Gabe Newell, managing director of Valve, has made a lot eyebrow-raising comments through the years, more particularly the ones about his stand on console game development. Here's his latest quote from the Game Informer:

It seems by and large that gamers are incredibly smart; the average gamer seems to know more about what makes a good game than the average person at a publisher.

It's true - gamers are smart. In many ways, no one really knows what a gamer wants out of a game better than a gamer. Haven't we all gone, "It'd be better if..." at some point while playing? Whether it's a bad camera angle, crappy in-game dialogue, or unreasonably hard-to-get items, we all have our ideas as to how to improve a game.

It's nice to see Gabe Newell recognizing gamer intellect - especially since he's a publisher (being a gamer too sure helps). He ought to use that recognition more when bashing consoles, though.

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if u think about it many games have beta testing where "gamers" test it to see what they like/dislike. however i doubt the tester are actually gamers becuase so many times i know ive gone "WTF were they thinking..."

This is 100% true, when a game dev makes a crappy game, gamers whine about the game and what makes it terrible, the publishers obviously don't notice the bad things about games that we do.