I worked at Valve a few years back, and I could write a book about what's wrong there. I think the biggest problem they have -- which the author of this article touched on -- is that "success is the worst teacher." Valve have discovered that cosmetic microtransactions are big money makers, and thus every team at Valve was dedicated to that vision. When I was there (before Artifact started in open development) there were essentially no new games being developed at all. There was a small group that were working on Left for Dead 3 (cancelled shortly after I joined), and a couple guys poking around with pre-production experiments for Half-Life 3 (it will never be released). But effectively all the attention was focused on cosmetic items and "the economy" of the three big games (DOTA, CS:GO, and TF2). One very senior employee even said that Valve would never make another single player game, because they weren't worth the effort. "Portal 2," he explained, had only made $200 million in profit and that kind of chump change just wasn't worth it, when you could make 100s of millions a year selling digital hats and paintjobs for guns (most of which are designed by players, not the employees!)
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.
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. A look at the big trends since 30 years clearly shows it. For example, in 2000, 50 games were high-grossing hits over a total of 5000 games that were produced that year [1]. You may think, well, cool story bro but what about Ubisoft for example, they are doing games like content. Most companies that did or do video games like it's content have or will disappear (the data show it all). 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.
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.
> 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.
I hope it's some kind of sarcasm. This is why Call of Duty is best-selling video game in the US 7 of 9 years since 2009:
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.
Because the models these games use is not sustainable for all games. Sports games have several things going for them that normal games don't. Like being simulations of the real world, so as players move, etc then the game gets updated. Secondly there is an inherint monopoly on sports games. There is only one official NFL game.
I just tend to disagree with this sentence too. Basically there a lot of game developers even in hardcore genres who efficiently maintain content-driven games: almost all simulators, economic strategies, Paradox-interactive strategies.
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.
What you explaining is exactly definition of "content driven game". They basically have working game mechanics with very few changes and a lot of content.
While I agree some games take most of players you know who those players are and which games are those?
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.
it's not like they should have lacked confidence though. They put out a lot of high quality games one after another. I still think the Orange box was pretty much the best game bundle ever to be sold. And given that they're a private company with lots of cash if they're not making great games, who else is supposed to?
> "Portal 2," he explained, had only made $200 million in profit and that kind of chump change just wasn't worth it, when you could make 100s of millions a year selling digital hats and paintjobs for guns (most of which are designed by players, not the employees!)
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.
Microsoft still has soft power, but the benefit of the platform goes beyond just control. Consider that millions of people who wanted to play Valve's games had to buy a copy of Windows first.
If those people would have used their PC only for that game, yes. But that's not the case. People didn't have a PC just laying around thinking "oh crap now I need an OS".
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 understand that. Most people bought a PC with a bundled Windows license as a prerequisite to run the many applications they cared about. Those are still people who bought Windows, and some of the applications that justified their purchase were likely created by third-party developers like Valve.
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.
Well, given that now Epic is trying to cut into that with Fortnite as the killer/gateway app that gets the Epic marketplace on your system, maybe Valve will be forced to focus on shipping some good new games to retain their position? If that's the case, yay for competition! :)
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.
> Well, given that now Epic is trying to cut into that with Fortnite as the killer/gateway app that gets the Epic marketplace on your system, maybe Valve will be forced to focus on shipping some good new games to retain their position?
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.
> 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.
I buy something from Steam only if it's not on GOG. Games from GOG let you play them without the headaches of the launcher.
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.
Totally agree. However, one major selling point of Steam for me is the practically seamless Proton compatibility layer (while acknowledging the philosophical disconnect between running Linux and buying DRM'd games...)
Before Fortnite was Minecraft and Pokemon Go and Angry Birds... It's in the nature of video games to come and go like fads.
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.
The difference is that Epic is leveraging their current popularity to turn into a platform. Pokemon Go and Angry Birds were already only really available through platforms, so that wasn't an option for them. Minecraft maybe could have, but it seems somewhat opposed to the idea of the program, which is all about user control and users creating an ecosystem. Now that Microsoft owns it, there's already a platform for it, and it's not game specific (the Windows Store).
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.
I'm on the Epic store because they have been giving away games I had wanted to play, specifically Transistor and What Remains of Edith Finch. It remains to be seen how much money I'll spend there. Most of my purchases these days are on GOG.
FWIW I'm a diehard steam user from the beta in 2002, and the Epic store is every bit as good at this point. Absolutely disappointed in Valve for resting on their laurels for this long.
Frankly I'm almost in the opposite camp now - why would I buy anything on Steam when it's clearly being left to rot.
>the Epic store is every bit as good at this point
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.
You're completely correct. Epic store is just a bare-bones program, it lacks features which we consider completely basic and natural in modern online marketplaces, such as a shopping cart. Yes, you have to buy and pay for games one by one.
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.
I have faith that the developers at Epic can improve their store. It's a purely technical problem, and an easy one compared to creating the Unreal Engine.
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.
> 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.
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.
If it doesn't take several seconds to load up a game's page, and if it gives me a way to look at multiple games from a recommended list without having to go one at a time, then it's already ahead of Steam in the ways that matter to me. Steam's store UI is astonishingly slow and cumbersome for what's essentially an embedded web browser. It reminds me of iTunes on windows.
Maybe most of the monetization "features" are regarded as a CON by most players? Just because sb develops this and his lifelihood depends on it, does not make something good or important in the customers 's eyes.
The killer feature with Steam for me at the moment is a combination of,
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.
Like the sibling says, 2016 and forwards essentially. I'm running it on a Q7F (I think it is). If you can get it to work, it's excellent. Supports 4K, whereas the physical one does not. I'm guessing the Apple TV 4K should support 4K streaming as well.
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.
This was Steams initial competitive advantage and it's still a benefit, but now Steam's advantage is that most commercial PC games are on Steam. Although many people still dislike Steam for various reasons, it's still overall the best game platform available on PC and is better than console and mobile platforms in many ways. One thing to thing about is that many of the biggest games (LoL, Fortnite, Minecraft, Activision Blizzard and EA titles) are not available on Steam.
This right here... There are game studios that can keep churning out enough games to create their own alternatives to Steam and they have and they will succeed without Steam. What will be left is microtransactions and indie games if they arent careful.
>All of the most successful tech companies are platforms
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).
> How many people were even on the internet in the mid 1990's?
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.
Holy crap. Of course the usage in 1995 would be super low. That’s around the first time I used the Internet. It was a vast ecosystem to my young eyes. So the number makes complete sense but still shocking to me. I’m guessing by Napster peak time the number was relatively much bigger.
Depends on your definition of "success". As a percentage of total market capitalization, these 4 companies comprise a significant portion of that, though by percentage of total companies, it's a low figure.
I think this perfectly explains how Artifact [1], the worst game ever made by Valve, was made. Valve is now not interested in making games but something that makes money with least effort.
That's a great discussion in itself. You can look at Valve as a company that started out focusing on making exceptional products (Half-Life), or focusing on their users (Steam), which then transitioned into a business that directed it's attention more toward optimizing profits.
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.
No. However, I work for a AAA games publisher, and it's clear that you can do both. We have games which are obviously our money makers and which fund the whole enterprise, but we also regularly make and release smaller games which are unlikely to ever make any money. Those later ones are needed to remain on the top of the game(ha!) in the industry and to give our creative people an outlet where they can experiment with stuff(and that's also how you push forward what games are meant to be and what the market likes/dislikes, without the risk of ruining your AAA big hitters). Valve was once known for pushing those boundaries with revolutionary games, but nowadays they only do what is super ultra safe. That's not great for the industry either.
I mean, yes and no. Every business exists to make profit, but most companies thrive when their customers are happy, not miserable. Many (but not all) microtransactions in gaming, particularly in the more predatory free-to-play models, don't exist for the good of the product, but to offer a relief to the player as the game applies more pressure and pain to try and force the player to cave and spend money. Even the "just cosmetic" microtransactions lean hard on techniques to get the player to spend as much as possible. Both sides of this aren't universal, some businesses are very much "minimum effort, maximum profit" without much care for the quality of their product, and some games take great care to not fall into predatory monetization techniques, even with microtransactions, but speaking generally, it's something that seems rather unique to the game industry.
I have to say that as a player I had an absolute blast in the TF2 hat economy: so many stylish and amusing items and combinations. I'm certain that not everyone had such a good time (it helped that I wasn't buying high-roller items or chasing the dream of a trading profit) but I don't think my experience is exceptional at all.
I recall some in-game commentary from TF2 where they talked about the design of each class. And how they worked hard to ensure that the look and even the outline of each class was unique to aid identification. What happened to that?
Is it possible to do both, e.g. pipeline of new creative titles that attract top-tier talent, a subset of which will mature into rent-seeking properties?
Valve's hat business feels more like walking into a shop that sells hundreds of shiny little things you don't need, but can buy and put everywhere. Battle Pass is like some kind of on-going carnival with the bulk sale of this stuff.
No need for shame, but there is a more subtle dynamic in play, sort of a tragedy of the commons.
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.
The market is a balance of needs and desires between businesses and customers. The perfect balance is achieved when a business focuses on delivering value to customers, and charges a price that's both bearable by those customers and profitable to the business. Trying to optimize for "most money" or "least effort" further generally leads to providing less value in a non-obvious ways - on the light side, through cutting corners and exploiting relatively weaker position of customers; on the heavy side, it transitions to borderline or actual fraud. As a customer, if I sniff that a business has this attitude of maximizing profits[0] at all costs, I do my best to avoid ever having anything to do with them - because it's a strong indication the business isn't focused on delivering value, and will throw the customers under the bus whenever it's beneficial to them.
--
[0] - including, or maybe especially, "delayed profits" (aka. growth), as many startups do.
Very often the way to make money with the least effort involves some kind of scamming/fraud - and at the very least it's not usually good for consumers, so it's not good for your company in the long run.
I would say it's far more shameful when it involves the food industry, for instance, or any other industry that provides essential resources to people. In that case, their business model becomes forcefully harmful to society.
What if the most money with least effort is made though tricking or manipulating people? Lately, that seems to be the trend. I’ve played mobile games recently where the only “content” updates were A-B testing schemes.
That was my fear too, that anyone who was there for the sake of making quality games (such as you) had left and everyone still at Valve only cared about maximizing profit.
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.
From recent accounts of former employees, he's pretty hands off with the company nowadays, mainly playing Dota 2 in his office and occasionally coming out to see how everyone is doing. I was suprised to find out that he's one of the main reasons that Windows became the most popular PC gaming platform. He was one of the main proponents of porting the original DOOM to Windows, and him and his team were responsible for creating DirectX before he left to create Valve.
> From recent accounts of former employees, he's pretty hands off with the company nowadays, mainly playing Dota 2 in his office and occasionally coming out to see how everyone is doing.
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).
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just what comes to my mind when I picture the Valve of today upon reading OP's comment (playing dota in the office).
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".
While you were there, how much was Valve still an "anarcho syndicalist" paradise? When you say projects were cancelled, was that because the teams working on them decided to stop (since everybody there is supposed to be their own boss) or was it a decision that came from the top down? Just curious how close Valve still is to its roots -- or at least the popular mythos of them.
In theory, employees are allowed to (supposed to, even) work on whatever they think is valuable. In reality, you should be working on whatever the people around you think is valuable or you're gonna get fired really quickly. (Fewer than half of new employees make it to the end of their first year.) This usually means doing whatever the most senior people on the team think is important, both because they should know if they've been there for a while, but also because they wield enormous power behind the scenes.
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.
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.
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."
> In reality, you should be working on whatever the people around you think is valuable or you're gonna get fired really quickly. (Fewer than half of new employees make it to the end of their first year.)
>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.
There's been plenty written on Valve's somewhat rare management system and how it works/doesn't work. Just do a HN search for valve and you'll find some explicit ones, and likely good discussions in more than a few in the discussions on submissions about Valve that are about other things.
Just as a side, the way Valve works is quite unusual in the games industry, most studios are more traditional with better defined roles and hierarchies.
> 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" 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.
It may sounds naive, but what on your opinion would have been the result if you'd knock on the CEO's office door, asked if he has 10 minutes to talk to you & then earnestly and honestly (but as diplomatically as you can) have told him exactly that story?
> 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
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.
Your boss reports to his boss. He can deny responsibility and blame his team, but normally if he has the power to hire/fire people that's still his problem.
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.
So, Valve is a terrible company bogged down by incompetent middle managers, just like many other terrible companies run by incompetent middle managers. The only difference is that at Valve their official title is "co-worker" instead of "boss".
Well, it can help if your boss's job description says they're responsible for your performance. Theoretically, that's why they're given the power to fire you in the first place.
If it were purely a profit case and they really don't want to make a new game. Then why doesn't valve sell the IP to publishers that want to make HL3, Portal3, Left4Dead3 etc? they'll collect a check with no effort and enable fans to have a new game.
Valve is treading water with their current games. Their current ecosystem is broadly based on goodwill of that system. If other publishers make a Valve game, like BattleField 2, and it gets called out and shunned, that ruins the good will that fuels Valve. And as long as they don't release games like that, they don't rock their boat. The problem with Epic is that they don't have any goodwill to start with that they can lose and they are smearing studios in a level of hate that is destroying those studio's goodwill.
At the end of it both will make money, but Valve will come out smelling like roses and able to pick the winners after Epic destroys the low hanging fruit.
Because HL3 would suck. First person shooters today are very different than what first person shooters were when HL2 was released. It's Quake vs Overwatch. So Valve is between a rock and a hard place; do they make HL3 in the modern style and alienate all their original fans? Or do they make HL3 in the dated style and risk a flop because the market for that dated style has only gotten smaller over the past decade and new players aren't interested in it? That's why HL3 would suck. No matter which path they take, and no matter how expertly they make it, it will almost certainly be something that leaves a TON of people dissatisfied.
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.
I don't think of the style as dated. If you think of Portal 2 as a continuation of the style on a tangent, it's just heading in it's own unique direction. Portal 2 still feels far ahead of today's AAA games in various aspects.
Comparing the HH style directly to other FPS just doesn't seem right.
First off, Portal 2 was eight years ago. That's a long time and mainstream consumer expectations for what a video game should offer have changed a lot over those eight years.
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.
> They'd rather HL3 be an urban legend than a disappointment. That's better for their image as experts in their craft
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.
Ok I don’t play gta:o or rdr2:o but I bought both games full price.
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.
Doom 2016 was a nice tribute I suppose, but compare it to the massive success of Doom 1&2. It's not the same sort of cultural phenomenon. What I will give it though is it nailed the attitude. Doom 1&2 had a certain raw metal attitude, and Doom 2016 captured that well. I've never seen the HL series expressing attitude like Doom did.
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.
I think one could argue that the original Doom had more in common with Fortnite than with its newer iteration. A Doom level wasn't that big, and it was for the most part a quick little stand-alone experience, almost arcadey; you could hop in, frag some demons, and play the same levels over and over. There was no story, no RPG elements, I don't even recall whether your health and ammo and weapons carried over between levels.
As for size and complexity, there were original Doom levels that surpass the 2016 levels in every quantifiable measure. Larger maps, huge mazes, etc. All thanks to the WAD system that allowed Doom to have such long legs thanks to community driven content. With the new graphics system of 2016, community generated content was just never going to be a real thing with 2016. That is where 2016 and the original differ the most. As for unwanted RPG elements, 2016 at least has a mode that ignores that and dumps you into any level you want. To your point though, the RPG elements did alienate some fans of the original games, which goes back to my original point.
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.
> Or do they make HL3 in the dated style and risk a flop because the market for that dated style has only gotten smaller over the past decade and new players aren't interested in it?
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.
Have you looked at the indie scene? Lots of 2D platformers there for example: cave story, shovel knight, limbo, thomas was alone, cuphead, rogue legacy, dead cells, and spelunky to name a few.
That's just not true. I really hate the newer FPS style, with the clunky hitboxes and weird movement. I miss the accuracy and smoothness of the HL series, to me HL2 shines because of the gaming experience.
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.
they can still do both, modern squad action multiplayer and traditional story driven single player can coexist, call of duty and battlefield made a point of doing that year after year. the rest is a marketing problem, being able to reach both audiences with the correct message
I'd be curious to hear you speculate on how Valve's VR push may have come about. VR certainly has the potential to make money long term, but very long term, and that payoff is far from guaranteed.
I'm not GP, but that information is actually publicly available from the people involved, here's a basic summary if you're interested:
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.
I guess they are afraid of the oculus store.if vr becomes a thing and something like the quest make it ( standalone vr) steam is gone for good. Then the middle man is Facebook with oculus store.
> had only made $200 million in profit and that kind of chump change just wasn't worth it
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.
This is what I don't understand. Why not hire 100 great game developers, give them $2 million each over 4 years, and have them develop Portal 3?
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?
Yep. I interviewed at Epic and the recruiter gave a big ol spiel about how they're working on developing a platform for cross-system gaming. Basically genericizing what they did for Fortnite and selling it as a game platform service. I could see a lot of those games going into an Epic Store that replaces Steam.
>most of which are designed by players, not the employees!
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.
Hey riotnrrd. I report for a video games news website. Would you like to share more about the environment at Valve? Feel free to contact me on discord - pingal#8518 or email - pingal@spieltimes.com
Well, IMHO The Lab is the best "game" made by Valve in the recent years. For a free tech demo, it has a surprisingly large amount of content: 8 minigames, plus the lobby. Three of them are score-based and have some replay value, the others are more like experiences.
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...
Your comment seems to talk about all publicly known information and pretty much reiterates the common hate echo chamber. Which leads me to believe that you made this all up.
From the perspective of allowing more and more games to exist and do well on the market Valve is doing amazing. This talk goes over some of it https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025672/2014-vs-2018-The-Shape but essentially there are 1000+ games right now on Steam with over 100 concurrent users. One of my games got about 80 concurrent users at its peak and it made a small but fair amount of money (especially for someone's first game), so it's easy to see how 1000+ games with that many players means a lot of financial success to a lot of people, way more than ever happened before for game developers.
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.
The PC game revival probably would have taken much longer without Steam. The things that Steam does seamlessly like installing required frameworks, a regular update delivery system, cloud saves, and a cloud-based library with a low price is really easy to take for granted now that it's everywhere. Before Steam, it was a chore to play a game on PCs.
Also being able to stream a PC game to any device is really cool.
> Before Steam, it was a chore to play a game on PCs.
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.
It was indeed a chore. Your local shop might not have the game - it might not have been released in your country. Media could be damaged. DRM that wouldn't work on your system. You buy that huge box and all it has is a leaftlet and a CD in a paper sleeve. The game might not actually run, depending on a patch that you had to huntdown in some slow FTP server somewhere.
I do not miss manual patching one bit. If you were lucky the publisher hosted the patches themselves. If not you're downloading them from some potentially sketcky third party site. And then you often had to apply the patches sequentially instead of just applying the latest.
It was definitely a tedious process, made all the more frustrating when all you wanted to do was play. But damn if your post didn't just make me smile from a wave of nostalgia.
One thing that I kind of miss from "physical" game was the leaflet/manual. Some of them were truly awesome. For example, the original boxes for guild wars had those huge manual with concept art, lore, and explanation about the whole game. It gave you something to do while downloading all the updates on a 256k connection ;) . When you buy games on GoG, they sometimes give you access to the old manual in PDF, but most game don't really have any anymore or it is really just a barebone manual on how to install and play the game.
That drastically increases the cost of the game though along with the physical copy itself. One of the major benefits of a cloud gaming platform is that games become cheap. If you really like that type of swag though it's still available via crowdfunding
I wouldn't be GOG surprised if it was GOG that stole Valve's market share in Europe because no one buys physical copies of PC games anymore, especially when most of them are just boxes with just the Steam code.
There is GOG for that. No one is buying physical media, that's so '90s. The only exception are probably collector editions, which people buy for fun. But surely no one does it for convenience, because it can't compete with convenience of digital DRM-free stores.
Not optical disks, which are commonly used for selling such stuff. If you preserve your archives using them, you are in for a nasty surprise. And who sells games on hard drives? So the way it works - you buy digitally, and do a proper back up of your copy using whatever good storage you want. Not optical disks though.
> allowing more and more games to exist and do well on the market Valve is doing amazing
Not to mention their efforts with Linux gaming. Proton [1] is amazing: in under a year a lot of AAA games just work with it. Something you couldn't even imagine happening for the next 10 years.
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).
The part about it being ok to break rules more freely as a solo dev because it’s all in your head also resonated with me as something I think about but stray from due to needless guilt
The usual counter-point is that even when you're solo you're not - it's you writing the code today, against you reading the code in 6 months or more and not remembering anything. I think that's often overblown in importance though.
It's ridiculous how this article is displaying Valve's strength as a failure. Valve is exactly the poster boy of a successful agile organic company that is run by software engineers. A company able to reinvent itself to meet demands. They have been pioneering the concepts of the app store and micro-purchases making it the most profitable company per employee. Things that Apple and Google get applauded for. What's amazing is that those profits didn't come from the demands of profit seeking shareholders. It came from the demands of the people, the software engineers, themselves who work at the company.
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.
I'll also add, as a regular dota player, that they don't just "get rent" out of it.
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.
Hell, they still seem to support the original Half-Life. According to the file metadata, the hl binary on my machine has been rebuilt about a month ago. That makes it 20 years; better than Windows.
IIRC, Steam's DRM modifies binaries on disk to inextricably link them to the user account. That might be the reason for the recent modified timestamp if you installed it recently, not an update to the original binary.
I mostly agree with you, but DotA plus is a shift towards subtly pay-to-win features. It's always surprising when a subscription lapses and I find out something is a DotA plus feature and not just part of the game.
I have dota plus. It doesn't give you any advantage on the current game. It merely lets you learn more about the current meta on the long run, faster than keeping up with all youtubers. Even pick stats and suggestions will not make you win more. It just teaches you.
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.
To be fair, Dota hasn't changed that much since W3 Mod days in terms of overall gameplay, yes there are talents and the map has changed but it's still 5 v 5 , 3 lanes, and you need to destroy the ancient. The only thing that has radically changed since Icefrog joined Valve is how it was monetized by using the Marketplace and cosmetics to rake in huge profits.
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.
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.
The engineers have a pretty bad creative track record, and really have no idea what's in right now.
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.
It's a common misconception the amount of creativity that is required to engineer a product. Engineers are the creatives! All the greatest game titles were designed by people with an engineering background. It was only later that some games got designed by artists using already existing game engines.
The reason Valve isn't producing great games is not because they can't. It's because they don't want to.
All the greatest titles of the early 70s-2000s and were products of their times. The hardware and systems were limited, and the basic level writing and direction matched the limited graphics.
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.
Valve hasn't made any games 100% because their engineers aren't creatives. It's kinda like the one hit wonder phenomenon. It's common in creative fields, like when an artist accidentally stumbles on a style and finds success, only to never be able to 'create something as good as the original' because they never had the skills in the first place--while the skills they actually need to create consistently take a lifetime to hone--so as creatives, they fade to obscurity.
Sorry, but even today (the most?) successful innovative games continue to come from people with engineering backgrounds. Also the engineers at Valve have continued to release games (Dota 2) and other valuable products that enabled many games to see the light of day.
Also it makes sense that - when you build an app store - it's better not to work on creating products (games) that are in direct competition with your customers.
I haven't said artists are useless. You guys contribute amazing things and surely have your roles to play. I do however see a problem with non-engineers (taking your line of arguing) trying to obtain leading roles over creative processes in the field of engineering. It simply doesn't work. Or at least not efficiently.
What we'll be seeing is that game engines will continue to become more like a sort of "Photoshop for games". It's where you guys will shine. Although I guarantee you some of the best titles will continue to come from engineers. Simply because engineers are their own audience. Artistic types tend to have different interests.
So in the past couple decades, your ace in the hole is Dota? Damn, that's an entire game (that was mirrored from a w3 mod) Also: gen z gives absolutely zero shits about Mobas, so that's kind of a lost cause.
What else do you got? Or is it just DOTA in two decades, that z gives no shits about, while the main moba demo ages out of gaming.
And are you serious? "we can't compete with other games so we don't" This is exactly the kind of bs I'm talking about.
Bunch of one hit wonder 1%ers who have been been sitting around in a vacuum playing widgets over at club valve over in bellevue, they haven't grown at all since the orange box.
'I do however see a problem with non-engineers (taking your line of arguing) trying to obtain leading roles over creative processes in the field of engineering. It simply doesn't work. Or at least not efficiently."
This is the bias I am talking about. You guys are sitting at a near 0% in terms of creating new and interesting IP--and this is throughout the entire industry--I can count the good titles post-orange box era with one hand.
Technology evolved: engineers realized they need visual people now, but for everything else were like: nah, we're good.
Spoiler: you're not.
No new titles, the titles that get through are disposable flavors of the month, at best.
The amount of creativity engineers have shown is about equal to creatives skill in OOP. If a gulf engineers don't even know how to cross.
If we could quantify the difference, it would be like asking a non tech person to do your netcode. We are talking about a lifetime a shaping here, you can't backload the skills any easier than I can backload the skills to build an engine.
You're missing my point. I didn't say we don't need artists. I'm saying you shouldn't have artists taking leading roles in the fields that aren't artistic.
Perhaps you're doing a bit too much goalposting to make your argument? Ignoring all the groundbreaking titles (in any company). The other groundbreaking title that was released by Valve was of course Steam. The first app store.
What makes Valve so great is that they're exactly not doing the same old thing they were doing. They reinvent and innovate. That's what makes it a great company. One of the best imho.
Do you hear any complaints coming from Valve? Seems to me they're happy with the direction they chose.
I love it. No complaints from the legacy engineers who are collecting million dollar salaries doing nothing, blowing smoke up gabes ass with vaporware.
Out of the 100million American pc gamers--during peak western hours--less than a 1/4 are on steam.
Everyone else on the inside and outside who don't want to see the company sold to activision-disney is a bit concerned.
The goalpost will move, and it will continue to move as we continue to examine how bad the bed has been shit post orangebox.
Millions upon millions of dollars spent over decades, with almost nothing to show. With any recent innovations coming from asset flips and indie teams.
I still fail to see the problem. I understand your complaint. But Valve is doing fantastic. It's not their mission to bring out new titles. A company is not a democracy where we get "to vote" what direction they should take. If it's not what you like then don't work for them or buy their products.
I find it hard to believe that they got into the industry to play stock market for games, haha.
I am wondering if Beth is planning on their own platform next, Microsoft is definitely making those moves . . .
I think the new meta is a cycling people around content releases, hopefully within your ecosystem, but np if not, because they will cycle back for the next updates.
But it's an agile company. It means it's "Boss-free since 1996". It works as follows: The creative director has a cool idea for a game. He makes the designs, storyboards and whatever. Then he needs to find developers who are willing to work on his idea. In an agile company it can very well happen nobody wants to work on your idea. You might get a response like: "Cool idea! You should go ahead and build it!" This in contrast to a top-down management company where bosses exist that tell you what it is you must work on. It's where people become "resources".
So what you're proposing can only happen through a top-down management approach where the boss/project-manager assembles the team and tells everybody what to work on. You take away the essence of the company culture at Valve.
What you fail to see is that it's actually been the right choice NOT to release new games but - in stead - work on Steam (and facilitating other game shops release their games). If creative directors would be ruling Valve that would most likely have never happened. Meaning Valve wouldn't have achieved $4.3B revenue.
I see a bunch of visual people, no creative directors - and the best indicator would be a current catalog of intriguing content.
The source guys wont work with anyone outside their clique. They are toxic. Studies have shown, despite skill, toxic employees bring the entire company down.
Maybe it's time to return to top down, some accountability is needed.
Steam ran the industry into the ground, ten years of stagnation where indie studios had to pick up the slack with asset flips and low budget shitters. Console sales are at an all time high.
This is nothing to applaud. I would say they put in no effort, but they automated profits, so that's kind of something, but not the reason any of us got into the bizz.
Finally we are just now starting to see some innovation coming 2020, and would ya look at, everyone had creative directors.
Valve doesn't serve the people anymore, and seeing all their devs and fanboys fanboy on the forums like "if you don't like it, leave" cracks me up. Less than a 1/4 US PC gamers are on steam during peak hours, why would they be?
People are now accustomed to being served by companies in the business to serve, being the Wallmart of the gaming industry is nothing to be proud of, and isn't even a position Valve can hold with WePlay, Epic, Blizz, and Microsoft in the arena.
Baby, I am a freelancer with three creative degrees, I just work better with distractions - I actually made some games you probably play a hellevua lot better. You've probably enjoyed some music/media I've had my hot little hands on, too.
I suspect Valve is suffering from artistic perfectionism, which means they will never release any of their products, much like how GRRM is repeatedly rewriting his novels.
>Chapters still to write, of course... but also rewriting. I always do a lot of rewriting, sometimes just polishing, sometimes pretty major restructures.
You can compare various games, but even with low quality graphics, Half Life has a visceral presentation that simply beats the others.
Writing is re-writing, nobody was arguing against that. It's pretty common to go through twelve or more drafts, with the exception of King, whose wild ass gets it done in two drafts.
It's the scale of GoT that's remarkable, and the reason it's taking so long. It's not just some stupid epic wizard quest - it's 150 character weaving into eachother, and it's well done.
Since Source was released, GRRM actually released like 16 books, three of those were GoT, and he also did a bunch of TV stuff. And now a game, too.
Nobody was arguing that half-life wasn't cool, I was arguing that the source guys can't ship games. They acquired everything post orangebox.
I am just arguing that Valve is more interested in making games than releasing them. I don't disagree with you, but the closest historical parallel is Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels.
While we study and mine cinema for launching off points - we do so knowing why we do so. The threads are timeless, but the execution was a thing of the time, much like HL.
Let's compare Hughes to Valve for some reason.
Hughes released at least 11 films - none of which were acquired. If he had only Scarface under his belt, he would be just another in a long line of shameful one hit wonders--those who accidentally stumble upon a hit without the skills to back it up--who consequently are unable to create anything else of substance.
It's been fifteen years, everything post-orangebox was acquired.
To put this in another way, Valve likely has spent millions developing the next Half Life game, and they will spent millions more. They are paying employee salaries, after all.
I wouldn't be too surprised if Valve will have spent $50 million on Half Life 3 at the point of release.
Fanboying is how we're going to get Disney-Activision-Valve.
They acquired titles and they automated profits. So pretty much the private version of a public company. Nothing at all to be proud of--especially after this horrible decade of PC gaming where indie teams had to pick up the slack with asset flips and low budget shitters. Console sales are now at an all time high.
We ran out of comparisons and only have their own mediocrity to examine at this point, but we could go the route of comparing them to failed companies who refused to adapt, like "NAH WE'RE GOOD" Blockbuster.
WePlay, Epic, Microsoft, Blizzard, Uplay. Less than a 1/4 of the 100 million PC gamers are on steam during peak western hours. The monopoly platform model is out with WePlay entering the arena, everyone else realized this and is prepared to hit hard with the 2020 releases.
Valve doesn't have much time to turn it around, and with how frugal they've been with development, I'd have a hard time believing that they will float the company once the steam money is compromised.
They have no current catalog, so they are already starting miles behind--coupled with the fact that their s2 guys wont play well with others--nothing short of a purge and a return to top down will save them.
This article is a fairly standard hit-piece, of which there are many that follow the basic form:
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!
We could have a small handful of new great games from valve and an unknown number of crappy ones, or we could have steam.
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.
+1. Steam is pretty damned good, and as a business they are killing it. As an entrepreneur I applaud them for the pivot. This isn't just hats - they provide access to TONS of games we would otherwise never see.
Yea, I'm amazed at the criticisms of Steam. Do you all not remember buying computer games before it? Having friends on all different programs, no integrated chat, cds everywhere, this is defintely rose-tinted googles.
I suppose I'm in a minority, but for me, all I want is the games. And those existed, in non physical form, before (or at least alongside) Steam. There were several stores that would simply let you buy the ability to download an installer, install a game and play it. No "portal", no "platform", no - thank the Gods! - integrated chat or friends lists. I could chat with people (who were not even on Steam!) very well on ICQ or whatever, thank you very much. I don't want anybody to know what I'm currently playing, or how many hours I've played it.
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.
This feels like another sour grapes article by someone that wants Valve to focus on their favorite games instead. Dota 2 is Steam's most played game [1] and has been so for most of the last decade. I have spent thousands of hours playing it during that time and I know dozens of people personally who have played it even more. We are happy that Valve is providing unprecedented support for the game. The kind of support which is rare. Just look at new games like EA's Anthem, where players are complaining about barely receiving any updates, although they were promised a bunch.
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.
'$179,702,427 have been given out in prize money (mostly from Valve) thus far'
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.
All the money paid for compendiums is for services provided by Valve. Valve also pays all the taxes that come with this fact, e.g. VAT. Yes they promise to give 25% of the revenue to prize pools and thus far have done so, but from a legal standpoint it's no different than buying skins in League of Legends.
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.
Valve created the digital game stores as we know today, away from the expensive physical copies into the digital distribution.
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.
Whatever they evolved to, their contribution to Linux gaming is outstanding, so thanks Valve for doing it. Without Valve, we wouldn't have such rapid progress of Wine/dxvk, radv, OpenXR and other gaming related open stack.
An og prospector looked around, and realized that the future was opening a store to sell backpacks and pickaxes to all the young newcomers who were coming in droves to stake their claim. Og prospector can't prospect like he used to. He's lost his chops. No matter. He's in the prospecting supply business now.
By focusing on the Steam platform rather than on its own creative game productions, Valve has shared more creativity with the world than it could ever had accomplished on its own. It is a creativity multiplier. It's a tremendous success in business and the arts.
Oh my god! I've seen so many videos with Yanis, and I also knew that Valve had a Greek economist in their midst, but I never linked the two. A lot of things make sense now.
The Last of Us was a masterpiece. It deserves a place in gaming history up there with Doom and Half Life 2.
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.
I got a PS4 for last christmas with The Last of Us. What a game, really good story telling. The game is over 5 years old and even today with a lot of great games, this is one of my all time favorites ever.
> I absolutely loved the Uncharted series, but that contradiction never sat right with me.
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?
I can't feel upset about Valve's success. I think their existence has done a net good to the industry, the games are cheap, the system works well and they support Linux better than any other big name in the creative industry, they even employed thr DXVK developer. We could dream with Netflix supporting Linux the way Valve does.
Valve is not perfect, but making them out to be rent seekers is a lie. They revolutionized the PC games market to the benefit of developers and consumers, and they are actively improving their platform and driving adoption of new technologies like VR.
Also this “reporter” evidently knows nothing about how Valve actually does things internally.
every sufficiently big company will eventually want to move into payment/banking. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Car manufacturers, supermarkets, airplane manufacturers, etc.
It's the dream of every MBA to skim on top of transactions instead of directly producing value.
I really don't see the problem here. It's not like there's a shortage of games, or game developers in the world. If one of them has gotten out of that market, to develop a shared platform that everyone (developers and consumers alike) want and need, isn't everyone better off?
That all sounds terrible, but to some extent I wonder if those problems are driven by the "self-organizing company" aspect or if they are the result of it being in the gaming industry.
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.
I find it funny how this article casts Steam as something easy to do, as if its success has been random and just first mover advantage.
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 think to a large extent it is first mover advantage, but that's not something to be taken lightly. They invested in developing an internet distribution platform at a time when broadband penetration was relatively low. I couldn't get anything other than dial-up internet access, and Steam seemed more of an inconvenience than a revolutionary idea.
I understand all this and yet even a hit of a rumour of Valve working on Half Life 3 makes my heart pump and brings butterflies to my stomach. On the other hand, "so and so company made millions selling hats on a videogame" means nothing to me.
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.
Something the author didn't address in the article is opportunity cost. It might be that the employee supply at Valve is limited, and that as a for profit company, it has to allocate this limited resource the most profitable way. Making 50 employees work on HL3 might get you $100M in profit, but why would you do that if you can make $150M more on hats with the very same team?
I’m surprised that Valve stayed so heavily entrenched in just microtransactions. I wonder how much money they could have made if they also focused on licensing out a newer source engine, and funneling source engine games into their platform.
Personally I like steam, and I don't mind them being a current monopolists of gaming platforms. All of the gaming market has been capitalized and we see companies like EA pushing their teams to the limit just for a release before a fiscal year. Results in half-baked product. Big publishers, including Blizzard, are having a tough time, and steam is a great platform for smaller devs to promote their content (Darkest Dungeon is a good success story). Sure Valves economic policies are profit oriented, but IMHO there's a good side to steam.
I'll honestly be shocked if Microsoft doesn't buy Valve in day for Steam. Obviously current ownership would be against it, even with Nadella, but one day it just feels like a guarantee.
Microsoft has tried to buy Valve multiple times. The funny thing is, Valve originally pitched Steam to Microsoft, asked them to build it and they said no (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/the-last-of-the-indep...), so they ended up building it themselves. Now, there is no guarantee that a Microsoft built store would have gained the same dominance as Steam (MS has launched multiple stores for Windows since), but it's funny to think about.
Valve and Gabe have explicitly said if will never happen. I met someone that once worked at MSFT in corporate development. Said they spent months working on a pitch to acquire Valve and Gabe kicked them out of the building after 15 minutes.
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.
Yes, that's why I said "current ownership" I was referring to Valve not Microsoft's ownership. Gabe will one day pass, and I believe Microsoft will buy it there after.
Valve is Gabe's baby. He already has freedom to do whatever he wants in life with his cash cow so why would he also give up his legacy to be obliterated?
Unlike what the article implies, I don't think Steam is the reason hasn't put any new great single-player games, but rather their big 3 micro-transaction games (TF2, CS:GO and Dota 2).
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.
This is a really disappointing article. Valve has changed the PC gaming industry in multiple ways, actually keeping the market alive and rejuvenating it.
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.
>How capitalism killed one of the best video game studios
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.
> One factor is that a capitalist business mindset is badly corrosive to an artistic temperament.
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.
Pirates of the Caribbean was a Disney film from a director with a record of past successes, a team of actors largely pulled from blockbusters, and an executive producer of some of the most memorable and (at the time) highest-grossing crossover blockbusters. It was not a risk to Disney at all.
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).
>Pirates of the Caribbean was a Disney film from a director with a record of past successes, a team of actors largely pulled from blockbusters, and an executive producer of some of the most memorable and (at the time) highest-grossing crossover blockbusters. It was not a risk to Disney at all.
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).
Tron Legacy was a gamble, as it (a) did not have an all-star cast, (b) a director with a string of successful movies, or (c) a popular IP (the first Tron was a box office failure, which is why it took several decades to make a sequel). Legacy did well on an absolute basis...but Disney barely made back its total budget. $170m was just the production budget; marketing was roughly another $150-$170m. While the movie did well-ish overseas, much of that revenue was split with theaters or local distribution partners, so from Disney's point of view, they barely broke even. (Dmoestically, studios only get the lion's share of ticket price for the first 2-3 weeks of ticket sales which is why they heavily front-load their advertising.)
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 itself was pretty uninspiring. It was an underpowered budget PC, but someone said, "hey, let's take this gamespy app that people use for matchmaking and put it on a game console..." and suddenly it was christmas morning when you unwrapped Mario64 all over again.
The xbox WAS xbox live matchmaking. It made online multiplayer on the console mainstream.
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.