
Half-Life 3 and Left 4 Dead 3 were both scrapped because Source 2 was unfinished - evo_9
https://www.destructoid.com/stories/half-life-3-and-left-4-dead-3-were-both-scrapped-because-source-2-was-unfinished-596899.phtml
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0xy
Steam's success as a platform masks the very real problems at Valve. When you
have an infinite money printer, you can't even tell that you haven't delivered
any quality products for years.

Steam itself seemed to be in maintenance mode with very little love until the
last two years (when real competition emerged).

Valve seems like the kind of place with constant power struggles and office
politics, even more so than a traditional org.

Separately, why are they still bothering with Source 2? Their competition is
technically superior in pretty much every respect.

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britmob
I can’t speak for many technicalities between existing engines and Source 2,
but from the bit I’ve been playing in Alyx, it seems to be more optimized than
any other engine I’ve ever seen, especially with VR. It’s multithreaded across
3-5 cores, and runs better than a lot of games that look worse. I have no
doubt that Source 2 offers performance (especially in VR) that existing
engines cannot easily match.

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0xy
VR is essentially an irrelevant niche in the AAA industry. It hasn't caught
on, there are no killer apps, and the majority of VR headsets are sitting in
the corner of people's rooms collecting dust.

Alyx has 2,000ish concurrent players at this point, while Left 4 Dead 2, a 11
year old game, has over 17,000.

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ShamelessC
Alyx, Beat Saber and Superhot are all killer VR apps and I bet you'd agree if
you played them yourself.

You're being incredibly dismissive of the tech in an unconvincing way. Being
fortunate enough to own a rig and hmd to play VR with, it's clearly hit a
turning point with Alyx.

Does that mean it's going to become the next iPhone tomorrow? No. The biggest
hurdle in terms of adoption is lowering prices. Next is reducing motion
sickness and researching what makes a VR game fun and immersive. We now have
teleport locomotion systems and 144 Hz refresh rate that don't make us as
motion sick. And Valve has now learned how to make these games incredibly fun,
immersive and with an absolutely fantastic story.

It's an utterly unbelievable experience.

To your last point about player counts, yeah they're low. But it doesn't make
any sense to compare a single player game which is played once or twice and it
_definitely_ doesn't make sense to compare a 60$ game that minimally requires
very cheap hardware to a 60$ game that requires about a 600$ PC and a 250$ -
1000$ VR headset.

VR isn't going to die again. It will take time, but it will definitely become
mainstream in 10-15 years. And while for some reason you seem to see Alyx as a
failure, I see it as the spark that ignites the VR revolution.

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wpdev_63
I am happy there's the epic store as it seems to be the only thing to get Gabe
and his cronies off their asses and start finishing games again.

Source 2 engine has nothing to do with why they scrapped like 4-5 games, it's
because why finish anything when you can just collect 30% on steam. It must've
been like an adult daycare at valve for the last 7-8 years with no actual work
needed to be finished.... Are they hiring?

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muttled
With how often Steam asks to restart for an upgrade I'm pretty sure that's
where all that engineer time is going. I generally have no idea what changed
after an update, though.

~~~
wpdev_63
Did you notice that the new steam interface came after epic store started
getting free games every month?

I have no idea why people are so against the epic store. I have to start
believing its steam marketing team at work.

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xigency
At a company where people work on whatever they want, there’s probably a lot
of reasons why projects might not be “finished.”

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Shared404
> "top secret project"since 2018 and there's no information as to what it
> might be.

Honestly, I really hope this is a Portal getting the Alyx treatment. That
would be my dream VR game, even if I did have to take unhealthy amounts of
dramamine.

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ShamelessC
I believe there's an interview with the Alyx devs where they explain that a
Portal game in VR wouldn't work as that game involves a ton of flying around
with momentum in heavy use. A common solution for motion sickness in VR is
teleport based locomotion. I don't really see how Portal could work with
teleport locomotion.

There's also the issue that the appeal of portals being quite mind bending is
satisfying on screen but it's probably rather jarring to go through a portal
on a wall and instantly begin falling quickly to the floor. Alyx had issues
with falling as well which is why you sort of float slowly when you fall off a
ledge.

On the other hand, while I think it's impossible, Valve would be the company
to pull it off.

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Shared404
> ...motion sickness in VR ...

Thus the dramamine :) .

That being said, I agree with everything you've stated. I don't really see it
being doable, but it's Valve we're talking about so who knows. I just know
what's wishful thinking.

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johnwalkr
Does anyone know the number of developers at Valve that work on Steam vs on
games?

