Gabe Newell

Growing up in the Sacramento Valley in the '70s, we were all pretty big into cars. Of course, I had to nerd out and be a fan of Bob Tullius' Group 44 Jaguars instead of Corvettes/Camaros.

The PC is successful because we're all benefiting from the competition with each other. If Twitter comes along, our games benefit. If Nvidia makes better graphics technology, all the games are going to shine. If we come out with a better game, people are going to buy more PCs.

The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates.

Ninety percent of games lose money; 10 percent make a lot of money. And there's a consistency around the competitive advantages you create, so if you can actually learn how to do the art, the design, and the programming, you would be consistently very profitable.

One of the things that's important about family is the narrative history they create for themselves.

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.

The Internet is changing what entertainment and sports is. It's not just a few people authoring an experience for others. It's really growing out of what everybody does.

The most important thing you can do is to get into an iteration cycle where you can measure the impact of your work, have a hypothesis about how making changes will affect those variables, and ship changes regularly. It doesn't even matter that much what the content is - it's the iteration of hypothesis, changes, and measurement that will make you better at a faster rate than anything else we have seen.

Don't ever, ever try to lie to the internet - because they will catch you.