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I feel pretty strongly that, assuming you care about the art and creating things then Valve is a blueprint of how exactly not to do it, hang on let me finish.

I feel pretty strongly that, assuming you care about the art and creating things then Valve is a blueprint of how exactly not to do it, hang on let me finish. Building Steam was a genius business move, it has basically given them an insane amount of income for close to zero effort, I mean the client is insanely janky and has barely been updated from an actual experience point of view in over a decade but it doesn't matter because almost all PC gaming purchases are funneled through it. Now what this should have done is allow the company to stop caring about profits and being able to relish in building true art to a true un-compromised vision. But something has seriously gone wrong here and the company has struggled to ship close to anything meaty in 16 years. To put it in perspective lets look at auteur studios held in similar regard as Half-Life. (I'm ignoring side releases, just focusing on mainline games) - Half-Life: HL2 2004, HL:A 2020 - Kojima : MGS3 2004, MGS4 2008, MGS5 2014, Death Stranding (worth pointing out his studio was rebuilt from nothing for this too) 2020 - Rockstar : GTA:SA 2004, GTA4 2008, RDR 2010, GTA5 2013, RDR2 2019 If Valve hadn't had steam, the company would not still exist today with that output. If HL:A good, yes. But we put it next to Rockstars output in the same time and it's not even the same league. Something has seriously gone wrong within Valve and I think the charitable way to frame it is "Oh they just care so much they only release when its perfect" but I'm not really buying that, I feel they have instead of being freed creatively by Steam they have been shacked by it. Steve Jobs sales and marketing speech comes to mind [0], the people calling the shots are only focused on running a digital videogame Walmart, artists push and push get burned out by not shipping and leave. At the head of it I guess Gabe just doesn't have the passion or care enough about creating art to push for anything else. Now if you're a big Valve fan what I'm saying might annoy you, but really think for a second. What have you as a Valve fan been denied because the people in the company care more about running a store than making art. What games exist in the reality where Valve never made steam. [0] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

mostlysimilar 6y ago
I dunno, SteamVR and the Vive (and later Index) are pretty noteworthy. Not to mention all of the progress on Linux gaming.
trowawee 6y ago
> I feel pretty strongly that, assuming you care about the art and creating things then Valve is a blueprint of how exactly not to do it, hang on let me finish. > Building Steam was a genius business move, it has basically given them an insane amount of income for close to zero effort, I mean the client is insanely janky and has barely been updated from an actual experience point of view in over a decade but it doesn't matter because almost all PC gaming purchases are funneled through it. > Now what this should have done is allow the company to stop caring about profits and being able to relish in building true art to a true un-compromised vision. But something has seriously gone wrong here and the company has struggled to ship close to anything meaty in 16 years. It's the Google problem. Once you have an automatic money printer, the only important job is making sure the automatic money printer still works. There's no incentive to improve it, because it's still printing money, and there's little incentive to make other products better, because whenever you look at the big revenue chart, the money printer in 90% of the pie chart, so who cares about the other parts.
- justnotworthit 6y ago
  It's amazing, really. Through making Half-life, they stumbled into getting 30% of the PC gaming market for all time. Through making professional half-life mods, they stumbled into the uncontrolled world of loot box windfalls (plus via Dota 2, a professionalized mod of blizzard's game). Like google, they probably fancy themselves as a kind of skunkworks laboratory that has the luxury of time and resources, able to accomplish what others can't. The two exceptions: While I've always been a skeptic of VR, their advancement of it is admirable. And while I've long hated the steam software (complaining about not being able to increase the chat font size for 10 years, without digging thru hardcoded css files), the recent influx of game stores that are equally crappy makes steam look ahead of their time. (How many years before Epic adds download throttling? Oh right, fortnite is printing money).

mostlysimilar 6y ago

I dunno, SteamVR and the Vive (and later Index) are pretty noteworthy. Not to mention all of the progress on Linux gaming.

trowawee 6y ago

> I feel pretty strongly that, assuming you care about the art and creating things then Valve is a blueprint of how exactly not to do it, hang on let me finish. > Building Steam was a genius business move, it has basically given them an insane amount of income for close to zero effort, I mean the client is insanely janky and has barely been updated from an actual experience point of view in over a decade but it doesn't matter because almost all PC gaming purchases are funneled through it. > Now what this should have done is allow the company to stop caring about profits and being able to relish in building true art to a true un-compromised vision. But something has seriously gone wrong here and the company has struggled to ship close to anything meaty in 16 years. It's the Google problem. Once you have an automatic money printer, the only important job is making sure the automatic money printer still works. There's no incentive to improve it, because it's still printing money, and there's little incentive to make other products better, because whenever you look at the big revenue chart, the money printer in 90% of the pie chart, so who cares about the other parts.

justnotworthit 6y ago
It's amazing, really. Through making Half-life, they stumbled into getting 30% of the PC gaming market for all time. Through making professional half-life mods, they stumbled into the uncontrolled world of loot box windfalls (plus via Dota 2, a professionalized mod of blizzard's game). Like google, they probably fancy themselves as a kind of skunkworks laboratory that has the luxury of time and resources, able to accomplish what others can't. The two exceptions: While I've always been a skeptic of VR, their advancement of it is admirable. And while I've long hated the steam software (complaining about not being able to increase the chat font size for 10 years, without digging thru hardcoded css files), the recent influx of game stores that are equally crappy makes steam look ahead of their time. (How many years before Epic adds download throttling? Oh right, fortnite is printing money).