Valve’s Gabe Newell Reveals His Daily Routine

During a recent interview, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell shared details about his daily life, describing everything from pastime activities to current work projects. Newell is known for avoiding the media as much as possible, so comments like these sometimes pop up out of nowhere, although the circumstances surrounding this interview are quite interesting. Despite staying out of the limelight, Newell continues working on projects at Valve and other companies, making his insight valuable to a wide audience.

Interviews with the industry titan are rare enough that even unconfirmed reports of Gabe Newell's addiction to Stalker 2 managed to garner some attention from fans in March 2025. The man behind the Steam platform is well known and respected within the gaming industry, and some fans will always be excited to learn more details about the outspoken tech executive's life and experiences.

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By Sarah Fields

In this most recent interview, Gabe Newell describes some of his daily activities, which include scuba diving, working out, and more. The creative mind behind Half-Life also commented on his daily work regimen. Newell chose Zalkar Saliev, a YouTuber with 19 subscribers, to do the interview, which has since been confirmed as legitimate by PC Gamer. Given Newell's history of interaction with fans, this decision oddly makes a lot of sense.

Gabe Newell Comments on Work Ethic and Daily Life

The Valve co-founder also noted that he works seven days a week from his bedroom, stating that "to me, it doesn't feel like work." Newell clarified his statement by explaining that "the kinds of things that I get to do every day are super awesome," which is undoubtedly very true. Afterward, the industry icon went on to say that "when you retire, you want to...stop doing your horrible job and then go do sort of what is most fun and entertaining, and so...in that sense, I've been retired a long time."

While even Newell admits there's nothing new about this sentiment, it seems his lived experience is proving that philosophy to be true. In that sense, it could be argued that the gaming mogul had some valuable words of wisdom for his fans in this interview. In addition to these comments, Newell admitted to working on several projects, including some work on "AI stuff" and "Steam stuff." While the PC gaming pioneer did not go into detail about these projects, it's worth noting that this comment comes shortly after the revelation that almost 8,000 Steam titles use Generative AI.

Of course, Steam isn't the only way to gauge the industry's stance on AI, as even the new Co-CEO of Ubisoft's latest subsidiary suggests that this technology will play a role in the publisher's future. It seems that no matter how gamers feel about the use of Generative AI, some developers and publishers are still hoping to take advantage of artificial intelligence when creating new titles. That said, it's important to keep in mind that Newell's comments here were offhanded, so there's no way of knowing exactly what kind of AI technology the developer could be working on at the moment.

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