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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
by 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 agoIt'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).