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I mean, the joke is funny but realistically it's clear that Valve is getting back in the game, so to speak, and we're probably going to see some VR followup to

I mean, the joke is funny but realistically it's clear that Valve is getting back in the game, so to speak, and we're probably going to see some VR followup to Alyx in the next year or two.

me_me_me 6y ago
I dunno about this. The current consensus of community is that Dota 2 is dying and valve couldn't be bothered doing anything about it. Just cashing in while they can. And Dota 2 is by far their biggest game.
- bootloop 6y ago
  I would say since it was made free to play CS:GO (also Valve) surpassed Dota 2 and it is still rising.
- nindalf 6y ago
  > Dota 2 is dying I'm old enough that I remember people saying this in 2014. Actual data on active users - https://steamcharts.com/app/570#All https://steamcharts.com/app/570#All. This indicates that it's far from it's peak of 1.2M active players but 700k active is still respectable. > Dota 2 is by far their biggest game. Not by players. That would be CS:GO (https://steamcharts.com/app/730 https://steamcharts.com/app/730) with 900k active players.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    900k active presumably includes the 50% of Deathmatch players that are zombies? It's interesting to see there seems to be some evolutionary pressures at play as a couple of new routines are being used, not just 'rotate on the spot', one or two shoot now (yes, I got shot by an XP farming zombie) and one does epicycles which makes them surprisingly hard to shoot.
    - LegitShady 6y ago
      I think its actually someone in a computer lab in pakistan etc running 10 computers at a time and just selectively doing an action or two per account each round. CSGO has the same thing.
  - de_watcher 6y ago
    They've managed to make a Dota 2 tutorial that's worse than the 2014 one. And matchmaking for the new players is just brutal, there is no retention.
    - me_me_me 6y ago
      Personal story time, few months back me and my buddy got asked to help our non-dota friend get into the game. We are both playing occasionally in lower brackets. Both of us created new account to so that noobie wouldn't be thrown into deep water right away. Note that me and my friend were 'baby sitting' - playing neutrally not trying to win vs lower rated opponents. Out of 10 games 7 had hardcore smurfs in them. People in stack dominating their lanes. I don't see how anyone new and without any friends could possibly survived through such acid pool. Imagine you are starting to play chess and 7/10 opponents are rated master and will crush you. And its kind of crush that you can't really learn from either. I really don't see how dota can grow when there are so many alternatives.
      - Revery 6y ago
        Are you sure matchmaking didn't detect you were smurfing?
        me_me_me 6y ago
        Nah we both play passive (avoiding aggression ourselves), besides blatant smurfs getting 15 kills by 20min are not tagged as smurfs. I just don't think there are any mechanisms to catch that and match noobies with other noobies. Instead they are sent straight into slaughterhouse.
      - jay_kyburz 6y ago
        To fix that problem you have game systems that are more random / forgiving in lower ranked games (remove the skill). Then in the harder ranks you can dial back those mechanics and make the game more skill based. Just a little tip for Valve there. I'm sure they're reading.
    - 6y ago
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- dx87 6y ago
  CS:GO is actually their biggest game now, but it does look like Dota 2 is dying. From a business perspective, they don't have any reason to try and save it though. They've lost ~40% of their players over the past 4 years, but are making more money than ever. The in-game tutorials have been unfinished for years, their Dota+ subscription service is all but abandoned (but still bringing in millions of dollars a year), and even cosmetics are mostly contained to a time-limited battlepass to take advantage of FOMO.
  - me_me_me 6y ago
    CS GO was abandoned by valve, community picked up the scene by creating their own leagues and tournaments. Only then valve gracefully came back to support CS :(
  - murph-almighty 6y ago
    CS:GO is also going to trend downward soon with the release of Valorant, which is basically the same game with a few superpowers attached. All my friends who played GO switched over, they're attracting a pro scene, I think it's only a matter of time tbh.
    - tmccrary55 6y ago
      I've avoided Valorant because it requires kernel drivers. But I'm in the minority, most gamers don't even know whats involved there.
    - chucky_z 6y ago
      I'll be a single counter-point. I straight up reinstalled Windows to play Valorant and all it's done is made me play a lot more CSGO. I'm legitimately having more fun with CSGO now than I have in a very long time! The game feels like it's in a super good place. It's got a ton of cool skins, the competitive scene feels really competitive at the moment, playing it competitively feels great. The DM mode scratches a very good itch, gun game is still a lot of fun, etc...
- overtonwhy 6y ago
  The International has been growing every year.
dspillett 6y ago
I'm not sure about that. I read Alyx as a very successful tech demo intended to push the market sector out a bit and make money off the platform and hardware, rather than a renewed more games-centric direction for Valve. Much like iD's output often being tech demos for the game engines that they then license to other studios.
- scollet 6y ago
  > very successful tech demo Can't think of a Valve game that doesn't fit this description.
- outworlder 6y ago
  Tech demo? Have you played it? It's a heck of a "demo". It's about the size of Half Life 2.
  - dspillett 6y ago
    I do not doubt it is a full game. But that is not its sole purpose. The only debate is whether is a game first, or a demo of how full games work in the framework/hardware first and a full game because that was deemed the best way to showcase the what is possible.
013a 6y ago
People really need to watch (play?) (read?) The Final Hours of Half Life Alyx. Its a documentary-like experience available on Steam which dives in to the past decade or two at Valve. From the outside, all we see is very few games being produced. From the inside, its far more complex; something like a Dark Decade for Valve where even they weren't sure what they should be working on. Hundreds of failed prototypes and ideas. Major technical issues with Source 2 that took years to fix. L4D3 was under development, but ran into huge scope creep (full open world with variable length days depending on time of year and hemisphere, variable tides based on moon cycle, crazy stuff like that). They were working on a tech showcase codenamed ARTI/Artifact using a brand new voxel-based game engine separate from Source (and after the game was canceled, the name was taken and used for the now-released Dota 2 Card Game).
- mywittyname 6y ago
  When you hear stuff like this, the acquisition binge that so many companies go on starts to make sense.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    When you hear stuff like this, you start to wonder if Valve's management style is half as sustainable as they would like to think. Without Steam and hats/knives they'd be broke several times over with that sort of lack of focus and inability to release games outside of what seems a decadal cycle. (ETA: Which possibly makes a "locusts of gaming" analogy relevant for Valve, hah.)
    - deadbunny 6y ago
      Except that out of that experimentation came Alyx. Everything in that game is outstanding from a technical perspective, the way you interact with the world feels completely natural. Sure they could have pushed out a VR game every year for the last 5 years to maybe get to the same level of interaction fluidity but they would all feel subpar, not quite there, like the vast majority of other VR games. Valves strength is that they a have a structure that allows experimentation without a hard deadline, they can afford to throw millions at the wall and see what sticks. This allows themw to take a decade between large, ground breaking projects. They're not beholden to YoY or QoQ growth. They've had what? Two duds in 20+ years? Not bad when you consider the rest of their output are beloved classics. Granted they have a good few money printing machines to help them work like this but I would argue that they have these money printing machines because they have the ability to experiment, because of their structure.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Sort of; unless they make more games, Alyx is "just" a tech demo or an attempt to sell more of their VR kits. It's weird, they've got some seriously good franchises that they haven't done anything with; Half-Life could use a sequel every few years; Portal could become a massive franchise; Team Fortress 2, CS:GO and DOTA 2 are huge money makers but I think they're reluctant to make sequels to those because of balancing and pissing off the existing, invested player bases. (I think that may have happened when they went from CS:S to CS:Go, where the latter had very lucrative monetization options, lucrative but morally dubious because of off-site trading and gambling)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- leetcrew 6y ago
  as a player, I'm not really sure what would be gained from a sequel to csgo. any big change to the mechanics would just piss everyone off, and smaller changes can just be done as updates to the existing game. csgo was only ~$20 when it launched, and it's free now, so I don't think there's much financial upside to selling a newer cs title. they already make plenty of money off skins. the only thing I see that they could really change in a new title would be the graphics, but I don't think that's much of a selling point to the audience. cs players care more about getting >100fps on their potato computer than pretty graphics.
- deadbunny 6y ago
  Do we need sequels every few years? Don't get me wrong I'll be the first I the queue for HL3 or Portal 3 but only because historically it has been a fantastic set of games.

I mean, the joke is funny but realistically it's clear that Valve is getting back in the game, so to speak, and we're probably going to see some VR followup to Alyx in the next year or two.

me_me_me 6y ago

I dunno about this. The current consensus of community is that Dota 2 is dying and valve couldn't be bothered doing anything about it. Just cashing in while they can. And Dota 2 is by far their biggest game.

bootloop 6y ago
I would say since it was made free to play CS:GO (also Valve) surpassed Dota 2 and it is still rising.
nindalf 6y ago
> Dota 2 is dying I'm old enough that I remember people saying this in 2014. Actual data on active users - https://steamcharts.com/app/570#All https://steamcharts.com/app/570#All. This indicates that it's far from it's peak of 1.2M active players but 700k active is still respectable. > Dota 2 is by far their biggest game. Not by players. That would be CS:GO (https://steamcharts.com/app/730 https://steamcharts.com/app/730) with 900k active players.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  900k active presumably includes the 50% of Deathmatch players that are zombies? It's interesting to see there seems to be some evolutionary pressures at play as a couple of new routines are being used, not just 'rotate on the spot', one or two shoot now (yes, I got shot by an XP farming zombie) and one does epicycles which makes them surprisingly hard to shoot.
  - LegitShady 6y ago
    I think its actually someone in a computer lab in pakistan etc running 10 computers at a time and just selectively doing an action or two per account each round. CSGO has the same thing.
- de_watcher 6y ago
  They've managed to make a Dota 2 tutorial that's worse than the 2014 one. And matchmaking for the new players is just brutal, there is no retention.
  - me_me_me 6y ago
    Personal story time, few months back me and my buddy got asked to help our non-dota friend get into the game. We are both playing occasionally in lower brackets. Both of us created new account to so that noobie wouldn't be thrown into deep water right away. Note that me and my friend were 'baby sitting' - playing neutrally not trying to win vs lower rated opponents. Out of 10 games 7 had hardcore smurfs in them. People in stack dominating their lanes. I don't see how anyone new and without any friends could possibly survived through such acid pool. Imagine you are starting to play chess and 7/10 opponents are rated master and will crush you. And its kind of crush that you can't really learn from either. I really don't see how dota can grow when there are so many alternatives.
    - Revery 6y ago
      Are you sure matchmaking didn't detect you were smurfing?
      - me_me_me 6y ago
        Nah we both play passive (avoiding aggression ourselves), besides blatant smurfs getting 15 kills by 20min are not tagged as smurfs. I just don't think there are any mechanisms to catch that and match noobies with other noobies. Instead they are sent straight into slaughterhouse.
    - jay_kyburz 6y ago
      To fix that problem you have game systems that are more random / forgiving in lower ranked games (remove the skill). Then in the harder ranks you can dial back those mechanics and make the game more skill based. Just a little tip for Valve there. I'm sure they're reading.
  - 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dx87 6y ago
CS:GO is actually their biggest game now, but it does look like Dota 2 is dying. From a business perspective, they don't have any reason to try and save it though. They've lost ~40% of their players over the past 4 years, but are making more money than ever. The in-game tutorials have been unfinished for years, their Dota+ subscription service is all but abandoned (but still bringing in millions of dollars a year), and even cosmetics are mostly contained to a time-limited battlepass to take advantage of FOMO.
- me_me_me 6y ago
  CS GO was abandoned by valve, community picked up the scene by creating their own leagues and tournaments. Only then valve gracefully came back to support CS :(
- murph-almighty 6y ago
  CS:GO is also going to trend downward soon with the release of Valorant, which is basically the same game with a few superpowers attached. All my friends who played GO switched over, they're attracting a pro scene, I think it's only a matter of time tbh.
  - tmccrary55 6y ago
    I've avoided Valorant because it requires kernel drivers. But I'm in the minority, most gamers don't even know whats involved there.
  - chucky_z 6y ago
    I'll be a single counter-point. I straight up reinstalled Windows to play Valorant and all it's done is made me play a lot more CSGO. I'm legitimately having more fun with CSGO now than I have in a very long time! The game feels like it's in a super good place. It's got a ton of cool skins, the competitive scene feels really competitive at the moment, playing it competitively feels great. The DM mode scratches a very good itch, gun game is still a lot of fun, etc...
overtonwhy 6y ago
The International has been growing every year.

dspillett 6y ago

I'm not sure about that. I read Alyx as a very successful tech demo intended to push the market sector out a bit and make money off the platform and hardware, rather than a renewed more games-centric direction for Valve. Much like iD's output often being tech demos for the game engines that they then license to other studios.

scollet 6y ago
> very successful tech demo Can't think of a Valve game that doesn't fit this description.
outworlder 6y ago
Tech demo? Have you played it? It's a heck of a "demo". It's about the size of Half Life 2.
- dspillett 6y ago
  I do not doubt it is a full game. But that is not its sole purpose. The only debate is whether is a game first, or a demo of how full games work in the framework/hardware first and a full game because that was deemed the best way to showcase the what is possible.

013a 6y ago

People really need to watch (play?) (read?) The Final Hours of Half Life Alyx. Its a documentary-like experience available on Steam which dives in to the past decade or two at Valve. From the outside, all we see is very few games being produced. From the inside, its far more complex; something like a Dark Decade for Valve where even they weren't sure what they should be working on. Hundreds of failed prototypes and ideas. Major technical issues with Source 2 that took years to fix. L4D3 was under development, but ran into huge scope creep (full open world with variable length days depending on time of year and hemisphere, variable tides based on moon cycle, crazy stuff like that). They were working on a tech showcase codenamed ARTI/Artifact using a brand new voxel-based game engine separate from Source (and after the game was canceled, the name was taken and used for the now-released Dota 2 Card Game).

mywittyname 6y ago
When you hear stuff like this, the acquisition binge that so many companies go on starts to make sense.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  When you hear stuff like this, you start to wonder if Valve's management style is half as sustainable as they would like to think. Without Steam and hats/knives they'd be broke several times over with that sort of lack of focus and inability to release games outside of what seems a decadal cycle. (ETA: Which possibly makes a "locusts of gaming" analogy relevant for Valve, hah.)
  - deadbunny 6y ago
    Except that out of that experimentation came Alyx. Everything in that game is outstanding from a technical perspective, the way you interact with the world feels completely natural. Sure they could have pushed out a VR game every year for the last 5 years to maybe get to the same level of interaction fluidity but they would all feel subpar, not quite there, like the vast majority of other VR games. Valves strength is that they a have a structure that allows experimentation without a hard deadline, they can afford to throw millions at the wall and see what sticks. This allows themw to take a decade between large, ground breaking projects. They're not beholden to YoY or QoQ growth. They've had what? Two duds in 20+ years? Not bad when you consider the rest of their output are beloved classics. Granted they have a good few money printing machines to help them work like this but I would argue that they have these money printing machines because they have the ability to experiment, because of their structure.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

Sort of; unless they make more games, Alyx is "just" a tech demo or an attempt to sell more of their VR kits. It's weird, they've got some seriously good franchises that they haven't done anything with; Half-Life could use a sequel every few years; Portal could become a massive franchise; Team Fortress 2, CS:GO and DOTA 2 are huge money makers but I think they're reluctant to make sequels to those because of balancing and pissing off the existing, invested player bases. (I think that may have happened when they went from CS:S to CS:Go, where the latter had very lucrative monetization options, lucrative but morally dubious because of off-site trading and gambling)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
leetcrew 6y ago
as a player, I'm not really sure what would be gained from a sequel to csgo. any big change to the mechanics would just piss everyone off, and smaller changes can just be done as updates to the existing game. csgo was only ~$20 when it launched, and it's free now, so I don't think there's much financial upside to selling a newer cs title. they already make plenty of money off skins. the only thing I see that they could really change in a new title would be the graphics, but I don't think that's much of a selling point to the audience. cs players care more about getting >100fps on their potato computer than pretty graphics.
deadbunny 6y ago
Do we need sequels every few years? Don't get me wrong I'll be the first I the queue for HL3 or Portal 3 but only because historically it has been a fantastic set of games.