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Tag: Gabe Newell

  • Gabe Newell Talks Coding In Google Hangout

    When you hear the name Gabe Newell, what immediately comes to mind? For most of us, it’s probably Valve, Steam, Half-Life or some combination of the three. Not many would immediately equate Newell to coding as it’s easy to forget that he’s a programmer first and lord of Valve second. That’s why Google recently invited Newell to speak to computer science students as part of the Hour of Code – a campaign dedicated to getting students interesting in coding and computer science.

    In the below Google Hangout, you’ll get to hear how Newell got into coding and how having knowledge in computer science greatly impacted his life. If you’re already a coder, you’ll want to check it out to get more insight into one of the most famous programmers of our time. For those who aspire to be coders, Newell might just inspire you to bust open that C++ or Visual Basic book and start studying.

    Oh, and those of you wanting to hear about Half-Life 3, you’re not getting it here. You will still want to watch the video though. You might just learn something.

  • Zuckerberg, Gates, Dorsey, and More Advocate for More Programmers

    Zuckerberg, Gates, Dorsey, and More Advocate for More Programmers

    A new campaign looks to teach people about a “superpower” that is only being taught in about 10% of U.S. schools.

    We’re talking about programming, and an array of high-profile tech figures and celebrities are throwing their support behind the new initiative.

    Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, Chris Bosh, Jack Dorsey, and Gabe Newell are some of the big names that participated in a new ad called “What Most Schools Don’t Teach.”

    In the video, they discuss how they all got started in coding and why they think it’s important that more people learn the process.

    Check it out:

    The push come from Code.org, a non-profit foundation dedicated to increasing the amount of computer programming education available to everyone.

    “Our vision is that every student in every school has the opportunity to learn how to code. We believe computer science and computer programming should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra,” they say.

    Code.org was founded by entrepreneurs Hadi and Ali Partovi, who between them have been early investors in Facebook, Dropbox, airbnb, Zappos, and Indiegogo.

  • Watch Gabe Newell, J.J. Abrams Talk About Films And Gaming

    During the annual D.I.C.E. conference last week, a number of gaming luminaries spoke on the state of the industry. These talks were all posted online with the exception of one that didn’t show up until this week. Unfortunately, it was the most important talk of all – a chat between Bad Robot’s J.J. Abrams and Valve’s Gabe Newell.

    Gamers, and Valve fans in particular, can now rejoice as the talk has been posted online in its entirety. Learn how two of the most famous men in their respective fields compare storytelling in film and gaming. You’ll also get to see the announcement that shook the world – Valve collaborating with Abrams on Half-Life and Portal films:

  • Watch Gabe Newell Talk About The Future Of Valve

    Gabe Newell is pretty busy these days. Just last week, he was at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs talking about the business of video games. Now he’s at the annual D.I.C.E. Summit where he gave two separate talks – one with director J.J. Abrams and one on the future of Valve.

    Unfortunately, the video of his talk with Abrams has not been uploaded just yet. From reports out of the show, it sounds like it was pretty entertaining. As a bonus, the two announced their plans to work together on Portal and Half-Life films.

    Today, Newell delivered the opening keynote on the future of Valve and the industry as a whole. Fortunately, that has been uploaded, and you can watch it all below. There’s some fascinating insights into how Newell views PC gaming as the next big thing, and what Valve is doing to capitalize on it.

    For a company as secretive as Valve, it’s been nice to see Newell speaking so frankly at so many events over the past few months. That being said, I don’t think we’re going to start seeing Half-Life 3 details sprouting up anytime soon. Still, it’s nice to hear industry insight from one of the most ambitious and innovate men in the business.

  • Watch Gabe Newell Talk About The Business Of Video Games

    Whenever you hear the name Gabe Newell, your mind presumably turns to Valve, Steam, Half-Life and Portal. Now’s your chance to hear one of the smartest men in gaming talk about the business of making games.

    Newell was recently invited by the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs to speak on the future of business. The talk is officially titled “Reflections of a Video Game Maker,” and it covers “productivity, economics, political institutions and the future of corporations. If you find yourself with a snow day today, the hour long talk may just be what you need to pass the time. Who knows? You might even learn something.

  • CES 2013: More Details On Valve’s Steam Box Emerge

    On Tuesday morning, CES 2013 opened with the news that the oft-rumored Steam box was real. The hardware is a mini-PC that will bring PC gaming to the living room. It’s Valve’s attempt at taking on the console market, and it just might work. Of course, we won’t know for sure until we get more details and Valve boss Gabe Newell is more than happy to oblige.

    In an interview with The Verge, Newell provided some early details on what his company is planning with its hardware, and where the company is headed in 2013. It’s noted right off the bat that Valve is at CES to meet with hardware partners. The Steam box could potentially be made by multiple parties with multiple configurations and price points. Newell touches upon that by saying that they’re looking at a scenario where OEMs will provide simple streaming solutions, or a self-contained hardware unit where the OEMs get to choose which components are included.

    All of that is for OEMs though, what is Valve’s Steam box going to look like? Newell says his company’s own PC will be Linux-based, but it wont be a closed system. He says that consumers can install Windows on the device if they want. Newell says that his company’s own box will also incorporate biometrics in its controllers, and that the device may even incorporate gaze tracking.

    The most interesting revelation out of Newell, however, was when he stated that the Steam box will be a server. In essence, it seems that Valve wants to bring back the LAN party:

    Any PC can serve multiple monitors, so over time, the next-generation (post-Kepler) you can have one GPU that’s serving up eight simultaeneous game calls. So you could have one PC and eight televisions and eight controllers and everybody getting great performance out of it. We’re used to having one monitor, or two monitors — now we’re saying let’s expand that a little bit.

    Of course, the first round of Steam boxes will not be able to do this. It might not even be able to do something like that with the next generation of Nvidia GPUs unless Newell knows something that we don’t. Either way, it’s incredibly ambitious, and it would be a sight to see an eight person LAN party running off of one computer.

    The rest of the interview features Newell’s thoughts on game design, and how hardware will change that in the future. It’s incredibly fascinating stuff especially for the gamer who has a vested interest in this crazy industry, and it seems that the Steam box is just going to make it crazier.

  • Steam For Linux Is Now In Closed Beta

    Valve’s Steam platform began life on Windows, and only just moved to Macs in 2010. Now the Washington-based developer is ready to move Steam onto the wild west of operating systems – Linux.

    Valve announced that the Steam for Linux closed beta went live today. The company said that over 60,000 Linux users signed up in the first week alone, and the first round of beta users has been already pulled from the initial applicants.

    The one game available to all beta testers from the start will be Team Fortress 2 as its free-to-play. There are two dozen other games available, and users who already own those titles on PC or Mac will also have them available on Linux. Users will also be able to take advantage of Steam’s Big Picture mode which changes Steam into a TV friendly interface.

    “This is a huge milestone in the development of PC gaming,” according to Gabe Newell, Valve President and co-founder. “Steam users have been asking us to support gaming on Linux. We’re happy to bring rich forms of entertainment and our community of users to this open, customer-friendly platform.”

    Frank Crockett, a member of the Steam for Linux team, notes that Steam will first only be available on the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. He notes that an “overwhelming majority of beta applicants” are running Ubuntu, but other popular distributions are not out of the question. He says that Valve will prioritize development of other distributions based on user feedback.

    As for future rounds of the closed beta, Valve says that future participants will be chosen among survey respondents. This will continue until the folks at Valve see “a solid level of stability and performance across a variety of systems.” Once that’s achieved, Steam for Linux will enter into open beta for all.

    Steam for Linux development started in earnest a few months ago. Newell has been outspoken on his disdain for Windows 8. He feels that Microsoft is creating a closed platform akin to Apple. Linux represents an open platform that fits better with his philosophy.

  • Steam Big Picture Brings Steam to Your TV

    If any game company can see the writing on the wall and adapt, it’s Valve. Though gamers are still waiting for the announcement of Half-Life 3, Valve has been adapting its Steam platform for almost a decade, making it into the most-used digital distribution platform for the PC. Both EA and Ubisoft have created copycat platforms, but are years too late and their platforms are far too closed to truly compete with Steam. Just last week, Valve launched Steam Greenlight, which allows the community to vote on which indie games will be allowed on the platform.

    Today, Valve launched the beta of a new interface that is surely the company’s first strike at console makers. Called Big Picture, it is an interface designed to be used on a TV screen, with a controller in-hand.

    Though it also supports mouse-and-keyboard controls, it offers many features designed specifically with a controller in mind. The most interesting of these features is an on-screen keyboard that uses an analog stick and four controller buttons to allow fast typing, instead of scrolling all over an on-screen qwerty keyboard. It also features what Valve is saying is “a web browser for the TV that doesn’t suck.”

    It appears Big Picture is a clear overture to a Valve gaming console, but those rumors have been slightly exaggerated. Greg Coomer, head of the Big Picture team at Valve, candidly told Kotaku that the new interface is actually a bit of market research for Valve. The company wants to see how users will use Big Picture, and thus learn what customers want. If that includes a Valve console, Coomer said, then Valve will do it.

    The video below was released by Valve today to coincide with the start of the beta. It provides a quick rundown of all the Big Picture features and how to activate it through Steam:

  • Windows 8 Trashed by Gabe Newell (Again)

    Much has already been said about Windows 8 and its new tile-laden interface. Moreover, much has already been said about Windows 8 gaming and how game developers are worried that the OS could damage the PC gaming market. Valve co-founder and Managing Director Gabe Newell last month stated that Windows 8 will be a “catastrophe” for PC gaming. Microsoft has defended Windows 8 gaming, but concerns still remain that the OS will lock PC games behind Xbox-like licensing walls.

    This week in an interview with Game Trailers TV, Newell went even further with his criticism, saying that customers will “hate” Windows 8 and are “going to basically rage quit computing after they use it.” He said, “things that used to be incredibly simple are very complicated and hard.”

    Newell doesn’t want to bask in schadenfreude, though. He stated that he hopes his predictions are wrong, if only for the sake of Valve’s Steam platform, which runs primarily on Windows PCs. “I hope I’m wrong,” said Newell. “If I’m wrong, we’ll actually end up making more money in the 12 months that follow Windows 8 shipping than if I’m right. I’m just worried that I’m right.”

    It’s easy to mistake Newell’s criticism of Windows 8 as malicious, but his reaction could very well come from a place of nostalgia. Newell once worked for Microsoft, creating software for over a decade before founding Valve. To see what he considers a terrible OS coming out of something he was once a part of could be disappointing.

    Newell is putting Valve’s money where his mouth is, however. The company is currently hedging its bets and porting its Steam platform to run on Linux. So, whether Windows 8 actually is a “catastrophe” or not, Steam is positioned to either remain the most popular digital distribution platform for the Windows PC or become the vanguard for a new era of Linux PC gaming.

    Check out the short interview segment below:

  • Linux Is Getting Valve’s Steam Platform Soon

    It’s a fun little joke to say that Mac doesn’t get any games, but we know that to be totally untrue. More and more developers are making sure their games can run on OS X ever since Apple switched to Intel processors. If anything, poor Linux users are the ones who never get any good games. Besides the few games built for Linux with the Humble Bundle, etc; there’s not much of an official distribution platform for games on Linux.

    That’s where our story begins today. Michael Larabel, founder of Phoronix, claimed to have been invited out to Valve’s headquarters in Washington. The reason? To start development of Steam and the Source Engine for Linux. When the story broke on Larabel’s Twitter account last night, he promised pictures and an article detailing the news.

    He didn’t get the story out last night as promised, but said it would come out sometime today. Turns out that he did keep his promise today with the story going up this morning. It details Larabel’s trip and discussions with Valve’s Gabe Newell. It’s even said that Newell is personally involved with the Linux development now which is why it’s only now that the news is coming into the spotlight.

    What should be noted at this point and is to be the most exciting part of this news is that Valve isn’t taking any shortcuts with the port. Previous attempts to bring games to Linux end up using the Wine library to port Windows games to Linux. Valve is building new code from the ground up for Steam and Source.

    Bringing Source to Linux is by far the most exciting part of the news. It could open up an entirely new wave of Linux game development. It’s the kind of thing that Linux fans could only dream of up until now and it seems to be really happening.

    The burning question now is when will Valve release the Linux client? Larabel says that we should expect it within the next few months, but most likely in a beta form. He also makes mention of Valve time so don’t get too frustrated if it takes longer than a few months to get off the ground.

    Still, this is exciting news and only shows that Valve is one of the ultimate good guys in game development. Everybody has seemingly forgotten the Linux platform so it’s good to see Valve taking up the torch.

    [h/t: The Verge]

    [Lead image: L4D2 running natively on Linux courtesy of Phoronix]

  • Steam Details Extent Of Hacking Attack, Backup File Was Stolen

    Steam Details Extent Of Hacking Attack, Backup File Was Stolen

    You may remember late last year that Steam, Valve’s digital distribution platform, was hacked and taken down for a while. The extent of the damage wasn’t exactly known until now.

    On Friday, Gabe Newell took to Steam to tell users exactly what happened:

    Dear Steam Users and Steam Forum Users:

    We continue our investigation of last year’s intrusion with the help of outside security experts. In my last note about this, I described how intruders had accessed our Steam database but we found no evidence that the intruders took information from that database. That is still the case.

    Recently we learned that it is probable that the intruders obtained a copy of a backup file with information about Steam transactions between 2004 and 2008. This backup file contained user names, email addresses, encrypted billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. It did not include Steam passwords.

    We do not have any evidence that the encrypted credit card numbers or billing addresses have been compromised. However as I said in November it’s a good idea to watch your credit card activity and statements. And of course keeping Steam Guard on is a good idea as well.

    We are still investigating and working with law enforcement authorities. Some state laws require a more formal notice of this incident so some of you will get that notice, but we wanted to update everyone with this new information now.

    Gabe

    This is a good example of a company being frank and open with their customers about their data. It’s a far cry from Sony’s mishandling of their own hack attack last year that saw the company taking their sweet time to let customers know that their data was compromised.

    Remember to take Gabe’s advice, kids. If you still have the same credit card number from 2004 to 2008, watch your bank account like a hawk just in case.