Valve has mutated from a game developer into a financial middleman
theweek.com
theweek.com
I joined Valve because I excited to work with what I thought was the best game studio in the world, but I left very depressed when I found out they're merely collecting rent from Steam and making in-game decorations for old games.
This is in my opinion the reason why Valve is having a hard time doing a new game, not because they don't want to. They want to be Valve and make good games, even if it means waiting years before an opportunity presents itself.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Citizen-Game-French-Nicolas-Gaume/dp/...
> Video games are not like movies, not like content. Since their inception, 1% of the games get 99% of the players. For example, when half-life was released, everybody was playing half-life. In this environment, you can't simply make another fps with a cool scenario and expect it to be a hit. You have to have real hard innovations in your product.
https://twitter.com/MatPiscatella/status/1134171732053331968
Basically most of video games market is content-driven games be it some mobile, social game or MMO. Innovations mostly occur in games for hardcore or indie audience and market share of these games are pretty small.
> Now, there is a business in pissing video games like content, but there is only spots for a few big conglomerates that will profits from the quantity, not the quality.
Why is eliminating largest games by revenue in his case justifiable?
Still. What about Call of Duty? What about Sequels?
There is number of small companies with only 20-30 employees who maintain their projects over decades basically releasing more of the same every couple of years.
I don't think it's the most revolutionary games. For example, EA sport franchises make more money than most of their other games. Not to mention casual cash grabs with pay to win mechanics.
All of the most successful tech companies are platforms:
* Facebook is a platform for it's users to make posts
* eBay is a platform for it's users to sell items
* Amazon is a platform for retail companies
* Even Google is a platform, because it's taking the Internet itself, and re-packaging it
From that perspective, you can see how things wound up like this at Valve.
* Apple owns the iOS and MacOS platforms.
* Microsoft owns the Windows platform.
It seems to be a very common pattern. I remember being convinced on the matter by an Economist article on European tech: https://www.economist.com/britain/2011/08/06/start-me-up
But MS doesn't control what programs are running on the Windows platform.
On the other hand, if you didn't have a PC back in 1998 you bought one and Windows came with it. Or you already were advanced user, built one from components and installed Windows. Either legally or not, didn't matter much.
I was trying to highlight one of the great benefits of owning a platform: your platform is made more valuable by the work of third-parties who build on it.
That said, I think part of what people are missing about Valve is that they are also seem to be focused on what they see as the next big thing in gaming, which is VR. They're supposedly shipping their own VR hardware (headset plus new hand controllers) soon (Aug 1st), and have publicly committed to launching a "Flagship VR" game this year. Probably not what most people want, given the cost of VR equipment (not mentioning the cost of the computer hardware to run it).
Personally, I'm kinda amped up about the Occulus Quest. A hands free (~3 hour charge, can play while charging), self-contained (no PC required), $400-$500 (depending on internal storage) device? I might actually be willing to pay for that as a first VR device. That the games are all $30 or less is a bonus.
Examples:
* Steam Machine [0], an alternative to consoles
* Proton [1], incredible boost to gaming on Linux
* Continued development of the Source engine [2], that, albeit not a first choice for the majority of game developers, is still being used
* Going heavy on e-sports with Dota 2 and The International [3], which, I believe, is also beneficial for gaming as a whole
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(hardware_platfo...
[1] https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_(game_engine)#Games
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_(Dota_2)
We'll see. There have been a number of game marketplaces over the years that have tried to compete with steam. For the most part, they're all gone, and the games they hosted are gone too.
At this point, it would take something pretty unusual for me to spend any money on a non-Steam game. I just don't believe other platforms will be around in 5-10 years.
I agree, but I think it's important to consider that they can succeed even if they don't get you or me. There's hundreds of millions of people that have installed it (approaching 250 million a couple months ago), tens of millions playing each month (almost 80 million as of a few months ago) and over 10 million people playing concurrently.[1]
How many of those are young players that might want to try a new game they see some youtuber play, and see it on sale in the epic store they might use to launch Fortnite? That's a hige captive audience, and this battle won't be won by swaying you or me, but by swaying the huge number of new gamers coming onto the market, which are mostly our kids. I know my son who's 9 probably wouldn't care about Steam if I wasn't sharing my library with him. Then again, his computer can't play much and he plays Fortnite on the Switch.
Steam is entrenched, and does have it's own user base, but given that Fortnite along as of a couple months ago has ~66% of the concurrent users of Steam overall[2], I wouldn't count it out. That's a lot for Epic to make something out of.
1: https://www.pcgamesn.com/fortnite/fortnite-battle-royale-pla...
I don't play very often and when I finally find time for it, it looks like this: - clicking on the game icon - the launcher starts updating - the launcher restarts and asks for my account, because why not? - the game starts updating, often downloading patches above a GB ... and so on. And that applies for Steam, Bethesda Launcher and the rest of the bunch. And don't let me get started on the Bethesda Launcher because that thing alone takes 500MB of memory.
More telling (to me) is that Epic started making a game very different from Fortnite but was both flexible enough and perceptive enough to change the game.
Fortnite has as many or more monthly players as Minecraft (which is huge), but much more control over the ecosystem and content. As the controlling party of what's (by this point most likely) the most popular online game in history in it's peak (until next month, most likely), that gives them a somewhat unique and powerful position, which they seem eager to exploit.
Will that be enough? I don't know. I definitely think the situation is different than the examples you cited though.
Frankly I'm almost in the opposite camp now - why would I buy anything on Steam when it's clearly being left to rot.
So it has cloud saves and you can buy games to send as gifts?
They have the “Buy game > download game > launch game” flow working, but there’s a heck of a lot of catching up to do. Frankly I’d say that cloud sync for game saves is table stakes for a game store in 2019. If Epic weren’t throwing around millions of dollars on exclusives and discounts, no one would use it.
I’m sure there are other missing features, the ones mentioned above are just what came to mind from when I looked into EGS after Borderlands 3 was announced as an exclusive.
They might be on track to catch up to Steam sooner or later, but it’s far to early to say they’ve done it.
There was this amusing incident not long ago, where the store's fraud prevention mechanisms were blocking users who bought five or six games quickly in a row. There were many, many blocked users, because at that time, the Epic store happened to have a "mega sale" event going, where many games were discounted. In a store without a shopping cart feature, that translates to lot of purchase transactions, one following quickly after another.
https://www.pcinvasion.com/epic-store-blocking-users-purchas...
If only they invested slightly more money into their store implementation, and less into buying expensive exclusive game releases, right?
That's funny, recently numerous users were also blocked from purchasing the Valve Index VR system on Steam because of fraud prevention mechanisms.
To their credit Valve did later offer an opportunity for people who ran into this to buy a kit in the first wave of shipments.
In a few years, if the store is good, nobody will care about the growing pains. The bad old days will be forgotten like Diretide.
a) some 300-400 games in my library, picked up over more than a decade, and probably 95% purchased on sales. There always seems to be a sale. This offsets the price of a computer as opposed to a console.
b) Steam Link, which lets me play those games in the living room using a regular Xbox One controller. The Link has recently migrated from being a hardware device to being software that runs on your TV (I have a Samsung TV) and now recently on iOS (iPhone/iPad/Apple TV).
Link works very well and has effectively moved me to the living room for enjoying games.
It has also made my game library available to my wife, who wasn't going to sit down in front of a computer to play games any time soon, but who has found some games she really enjoys playing by virtue of the simpler, more direct interface that is Steam's big screen mode.
While Steam the desktop app is a horrible, ancient mess, the big screen interface is surprisingly decent.
Wait what? I have a hardware Link and a Samsung tv. Are you saying I can dump the hardware? How do the controllers connect?
Yeah, so due to how bluetooth works on the Samsung, some controllers work well and others don't. I set up VirtualHere[1] on the router (which is pretty close to the TV), and connected a USB bluetooth stick to the router. I have a wireless Apple keyboard, a Logitech mouse, and two Xbox controllers connecting through the bluetooth stick, and it works flawlessly. No discernible input lag.
Amusingly, there's also a version for the Raspberry Pi 3B: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=6153-IFG...
This is silly. 4 rather recent internet companies are meant to prove your point that the way to success is as a platform? This post ignores the vast majority of tech companies.
As opposed to what, ancient internet companies? Amazon, Google and Ebay were all started in the mid to late 1990's. They are all over twenty years old. Facebook, as the youngest, is about 15 years old. How many people were even on the internet in the mid 1990's?
Edit: Or perhaps you meant tech companies pre-internet. But I think the fact that relatively young (although not really, even non-internet tech companies aren't that old) companies quickly rose to supersede non-internet companies (or those non-internet companies shifted to to be somewhat internet centric to not be left behind, like Microsoft) points towards more evidence for platforms (since the internet enabled platforms in a much easier way).
I know that was rhetorical, but just to answer the question literally since I was curious, the estimates across multiple sources from the first page of Google results for “internet usage 1995” show it was double digit millions, somewhere in the 10M-50M range, and separate percentage estimates seem to say about 0.5% of the world’s population. Today, by contrast it’s over 50% of the planet.
During a gold rush - sell shovels.
I substituted the blank for "games." Doesn't this now apply to lean startups?
Is that so shameful?
A company can take this stereotypical start-up approach of worrying about users and the 'product' first, but eventually, you might end up in the same position as Valve - and here's the thing, maybe you can only end up in that position if you first focused on something other than pure profit? How many businesses get to be the size of Valve by purely starting out chasing profit vs trying to create a great product first?
It's common to see people begrudge a company - or even an artist - who seeks to make money with the least effort, we sometimes refer to them as 'sell-outs'. We tend to look at people who once concentrated on developing something that has a quality or true value, only to later exchange this for the pursuit of money over everything else, in a negative light. Conversely, we applaud successes where the intentions of the individual or the business were seen as 'honest.'
I think this just boils down to some basic human condition around what we perceive people and companies deserve for their efforts, about fairness. OP wanted to work at Valve because OP believed it was a company that deserved to be where it was because it created something of quality, something of value. OP was disillusioned because what was being produced there at the time didn't deserve the praise and financial success.
I.e. Why would anyone struggle and sacrifice quality of life to make great art, when they can make equal or more money rent seeking?
- rent seeking
- making great art
Gaming is the commons.
If all the games are max money, least effort, that commons will be shallow, sort of dull.
If all the companies are doing low effort works, that commons will be shallow, dull.
A dull commons will sell through well, but will not tend to attract everyone it could. It is a smallish, but high profit commons.
Hold that thought while I relate an experience.
A product I used to manage came in colors, and standard black and white.
It was observed most of the sales and money were standards, black and white, and oddly, one mint color. The rest all did sell, but in much smaller numbers.
When that data was seen, sellers immediately quit buying anything but black, white and some bought that mint.
Everyone sold less. And they sold less of the standards than usual.
Turns out what attracts buyers to the product is a variety. Gotta have interesting colors on display. When they are there, part of the display, more buyers consider the product overall.
They still tend to buy the standards either way. But they buy more more times per unit of foot traffic past the display, so to speak.
Max sales actually happen when there are both a fair number of interesting colors, those colors change every so often, and that is done in tandem with the standards being available.
Going back to gaming I think the parallels are obvious.
Many will just pick the few big hits, but a diverse and interesting set of games is what gets them to be a greater part of culture and more people consider and stay gaming.
There has got to be effort there, even though it may not directly improve revenue on a effort / title basis.
--
[0] - including, or maybe especially, "delayed profits" (aka. growth), as many startups do.
No
Most businesses and employees have some ethical limits whether they’re aware of it or not
Uh, not mine. Otherwise I would have stayed in finance.
This applies broadly to the more advanced stages of capitalism. Minimize the cost and effort; maximize the profit.
The game is essentially dead now. I don't think a new card game is what either Half-Life nor Dota fans wanted.
It's unfortunate, the thing I kept hearing over and over is that Valve, being a private company, isn't required to maximize profit and can instead focus on making meaningful games. That's honestly what I thought the people who worked there wanted. Gabe himself was a millionaire from Microsoft, and I assumed he started a game company to for the love of making video games.
Uh. That's kinda sad. I remember messages on some forums (edit: around hl2 release) from some gamers asking if he was okay since he had gained a lot of weight at that time.
I remember one of the guy who won a prize competition and was given a tour of Valve offices and took pictures of the crowbar (or something else, details are fuzzy).
It looks like depression from here.
It's more a statement about how depressing the whole thing is.
Yeah, I am still bitter about hl3 and the "we have the tools to churn out an hour of hl every week so we are going into episodes".
Sigh.
But allmost only playing it and neglecting real world around it, might be.
The problem with a company with no defined job titles or explicit seniority is that there is still seniority, but it is invisible and thus deniable. An example: in my first few months, I was struggling to find a good project and a very senior employee (one of the partners, actually) took me aside and recommended I leave my current team since my heart was clearly not in it and take some time to think about what I really wanted to do, or else I'd get let go. I took his advice seriously, came up with a couple ideas, and then approached him a week or so later to pitch these projects. He got _angry_ at me, stressing that he's not my boss, and that it showed a remarkable lack of initiative that I'd ask someone else at the company what I should work on. So: he has the authority to fire me (or at least to plausibly threaten to fire me) but the moment that authority would mean any responsibility or even the slightest effort to mentor someone, he's just another regular Joe with no special role at all. Similarly, there's no way to get meaningful feedback because nobody really knows who's going to be making the performance evaluations. Sure, you can take advice from someone who's been there for ten years, but if they're not included in the group that's assembled to evaluate you then their guidance is worth nothing.
I worked with some very smart people there, but it was the most dysfunctional and broken work environment I've ever witnessed.
In groups of humans operating in "communal" mode, this invisibility of the hierarchy is by design. It's not the top brass that's doing it. It's the "will of the people."
>I worked with some very smart people there, but it was the most dysfunctional and broken work environment I've ever witnessed.
Sounds like it. It sounds like a complete vacuum, void of any responsibility. Rife with cowardly management and lack of direction, I could only imagine...
I don't think I have ever read any employee account that's made me want to work in the games industry.
What an abysmal environment. Sounds like everyone is just lusting for money.
> Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.”
...
> The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.
The Tyranny of Structurelessness
> "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" is an influential essay by American feminist Jo Freeman inspired by her experiences in a 1960s women's liberation group that concerns power relations within radical feminist collectives.
You can read it here: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
Isn't it an environment for creating ideas, rallying people around them and then leading them?
If you're new with fresh ideas then you can directly go and try to do that because formally there is no boss. You only have to fight the informal hierarchy.
From what I've heard about Valve, it sounds like there's a class of people that can fire you and therefore force you to do things, but you are still directly responsible if things go wrong. So the high-level people have power without accountability, and the low-level people have accountability without power.
That doesn't sound like a bad deal if you enter with a lot of political capital (maybe you are a world-renowned expert or friends with Gabe Newell). Doesn't seem like a particularly great place to work for everyone else though.
I'm not sure that perspective is useful.
Cowards.
But Valve is famous for their speed of work which would normally get people fired in different companies.
They do make perfect games though.
none, except Unreal Tournament legacy and one of the best 3d engines on the market for the last 20 years.
So it's better for Valve to not make it. They'd rather HL3 be an urban legend than a disappointment. That's better for their image as experts in their craft.
Comparing the HH style directly to other FPS just doesn't seem right.
Secondly, I know plenty fans of HL/HL2 who found the tone/direction of Portal 2 distressing because it was too self-aware or whatever. I don't really agree with that, but it's a point of view that's been circulating around for years. I think a lot of fans have come to terms with HL3 never being released. Continuing to not release HL3 has little apparent risk. Less risk than releasing it and making something a bunch of people will either hate or ignore. So I don't think they will.
Sorry but I doubt they're even thinking about it that hard, at this point this post nails it [0], Valve just doesn't care about making any sort of experience that isn't maximum profit for minimum effort and isn't based around a in game item economy.
It certainly isn't out of worry that they'll disappoint their fans with a dated gametype. They look at Portal 2, a beloved game as a huge waste of their time. They're not a company that makes money from art, gameplay and storytelling anymore they make money from virtual items.
But don't be sad, plenty of companies still care about telling single player stories in videogames: Nintendo, Guerrilla, Rockstar, Kojima Prod, Naughty Dog, Sony Japan Studio etc
The concept isn't as dead as Valve believes it is.
> still care about telling single player stories in videogames
Yeah, no. They released GTA V simply to use it as a platform for their microtransactions. They knew releasing an online-only game would not work.
This is why COD still has a half-assed campaign mode attached to it.
This is why Fallout 76 failed miserably.
I’m sorry but to pretend for even a second that both those titles didn’t include expertly crafted 50-100 hour single player worlds and stories is being extremely disingenuous.
Rockstar shipped twice what people are asking from valve, yes they tacked on online but they still shipped the single player experience many in this comment section are claiming they’d happily pay valve AAA prices for.
The difference is rockstar manages to do both and just because you dislike one doesn’t mean they didn’t ship the other.
What Valve really wants to avoid is a Doom 3 moment. When an old franchise is given a modern tuneup and the result is something nobody really thinks does the IP justice.
2016 was moderately successful. It got a lot of praise just for being stylistically Doom in every way that Doom 3 wasn't. But I don't think that Doom 2016 counts as strong evidence that HL3 could be made in a way that satisfies fans of the original games without alienating younger/modern gamers.
Execution is paramount. Valve certainly had the talent to pull it off at one point, I wonder if they still do...
I get your point that they can't win either way, but I wish there were more developers that would stick to older style games, when the goldeneye/timesplitters style of shooters went out of fashion the FPS market left me behind completely, similarly when platformers became 3D there weren't a lot of options for people that preferred the 2D style.
And also they ended it on a cliffhanger in episode 2 instead of concluding the arc at least.
And lastly after Portal came out I was so happy because it all made sense, I was sure Portal will somehow cross paths with HL so in HL3 you'd have a portal gun in your arsenal. So much potential wasted.
Gabe Newell invited Michael Abrash to work at Valve (they knew each other from back at Microsoft, and Abrash was even offered to be a co-founder of Valve originally but turned it down). Abrash was interested in wearable displays as a future platform. Valve missed mobile and even wants to reduce their dependence on Windows, so there's justification to research it and put together a team.
So it's harder to expand the team than keeping an extra 200m revenue? Can't find words to describe if that's the real reason. Every player I know got excited when I told them we need Portal 3 btw.
We know it would sell well. What about Left 4 Dead 3? Once again, it would be an instant hit. Even if Valve develops a game that breaks even, it helps to strengthen Steam as a whole and those users go on to make purchases elsewhere on their platform.
How much money did they lose because someone else developed Fortnite? How many users started buying games at Epic instead of Steam because their first jump into PC gaming was with Fortnite at the Epic store?
Which is kind of funny, as the original CS and TF Classic were total conversion mods made by players. I fondly remember Natural Selection, which was also later made into a standalone game. Shame Valve didn't explore the market of enabling amateur/semi-professional game design before Unity and UE ate that particular lunch. I guess the hats must be worth it.
They are trying to make another breakthrough there.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there is more to it now. There is the Valve Index, but that's just a nice headset with nothing revolutionary. It may have a best-in-class display but none of the "gen2" features such as wireless communication, inside-out tracking, foveated rendering with eye tracking, varifocal lens...
One of the things that amazes me about Valve and the way they run Steam is that I released my game, had thousands of people buy it, pushed updates, communicated with users, got paid, and I had to speak with 0 human beings at Valve. It all just happened in a very predictable, clear and highly automated way. This lack of friction is absolutely amazing for developers, especially people like me who live in a third world country and would otherwise have more difficulty going through these processes for any number of reasons. So IMO they're doing something extremely valuable which is properly acting as a platform so that other game developers can succeed and make more and better games for everyone.
Also being able to stream a PC game to any device is really cool.
I liked their games, but I like Steam better.
I disagree. It was somewhat more elaborate but the experience (having an actual physical copy, a manual/books, sometimes nice installer screen) made it feel more special. Nowadays most games feel the same, you just hit a button on Steam, it downloads itself and then you play. But it's mundane; the charm got lost along the way.
Long live Steam and GOG.
https://www.wepc.com/news/video-game-statistics/#pc-gaming
74% of all the video games and computer sales were sold in digital format form.
That's just one source. You'll find similar numbers confirmed elsewhere.
PC gamers overwhelmingly buy digital, either from Steam or other digital storefronts like GOG, Greenman Gaming, Epic Games Store, Origin etc.
"29% of Steam sales revenue was attributed to Western Europe according to Valve. (GeekWire, 2018)"
The typical US == The World view.
Don't be so presumptuous, it's arrogant.
And you are cherry-picking stats by stating only sales on Steam. Steam is not the only digital delivery platform on PC. There are many.
From 2014 worldwide:
https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/92-percent-of-...
92% of game sales worldwide were digital.
From 2019 in the UK:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-01-03-uk-video-game-...
80% digital sales for games in the UK alone.
And it's not just the UK and US.
https://business.financialpost.com/technology/gaming/digital...
The number of physical sales is declining everywhere, some quicker than others.
> allowing more and more games to exist and do well on the market Valve is doing amazing
It's something that has stalled me out a bunch of times, trying to find the 'correct' way to implement things, rather than just charging through and trying to see if my ideas even have merit to stick around long enough to desreve improvement. It has obvious links to the famous saying about Premature Optimization too.
The bit about globals and team vs solo matched my experience too (especially the part about how much you can fit in your head at once).
So they stopped producing games. So what? Valve is probably in the most optimal position to quickly reinvent itself yet again if new demands and opportunities arise.
This article is an attack on software engineers. Where non-engineers try to swoop in and take their power positions because they "know" better what a company should be doing. This is where engineers get pushed down in the power chain. It's exactly how great products get killed.
First, the game is free to play and very deep as-is. There is no missing feature or add-on to pay for in order to have the full game experience, and the experience is amazing.
Second, they update it every month and managed to keep it interesting through the years. It's an incredible feat.
In the end, it's one of the few places where I'm more than happy to pay micro transactions for virtual hats and idiotic gimmics. Because they do a hell of a job.
Of course I would love a portal 3. But I'm not disapointed of what they are doing right now. They still rock.
Teaching is not unfair in my book, and worth money so I find it a very well balanced paid feature.
I played LOL before, and their rune and pick system is definitely pay to win.
All in all, given the size of dota, I'm actually amazed that so much of it is free. I played it years before spending a cent, and wondered how they could be sustainable.
ranked roles
I would argue that the "gameplay" part is due largely to Icefrog's influence and philosophy regarding hero designs and reccurring patches.
IMO the game has never been more enjoyable and while I haven't gotten a battle pass since 2016 due to the fact that they have gotten too expensive with little value, this year's is actually really tempting with the new map skin, arcanas, persona, and announcer pack.
Don't start me about the ranked roles in DotaPlus.
As someone who has closely followed the Half-Life series since the very first game way back in 1998, I have to say that I found this throwaway comment pretty depressing. But of course you're right, it's their company to run as they please and they don't owe us anything.
That said, it would be nice to wrap up the story for those of us who are (were?) so heavily invested in it. I imagine they'd make a huge amount of money out of it, too.
But we all know that financial decisions aren't being made by engineers.
Like for example the decision to pick up in the valley of the gods.
Why? Women/lgbt are playing hero shooters, we don't need some bs exploration game.
Fact is: engineers refuse to believe that creatives spent the same staggering amount of time honing their skills - it's just inconvenient because that means engineers possess about as much creativity as we do oop skills. That is a deep chasm. And it shows, pick a metric. They have had a near 0% success rate in creating new games outside the Orange box era.
Which is incredibly unfortunate, because these guys think because they can build engines/hw they can make good art because it doesn't involve math, so easy.
I see Activision valve in the decade if they don't make some pretty radical changes in the near future.
Valve Bad; Epic good!
There has been an incredible quantity of these PR efforts over the last 6 months as Epic has tried to push that narrative in to the public conscious (and has managed to do so, I would expect this article is a result of those efforts rather than directly paid spin).
However, it's still the same regurgitated untrue nonsense points from Epic PR we see everywhere else:
Steam lazy, makes no games. Not Epic! Massive hit Fortnite!
Steam does nothing to validate quality, noble indie developers "drowned in a sea of dreck" - not like Epic's hand-curated marketplace!
Standard "child with parent's credit card" bogeyman evoked regarding Valve, with it's "abusive capitalist mindset"
Valve is a "monopolist platform" (it is not).
Valve's take is a "substantial cut" - not like Epic, which offers "a generous split".
And so on.
Of all these, the one that riles me up the most is the doublespeak rewriting of the meaning of the work "monopoly". Valve is not in any way shape or form a monopoly. Epic is literally purchasing exclusive monopoly distribution rights for numerous games, and then raising prices of them.
I suppose this won't be the last "Steam Bad; Epic Good" nonsense I see as E3 fast approaches. I am looking forward to the Epic Games sponsored PC Gaming Show!
Steam provides more value to me on an order of magnitude that makes the article laughable. Steam is like netflix before licensing fractured their content between 20 different streaming services. It's not perfect but I'm not crying over the loss of a few more valve games. Better to burn out than fade away anyway.
I don't see it as Steam vs quality Valve games, but rather CS:GO/Dota2/TF2 vs new Valve games. I don't think Steam itself has any impact of the games Valve release. If anything, it seems like the teams are fairly separate.
I'm trying to imagine apt-get with an embedded, proprietary chat client and full name registration system - popcon mandatory. I wonder how many would see it as an improvement.
Dota 2's success doesn't come from a release dump in 2013 and then just an influx of hats. There's continuous development that's happening on the game. There are new features added all the time, game mechanic changes, new heroes, new items, map changes etc. The whole engine was swapped out from Source to Source 2. There was a year where there were two branches of Dota 2 being played concurrently as this transition happened. Very few games in history have received this kind of attention.
On top of that Dota 2 has one of the best executed e-sports scenes. Valve has been directing the scene structurally, supporting it with unrivaled prize pools [2], and building a lot of features into the game to support e-sports, e.g. in-client spectating with both observer camera and player perspective.
So no, Valve has not mutated into a financial middleman. They're hard at work at supporting one of the most successful games in history. The kind of success that other game developers can only dream of. Sure that means they can't also be working on a bunch of other games, but that doesn't make them any less of a game developer.
--
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/stats/
[2] $179,702,427 have been given out in prize money (mostly from Valve) thus far. https://www.esportsearnings.com/games
Come now, this part of your response is totally misleading. Valve contribute a base $1.6M for TIs, $3M for the old majors, $150k for the current minors and $500k for the current majors. The vast majority of the $179M is crowd-funded money: money which Valve facilitated the collection of but which many people only gave to boost the prize pool of The Internationals.
Contrast this to an actual crowdfunding site like Kickstarter which does not pay VAT on the collected money. [1][2]
However perhaps you didn't like that my point could be viewed as if Valve is transferring money from non dota related profits to dota. That's of course not true, Valve is a business and profits from dota. I fully admit that and thought it didn't need mentioning.
--
[1] https://help.kickstarter.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005139493-...
Before that, to release a game, one would need a publisher, a distribution deal, a ton of money wasted to get the game into the player's hard drives.
What Valve did is much much more significant for the gaming industry and sparked a ton of indie developers. That's much more impactful than half life 3 could have ever been.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began-with-a...
The Uncharted series was gobsmacking production values, a great story, some nice adventure aspects, a bunch of lame puzzles, and at the core a mediocre hand-holdey shooter based on arcade style bullet-sponge mechanics made absurd by the parallel universe of endless cut-scenes where death is consequential and killing is bad. Why are we (the supposed good guys) gleefully murdering so many people? It doesn't make sense.
I absolutely loved the Uncharted series, but that contradiction never sat right with me. And it became all the more obvious in the later games as the production values improved to ever-greater feats of realism and the cut-scenes increasingly humanised the enemy.
So I never played the Uncharted games (though I really loved The Last of Us) so this may be incorrect, but I thought the later Uncharted games made that contradiction a plot point?
Maybe. They never bothered to release it for the PC, so I'll never know.
Also this “reporter” evidently knows nothing about how Valve actually does things internally.
It's the dream of every MBA to skim on top of transactions instead of directly producing value.
I think that every company in the gaming industry has the problem of not needing to treat their developers very well. There are so many CS students in college dreaming of building computer games that there are always a dozen people outside the door trying to get in. That gives the company a lot of leverage over its employees.
Not only from a financial perspective but from an emotional/personal as well. You need people who can dedicate years of their life developing new tech and actually making the thing, knowing that there is a large chance to fail.
As per Valve handbook, each "co-worker" should think about the risks to the company and it is not surprising that as a group they work on less risky things which can generate profit. (Steam, existing titles).
But as competition in storefronts increases, I think they will be forced to innovate, either through VR, their own games or some other way.
Making Steam and making it work is hard. Steam does not have the advantage of a platform monopoly like Apple or Sony stores. They earned their place in the market. And as other said here, Steam is more important for gaming history than Half Life 3 would be.
I understand that making money is a very powerful drive for a lot of people. But what's another million when you have 100 million?
Valve can afford to implement Half Life 3 (or pay someone to do it for them). It would, at the very least, make a profit, even if it wasn't a huge success. Instead they are letting the IP die a slow death. That would make me sad. The 101 million would help, for a while, but the pain would return.
He and Michael Harrington founded Valve a year afterwards. I asked Gabe over email if it was because it was the 1 year anniversary of Windows 95 launch but he said Valve was actually founded on his wedding day.
That's never going to happen, at least not while he's alive.
From what I understand, the Steam team isn't even that big, most of Valve employees work on games, but again, it's mostly those 3 that bring all the money. Therefore, splitting out the game company won't solve the real issue, which is that they are more focused on addictive games people play for thousands of hours, over quality award winning story telling.
They're 10 years late with this article.
First, they broke the traditional publishing model with Steam, offering an entirely new way for developers (especially independent developers) to deliver their games to consumers without needing a publisher.
Second, their current project is clearly geared toward breaking the Windows monopoly on PC gaming and they have done a tremendous job so far. Thanks to Steam and Valve's efforts, more games are available than ever on Mac and Linux.
What is the author's take on Valve's interesting and revolutionary innovations on the business side of PC gaming? "Capitalism bad." It is an ideological piece with nothing interesting to say.
Ahem, no. Capitalism didn't kill it. Had Valve tried to maximize revenue/income, it would either hire more people to develop those profitable franchises, or contracted the development out to another studio. At the very least, they could have sold off the rights to Microsoft or Sony and allow them to butcher sequels and movies.
Had capitalism won, we'd be seeing Half-Life 12, Portal 7, TF 10, CS 8, LFD 6, etc. There's a lot of creative property there that could have been developed to death. That they didn't do that says they'd give up on revenue (at least in the mid term) to protect those properties.
Not sure I agree. In fairly recent memory I can think of a number of artistic successes that were huge risks. It’s easy to forget that the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie scared the shit out of Sony, and with good reason. It had a blockbuster budget and starred a contentious, commercially unproven actor doing an incredibly risky performance. To this day I suspect that Johnny Depp fully expected the movie to tank, and would have been quite happy if that had happened.
Marvel’s investment in “Iron Man” wasn’t too far off that mark either. Its star had only recently been in the throes of drug problems so severe that at once point he wandered into a neighbor’s house and feel asleep naked in their bed. IIRD correctly the director’s biggest movie up to that time was “Swingers”.
To me there were a couple of watershed moments in hip-hop that could have destroyed the careers of the people who finally said “yes”. Rap before “Straight out of Compton” was pretty much just supercharged melodic R&B with talking. Whoever signed Eminem was taking a serious risk as being guilty of the next Vanilla Ice.
The XBox wasn’t greeted with any sense of inevitability. Microsoft had to deal with game developers in ways it had never worked with companies before. Its relationship to hardware was spotty (though I loved just about everything they tried). It was not at all clear that an accomplished systems/app company had any expertise at all in the Byzantine politics, personalities, and economics of the game world.
Dr. Dre, one of the most successful rap producers of all time, signed Eminem after watching him perform. By then, Eminem was already well-known in local circles for his rap skills, and there was no risk of him being seen as Vanilla Ice (a joke, incidentally, which worked its way into 8 Mile, which was loosely based on the life of Marshall Mathers).
It certainly was, the first PotC movie basically established pirate movies as a blockbuster genre. And while the Mouse was already rich back in 2003, even for them $143M budget is a risk.
Even movies that made them a small but solid profit like Tron Legacy (400M box office vs 170M budget) get chucked into the bin (most unfortunately, as I really liked the movie and had hoped for a sequel).
PotC was most definitely not a gamble for Disney. PotC was always expected to be successful--it just turned out to be even more successful than they thought it would be.
Note: the same thing that happened to Legacy happened to the Solo movie. Solo more than made back its production budget but did not make back its total budget including marketing, which is why at first glance it looks silly than Disney killed the Star Wars Story franchise. Both Legacy and Solo actually ended up being decently profitable for Disney when partner tie-ins, DVD sales, and streaming rights are included, but those income streams aren't known until long after the movie is deemed a success or failure and for most box office "failures" these long-tail income streams don't usually bring the movie into the black.
TLDR: A movie has to make back more than its production and marketing budgets to be profitable to the studio, and since they split ticket sales with theaters and distribution partners, the movie has to do a lot better at the box office than just matching its budget.
The xbox WAS xbox live matchmaking. It made online multiplayer on the console mainstream.
Man. Have you had a Zune? I loved mine!
If I'm not mistaken, that was one of the first products where the Metro design language was applied. (edit: Media Center was the first)