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> gives them what they want I did not get Half-Life 3 yet. But on a serious note, we don't know how successful they actually are. They are a private company.
by lrae 4y ago
> gives them what they want
I did not get Half-Life 3 yet.
But on a serious note, we don't know how successful they actually are. They are a private company. Concurrent players & logged in users growing, with more and more gamers around the world and covid as a catalyst over the last years is probably not a good sole indicator. Those are growing for everybody, just compare them to Roblox alone.
I'd say maybe a better one could be pretty much every publisher returning or rumoured to return soon - but that could also just mean better deals for them and Valve also not making more money.
Besides that, doesn't seem all sunshine at Valve either. There were reports of a hostile work environment in the past, among other things supposedly due to the ego-fuelling bonus structure.
When Alyx arrived GabeN talked about how they'll ship two more big VR titles soon-ish, which didn't happen and which supposedly are at least on hold. We at least know that they currently work on a non-vr game called Neon Prime right now and that might or might not ship soon.
The Dota 2 and especially the CSGO community wishes for more communication and updates for their games. The Source 2 update for CSGO has more people coping now than HL3.
They let games like Artifact and Underlords just die. Especially Artifact, with being a buy-to-play title where you additionally had to buy the cards for additional real money, had quite some controversies around the game and how Valve handled everything.
At least in CSGO the esports scene is also not happy either with how Valve ignores and handles cheat & fraud cases half-assed. Their own anti-cheat in CSGO is also still shit.
- icapybara 4y agoThey also face a more competitive environment now than possibly ever before. There are other game stores/fronts like Epic's and Activision's, and the console giants are coming for a piece of their pie (Xbox Game pass and Sony's equivalent). There's also the ever-looming risk that Apple decides to go after their market with Apple TV/iOS somehow. If I was an executive at Valve, I'd probably be happy with the current success, but nervous for the future.
- flohofwoe 4y agoNothing of this is "new competition" though, and the threat from console gaming was arguably much bigger in the past, yet so far Steam has weathered all storms pretty well. There are now more ports from Xbox and PS to PC than ever before that would have been exclusives in the past (e.g. Sony 1st party titles like God of War, ten years ago something like this would "hell freezing over territory").
- mrtranscendence 4y agoApple's paying a bit more attention to gaming these days, but I don't think they'll ever release an Apple TV that performs better than a midrange phone. If they really wanted to make a big push into gaming they could; they certainly have the gazillions for it. Make a more powerful Apple TV, invest a billion into game dev studios to target MacOS and iOS, either make Apple Arcade free or beef it up for the same price. I just feel like they would've done this by now if they were ever going to.
- dpkirchner 4y agoThey faced Origin and won. I'm not sure about Ubisoft, but I think some of their games are available without using a non-steam launcher. Doesn't mean they'll win but their record is pretty good.