Now the information that there was no meeting was interesting enough, but there was something else that caught our eye in the part of the transcript we read. Newell also said; “We have a long list of things we'd love to see Apple do to support games and gaming better.” in reference to his wish to actually meet with the folks at Apple. Now what this actually means only Gabe Newell and some of his team knows, but we can speculate.

One of the things that Valve has always wanted to bring to the market was a sense of openness in the way that content is distributed. Many will remember the big issues with EA and their limited number of activations for the Game Spore. This caused it to become one of the most pirated games of all times (and it was not that great) what made things even worse was that EA wanted to push this onto Steam users. Newell was publicly against this and has said many times that more restrictive DRM is not the answer to combat piracy (and he is right by the way).

It is possible that Newell is thinking along the same lines with Apple and their increasingly restrictive walled garden approach. Traditionally Apple has not supported gaming in quite the same way as Windows has. Before Apple switched to using Intel CPUs this was due to the fact that for developers to make games for Apple they had to make things work on the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) based OSX. Now that Apple is using the same parts that are in every other PC this should not be a stumbling block… except for that walled garden approach. Apple likes to control that can and cannot be installed on to their devices. When Steve Jobs was around he stated that it was to control the user experience and ensure its quality. So to Apple the environment is the most important thing. According to Newell, people need to be more important and developers need to be more aware of their customers. This is an issue he sees even in social networking.

When Newell was asked if he felt that Apple shared the same values as Valve he stated very quickly; “No”. He went on to state that Valve operates in an open and collaborative environment where they work together with customers and developers. Apple on the other hand has its own ideas and “design ethic and then if you want to go along for the ride, you can”. Newell seemed to indicate they would like to collaborate with Apple, but that they had not talked about it with them much.

Newell also highlighted the fact that the tablet market as a gaming frontier is its own world. He stated that the tablet market was an interesting opportunity, but that partnering up with Apple was not going to make you rich stating “Apple is really good at... at, at, you know, driving partner margin to zero”. The overall feel of the conversation was that the Windows PC is still the market with the most creative flexibility and performance, but that the console was the proverbial cash cow. On the other had Apple was something of a touch subject… you could tell Newell wanted to say more, but probably held back out of a sense of professionalism.

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