So after setting up a Reddit AMA, Gabe Newell vanished without a trace. Many conspiracy theorists would have you believe that he had to slip away to deal with some Half-Life 3 business. Whatever the reason for the disappearance he is back today for a full hour to answer questions on Reddit along with Greg Coomer, Ido Magal, Erik Wolpaw and Erik Johnson.

Many of his answers were not what people wanted, as most responses were mundane. We found out things like – his love of Mario 64, He spends 20 hours per week playing games; DOTA 2 is his go-to game, he likes knives and started programming at the age of 13. Besides this biographical stuff, there were some interesting titbits.

Gabe sees the steam machines and their OS as a service update to steam, for example. "We see Steam Machines (along with SteamOS and the Steam Controller) as a service update to Steam, porting the experience to a new room in the house," Newell said. "As we've been working on it, we've focused first on the customers who already love Steam and its games. They've told us they're tired of giving up all the stuff they love when they sit in the living room, so it seemed valuable to fix that."

He not only admitted that he plays DOTA 2, but he also explains why Valve developed the title and information on the next international. He said: IWe knew there were a lot of people playing Dota 1, and quite a few of those people worked at Valve, so our hope was that we'd do a good enough job on it that those people would play Dota 2."

"We haven't finalized where this year's International will be," he continued. "We are pretty sure it will be at Key Arena in Seattle, but we haven't gotten everything finalized, and there is always a risk that our schedules and theirs won't align in some way. As soon as we get everything finalized one way or another, we'll get the dates out there for everyone who would like to attend. Should be fun this year."

Gabe also reveals his original vision for Valve and how it turned out. "[W]e find it more useful to think in terms of feedback loops than in terms of visions/goals. Iterating with the community means that your near-term objectives change all the time. The key benefit to Steam is to shorten the length of the loop. Longer term, we see that working at the level of individual gamers, where we think of everyone as creating and publishing experience. 'How can we make gamers more productive' sounds weird, but is an accurate way to characterize where we're going."

And after that he disappeared once more. Probably these are not the answers that people wanted, me included. And we have no information on when Half-Life 3 will be development, if ever. Nice Interview Mr Newell, very informative. (yes sarcasm implied)