it i've got enough there's less stress on me pushing in in those kinds of risky directions than there is for other people so it's a useful role for me internally in sort of the political economy of valve this one i think be good for both of you here uh for both in terms of for first for gabe has as your time in in new zealand and obviously the the weathering the pandemic changed your thinking about about uh centralized office and and and operating a company in general and and and pierre be curious then to get your perspective on it from from the the actual team developing this thing uh the the sort of ups and downs of of uh being together and then being not on my side i think if anything it reinforced uh my belief of the benefits of of everyone being in the office and collaborating uh when we were all split out trying like at the heart of trying to figure out what the id for you know the industrial design for our final was going to be it was really slowing us down and causing all kinds of challenges for the natural model of collaboration here which is everyone from all disciplines are in the same room just discussing things and making really good decisions as a result so i think everyone was really eager to you know get back in the office uh that might largely be due because of the way we work but i think for for valve it's the right model and we're really all happy to be back here in the office so i think we all got a better at working remotely i was working just a little more remotely than most other people i think if you looked at sort of course measures of productivity you know just the lazy how many lines of code get checked in you know how many assets we were our productivity was impaired about 25 over the last year like everybody's like what does the pandemic mean for me personally what does it mean from the business you know what does it mean for for the team that i'm working on so we we tried to try to just sort of come up with really quick and dirty ways of measuring that and so it was like about 25 but that wasn't homogeneous across all the different things that we do yeah so things that involved you uh like going off and thinking like just pure code production like i'm i already know what i'm gonna go write and i just know that i have a bunch of code i need to write that actually got a little bit better anything that required sort of uh back and forth collaboration um you know like it was a great time to be you know an individual contributor being a hermit just producing stuff but anything that in like trying to launch a new product would have been impossible in the pandemic because that's the phase in which there's that maximal amount of interchange of ideas back and forth you know uh triggering ideas and other people and so on so that would be an example like you know making a whole bunch of hats for a game yeah that pandemic didn't hurt us coming up with what is a next product for us to go build that would have been super challenging those are the sort of the two two extremes yeah well uh since we also let since we last talked over a year ago alex hadn't shipped yet it was it was getting there and then you ended up having to ship it from home so now that that game's been out for over a year i'm curious how you feel about it in hindsight you kind of touched on it early in in our conversation here but are you frustrated that didn't win more awards that it was certainly worthy of d did it move the needle on vr adoption um i know you're yeah so i'm kind of kind of curious how you feel about it you know a year plus out yeah i feel great a year out i think it's been super helpful in us in terms of like what do we do next how do we continue to move vr forward what are the opportunities uh in the space so in that sense it's been hugely successful it you know everything we saw in terms of vr adoption it had a positive impact there um i mean there are a lot of the the word stuff to me felt feels a little bit like that's not the right metric to be applying to those to those kinds of projects it's great if you get them but uh you shouldn't even if you get a bunch of awards if it doesn't solve the other problems then you haven't solved the the more interesting challenges so in terms of giving us this confidence you know like uh it was hugely helpful with with dec right this notion that yes working these tightly coupled hardware software designs could be can in fact have big big payoffs you don't end up with well why'd we do that it's the same hardware that anybody else would build or yeah you know the game developer's saying yeah but that's great but you haven't impacted my thinking at all or what about what the opportunity space is so yeah i'm super happy with with alex um and everything that the the team did and the the implications it has for our business uh long term pierre liu how about you a year out how has it how do you feel looking back on alex now um i mean i i was not really involved with that project right but i i played it a lot leading into launch just to give play test feedback and i really loved it it seems like for the past year i've seen lots of comments and happy players and people that really enjoyed it as well and so it seems like a big success to me but what did i mean what did index and alex mean i mean you heard me saying about the the confidence aspect of it i mean what did what did it mean to you in terms of how i mean you were in the hell of why are we doing this project that every project goes through on on deck yeah it's i mean it was really really positive to see and i think the the tight integration between the the index controller and alex gave us a lot of ideas for you know new input schemes and uh really kind of reinforced our confidence going into deck as well and very narrowly very narrowly it addressed the issue with the thumb sticks right we got some good feedback from that too yes and we got some good thumbsticks on the on the deck so yeah full-sized thumbsticks with the capacitive touch it's been it's been fun to use here these last couple days all right last question because i got to let you go but um still on the subject of alex because again it's it's a nice opportunity to come back here after it's been out what was your reaction when you first either read the script for or or saw on the screen the uh the ending spoiler alert for anybody that hasn't finished half-life alex uh you know you obviously have such a connection to the original games the original two and now so so when you saw that ending uh come to life what were you what was your thought endings are hard uh but to us it feels like the right progression uh for where we're going with half-life so you know and that's yeah so it worked perfectly in terms of where we where we see ourselves headed so that's music to my ears as a halfway fan gabe pierre lou thank you so much thanks

Channel: IGN

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Keywords: valve, valve interview, gabe newell, gabe newell interview, gabe steamdeck, steam, ign first, pc, pc gaming, steam deck, valve steam deck, valve gaming pc, valve console, steam games, steam store, steam pc, steam handheld, mobile pc, steam deck interview, gaming pc, ign first gabe, Switch, Handheld, ign first steam deck, steamdeck, steam deck price, steam deck reveal, steam deck Announcement, valve steamdeck, valve pc, valve switch, valve steam device, steam deck cost, gaben

Id: 9kO6Dj2XNfY

Length: 27min 35sec (1655 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 28 2021