I worked at Valve a few years back, and I could write a book about what's wrong there. I think the biggest problem they have -- which the author of this article touched on -- is that "success is the worst teacher." Valve have discovered that cosmetic microtransactions are big money makers, and thus every team at Valve was dedicated to that vision. When I was there (before Artifact started in open development) there were essentially no new games being developed at all. There was a small group that were working on Left for Dead 3 (cancelled shortly after I joined), and a couple guys poking around with pre-production experiments for Half-Life 3 (it will never be released). But effectively all the attention was focused on cosmetic items and "the economy" of the three big games (DOTA, CS:GO, and TF2). One very senior employee even said that Valve would never make another single player game, because they weren't worth the effort. "Portal 2," he explained, had only made $200 million in profit and that kind of chump change just wasn't worth it, when you could make 100s of millions a year selling digital hats and paintjobs for guns (most of which are designed by players, not the employees!)
I joined Valve because I excited to work with what I thought was the best game studio in the world, but I left very depressed when I found out they're merely collecting rent from Steam and making in-game decorations for old games.
Video games are not like movies, not like content. Since their inception, 1% of the games get 99% of the players. For example, when half-life was released, everybody was playing half-life. In this environment, you can't simply make another fps with a cool scenario and expect it to be a hit. You have to have real hard innovations in your product. A look at the big trends since 30 years clearly shows it. For example, in 2000, 50 games were high-grossing hits over a total of 5000 games that were produced that year [1]. You may think, well, cool story bro but what about Ubisoft for example, they are doing games like content. Most companies that did or do video games like it's content have or will disappear (the data show it all). Now, there is a business in pissing video games like content, but there is only spots for a few big conglomerates that will profits from the quantity, not the quality.
This is in my opinion the reason why Valve is having a hard time doing a new game, not because they don't want to. They want to be Valve and make good games, even if it means waiting years before an opportunity presents itself.
> Video games are not like movies, not like content. Since their inception, 1% of the games get 99% of the players. For example, when half-life was released, everybody was playing half-life. In this environment, you can't simply make another fps with a cool scenario and expect it to be a hit. You have to have real hard innovations in your product.
I hope it's some kind of sarcasm. This is why Call of Duty is best-selling video game in the US 7 of 9 years since 2009:
Basically most of video games market is content-driven games be it some mobile, social game or MMO. Innovations mostly occur in games for hardcore or indie audience and market share of these games are pretty small.
> Now, there is a business in pissing video games like content, but there is only spots for a few big conglomerates that will profits from the quantity, not the quality.
Because the models these games use is not sustainable for all games. Sports games have several things going for them that normal games don't. Like being simulations of the real world, so as players move, etc then the game gets updated. Secondly there is an inherint monopoly on sports games. There is only one official NFL game.
I just tend to disagree with this sentence too. Basically there a lot of game developers even in hardcore genres who efficiently maintain content-driven games: almost all simulators, economic strategies, Paradox-interactive strategies.
There is number of small companies with only 20-30 employees who maintain their projects over decades basically releasing more of the same every couple of years.
What you explaining is exactly definition of "content driven game". They basically have working game mechanics with very few changes and a lot of content.
While I agree some games take most of players you know who those players are and which games are those?
I don't think it's the most revolutionary games. For example, EA sport franchises make more money than most of their other games. Not to mention casual cash grabs with pay to win mechanics.
it's not like they should have lacked confidence though. They put out a lot of high quality games one after another. I still think the Orange box was pretty much the best game bundle ever to be sold. And given that they're a private company with lots of cash if they're not making great games, who else is supposed to?
> "Portal 2," he explained, had only made $200 million in profit and that kind of chump change just wasn't worth it, when you could make 100s of millions a year selling digital hats and paintjobs for guns (most of which are designed by players, not the employees!)
All of the most successful tech companies are platforms:
* Facebook is a platform for it's users to make posts
* eBay is a platform for it's users to sell items
* Amazon is a platform for retail companies
* Even Google is a platform, because it's taking the Internet itself, and re-packaging it
From that perspective, you can see how things wound up like this at Valve.
Microsoft still has soft power, but the benefit of the platform goes beyond just control. Consider that millions of people who wanted to play Valve's games had to buy a copy of Windows first.
If those people would have used their PC only for that game, yes. But that's not the case. People didn't have a PC just laying around thinking "oh crap now I need an OS".
On the other hand, if you didn't have a PC back in 1998 you bought one and Windows came with it. Or you already were advanced user, built one from components and installed Windows. Either legally or not, didn't matter much.
I understand that. Most people bought a PC with a bundled Windows license as a prerequisite to run the many applications they cared about. Those are still people who bought Windows, and some of the applications that justified their purchase were likely created by third-party developers like Valve.
I was trying to highlight one of the great benefits of owning a platform: your platform is made more valuable by the work of third-parties who build on it.
Well, given that now Epic is trying to cut into that with Fortnite as the killer/gateway app that gets the Epic marketplace on your system, maybe Valve will be forced to focus on shipping some good new games to retain their position? If that's the case, yay for competition! :)
That said, I think part of what people are missing about Valve is that they are also seem to be focused on what they see as the next big thing in gaming, which is VR. They're supposedly shipping their own VR hardware (headset plus new hand controllers) soon (Aug 1st), and have publicly committed to launching a "Flagship VR" game this year. Probably not what most people want, given the cost of VR equipment (not mentioning the cost of the computer hardware to run it).
Personally, I'm kinda amped up about the Occulus Quest. A hands free (~3 hour charge, can play while charging), self-contained (no PC required), $400-$500 (depending on internal storage) device? I might actually be willing to pay for that as a first VR device. That the games are all $30 or less is a bonus.
> Well, given that now Epic is trying to cut into that with Fortnite as the killer/gateway app that gets the Epic marketplace on your system, maybe Valve will be forced to focus on shipping some good new games to retain their position?
We'll see. There have been a number of game marketplaces over the years that have tried to compete with steam. For the most part, they're all gone, and the games they hosted are gone too.
At this point, it would take something pretty unusual for me to spend any money on a non-Steam game. I just don't believe other platforms will be around in 5-10 years.
> At this point, it would take something pretty unusual for me to spend any money on a non-Steam game. I just don't believe other platforms will be around in 5-10 years.
I agree, but I think it's important to consider that they can succeed even if they don't get you or me. There's hundreds of millions of people that have installed it (approaching 250 million a couple months ago), tens of millions playing each month (almost 80 million as of a few months ago) and over 10 million people playing concurrently.[1]
How many of those are young players that might want to try a new game they see some youtuber play, and see it on sale in the epic store they might use to launch Fortnite? That's a hige captive audience, and this battle won't be won by swaying you or me, but by swaying the huge number of new gamers coming onto the market, which are mostly our kids. I know my son who's 9 probably wouldn't care about Steam if I wasn't sharing my library with him. Then again, his computer can't play much and he plays Fortnite on the Switch.
Steam is entrenched, and does have it's own user base, but given that Fortnite along as of a couple months ago has ~66% of the concurrent users of Steam overall[2], I wouldn't count it out. That's a lot for Epic to make something out of.
I buy something from Steam only if it's not on GOG. Games from GOG let you play them without the headaches of the launcher.
I don't play very often and when I finally find time for it, it looks like this:
- clicking on the game icon
- the launcher starts updating
- the launcher restarts and asks for my account, because why not?
- the game starts updating, often downloading patches above a GB
... and so on.
And that applies for Steam, Bethesda Launcher and the rest of the bunch. And don't let me get started on the Bethesda Launcher because that thing alone takes 500MB of memory.
Totally agree. However, one major selling point of Steam for me is the practically seamless Proton compatibility layer (while acknowledging the philosophical disconnect between running Linux and buying DRM'd games...)
Before Fortnite was Minecraft and Pokemon Go and Angry Birds... It's in the nature of video games to come and go like fads.
More telling (to me) is that Epic started making a game very different from Fortnite but was both flexible enough and perceptive enough to change the game.
The difference is that Epic is leveraging their current popularity to turn into a platform. Pokemon Go and Angry Birds were already only really available through platforms, so that wasn't an option for them. Minecraft maybe could have, but it seems somewhat opposed to the idea of the program, which is all about user control and users creating an ecosystem. Now that Microsoft owns it, there's already a platform for it, and it's not game specific (the Windows Store).
Fortnite has as many or more monthly players as Minecraft (which is huge), but much more control over the ecosystem and content. As the controlling party of what's (by this point most likely) the most popular online game in history in it's peak (until next month, most likely), that gives them a somewhat unique and powerful position, which they seem eager to exploit.
Will that be enough? I don't know. I definitely think the situation is different than the examples you cited though.
I'm on the Epic store because they have been giving away games I had wanted to play, specifically Transistor and What Remains of Edith Finch. It remains to be seen how much money I'll spend there. Most of my purchases these days are on GOG.
FWIW I'm a diehard steam user from the beta in 2002, and the Epic store is every bit as good at this point. Absolutely disappointed in Valve for resting on their laurels for this long.
Frankly I'm almost in the opposite camp now - why would I buy anything on Steam when it's clearly being left to rot.
>the Epic store is every bit as good at this point
So it has cloud saves and you can buy games to send as gifts?
They have the “Buy game > download game > launch game” flow working, but there’s a heck of a lot of catching up to do. Frankly I’d say that cloud sync for game saves is table stakes for a game store in 2019. If Epic weren’t throwing around millions of dollars on exclusives and discounts, no one would use it.
I’m sure there are other missing features, the ones mentioned above are just what came to mind from when I looked into EGS after Borderlands 3 was announced as an exclusive.
They might be on track to catch up to Steam sooner or later, but it’s far to early to say they’ve done it.
You're completely correct. Epic store is just a bare-bones program, it lacks features which we consider completely basic and natural in modern online marketplaces, such as a shopping cart. Yes, you have to buy and pay for games one by one.
There was this amusing incident not long ago, where the store's fraud prevention mechanisms were blocking users who bought five or six games quickly in a row. There were many, many blocked users, because at that time, the Epic store happened to have a "mega sale" event going, where many games were discounted. In a store without a shopping cart feature, that translates to lot of purchase transactions, one following quickly after another.
I have faith that the developers at Epic can improve their store. It's a purely technical problem, and an easy one compared to creating the Unreal Engine.
In a few years, if the store is good, nobody will care about the growing pains. The bad old days will be forgotten like Diretide.
> There was this amusing incident not long ago, where the store's fraud prevention mechanisms were blocking users who bought five or six games quickly in a row.
That's funny, recently numerous users were also blocked from purchasing the Valve Index VR system on Steam because of fraud prevention mechanisms.
To their credit Valve did later offer an opportunity for people who ran into this to buy a kit in the first wave of shipments.
If it doesn't take several seconds to load up a game's page, and if it gives me a way to look at multiple games from a recommended list without having to go one at a time, then it's already ahead of Steam in the ways that matter to me. Steam's store UI is astonishingly slow and cumbersome for what's essentially an embedded web browser. It reminds me of iTunes on windows.
Maybe most of the monetization "features" are regarded as a CON by most players? Just because sb develops this and his lifelihood depends on it, does not make something good or important in the customers 's eyes.
The killer feature with Steam for me at the moment is a combination of,
a) some 300-400 games in my library, picked up over more than a decade, and probably 95% purchased on sales. There always seems to be a sale. This offsets the price of a computer as opposed to a console.
b) Steam Link, which lets me play those games in the living room using a regular Xbox One controller. The Link has recently migrated from being a hardware device to being software that runs on your TV (I have a Samsung TV) and now recently on iOS (iPhone/iPad/Apple TV).
Link works very well and has effectively moved me to the living room for enjoying games.
It has also made my game library available to my wife, who wasn't going to sit down in front of a computer to play games any time soon, but who has found some games she really enjoys playing by virtue of the simpler, more direct interface that is Steam's big screen mode.
While Steam the desktop app is a horrible, ancient mess, the big screen interface is surprisingly decent.
Like the sibling says, 2016 and forwards essentially. I'm running it on a Q7F (I think it is). If you can get it to work, it's excellent. Supports 4K, whereas the physical one does not. I'm guessing the Apple TV 4K should support 4K streaming as well.
Yeah, so due to how bluetooth works on the Samsung, some controllers work well and others don't. I set up VirtualHere[1] on the router (which is pretty close to the TV), and connected a USB bluetooth stick to the router. I have a wireless Apple keyboard, a Logitech mouse, and two Xbox controllers connecting through the bluetooth stick, and it works flawlessly. No discernible input lag.
This was Steams initial competitive advantage and it's still a benefit, but now Steam's advantage is that most commercial PC games are on Steam. Although many people still dislike Steam for various reasons, it's still overall the best game platform available on PC and is better than console and mobile platforms in many ways. One thing to thing about is that many of the biggest games (LoL, Fortnite, Minecraft, Activision Blizzard and EA titles) are not available on Steam.
This right here... There are game studios that can keep churning out enough games to create their own alternatives to Steam and they have and they will succeed without Steam. What will be left is microtransactions and indie games if they arent careful.
>All of the most successful tech companies are platforms
This is silly. 4 rather recent internet companies are meant to prove your point that the way to success is as a platform? This post ignores the vast majority of tech companies.
As opposed to what, ancient internet companies? Amazon, Google and Ebay were all started in the mid to late 1990's. They are all over twenty years old. Facebook, as the youngest, is about 15 years old. How many people were even on the internet in the mid 1990's?
Edit: Or perhaps you meant tech companies pre-internet. But I think the fact that relatively young (although not really, even non-internet tech companies aren't that old) companies quickly rose to supersede non-internet companies (or those non-internet companies shifted to to be somewhat internet centric to not be left behind, like Microsoft) points towards more evidence for platforms (since the internet enabled platforms in a much easier way).
> How many people were even on the internet in the mid 1990's?
I know that was rhetorical, but just to answer the question literally since I was curious, the estimates across multiple sources from the first page of Google results for “internet usage 1995” show it was double digit millions, somewhere in the 10M-50M range, and separate percentage estimates seem to say about 0.5% of the world’s population. Today, by contrast it’s over 50% of the planet.
Holy crap. Of course the usage in 1995 would be super low. That’s around the first time I used the Internet. It was a vast ecosystem to my young eyes. So the number makes complete sense but still shocking to me. I’m guessing by Napster peak time the number was relatively much bigger.
Depends on your definition of "success". As a percentage of total market capitalization, these 4 companies comprise a significant portion of that, though by percentage of total companies, it's a low figure.
I think this perfectly explains how Artifact [1], the worst game ever made by Valve, was made. Valve is now not interested in making games but something that makes money with least effort.
That's a great discussion in itself. You can look at Valve as a company that started out focusing on making exceptional products (Half-Life), or focusing on their users (Steam), which then transitioned into a business that directed it's attention more toward optimizing profits.
A company can take this stereotypical start-up approach of worrying about users and the 'product' first, but eventually, you might end up in the same position as Valve - and here's the thing, maybe you can only end up in that position if you first focused on something other than pure profit? How many businesses get to be the size of Valve by purely starting out chasing profit vs trying to create a great product first?
It's common to see people begrudge a company - or even an artist - who seeks to make money with the least effort, we sometimes refer to them as 'sell-outs'. We tend to look at people who once concentrated on developing something that has a quality or true value, only to later exchange this for the pursuit of money over everything else, in a negative light. Conversely, we applaud successes where the intentions of the individual or the business were seen as 'honest.'
I think this just boils down to some basic human condition around what we perceive people and companies deserve for their efforts, about fairness. OP wanted to work at Valve because OP believed it was a company that deserved to be where it was because it created something of quality, something of value. OP was disillusioned because what was being produced there at the time didn't deserve the praise and financial success.
No. However, I work for a AAA games publisher, and it's clear that you can do both. We have games which are obviously our money makers and which fund the whole enterprise, but we also regularly make and release smaller games which are unlikely to ever make any money. Those later ones are needed to remain on the top of the game(ha!) in the industry and to give our creative people an outlet where they can experiment with stuff(and that's also how you push forward what games are meant to be and what the market likes/dislikes, without the risk of ruining your AAA big hitters). Valve was once known for pushing those boundaries with revolutionary games, but nowadays they only do what is super ultra safe. That's not great for the industry either.
I mean, yes and no. Every business exists to make profit, but most companies thrive when their customers are happy, not miserable. Many (but not all) microtransactions in gaming, particularly in the more predatory free-to-play models, don't exist for the good of the product, but to offer a relief to the player as the game applies more pressure and pain to try and force the player to cave and spend money. Even the "just cosmetic" microtransactions lean hard on techniques to get the player to spend as much as possible. Both sides of this aren't universal, some businesses are very much "minimum effort, maximum profit" without much care for the quality of their product, and some games take great care to not fall into predatory monetization techniques, even with microtransactions, but speaking generally, it's something that seems rather unique to the game industry.
I have to say that as a player I had an absolute blast in the TF2 hat economy: so many stylish and amusing items and combinations. I'm certain that not everyone had such a good time (it helped that I wasn't buying high-roller items or chasing the dream of a trading profit) but I don't think my experience is exceptional at all.
I recall some in-game commentary from TF2 where they talked about the design of each class. And how they worked hard to ensure that the look and even the outline of each class was unique to aid identification. What happened to that?
Is it possible to do both, e.g. pipeline of new creative titles that attract top-tier talent, a subset of which will mature into rent-seeking properties?
Valve's hat business feels more like walking into a shop that sells hundreds of shiny little things you don't need, but can buy and put everywhere. Battle Pass is like some kind of on-going carnival with the bulk sale of this stuff.
No need for shame, but there is a more subtle dynamic in play, sort of a tragedy of the commons.
Gaming is the commons.
If all the games are max money, least effort, that commons will be shallow, sort of dull.
If all the companies are doing low effort works, that commons will be shallow, dull.
A dull commons will sell through well, but will not tend to attract everyone it could. It is a smallish, but high profit commons.
Hold that thought while I relate an experience.
A product I used to manage came in colors, and standard black and white.
It was observed most of the sales and money were standards, black and white, and oddly, one mint color. The rest all did sell, but in much smaller numbers.
When that data was seen, sellers immediately quit buying anything but black, white and some bought that mint.
Everyone sold less. And they sold less of the standards than usual.
Turns out what attracts buyers to the product is a variety. Gotta have interesting colors on display. When they are there, part of the display, more buyers consider the product overall.
They still tend to buy the standards either way. But they buy more more times per unit of foot traffic past the display, so to speak.
Max sales actually happen when there are both a fair number of interesting colors, those colors change every so often, and that is done in tandem with the standards being available.
Going back to gaming I think the parallels are obvious.
Many will just pick the few big hits, but a diverse and interesting set of games is what gets them to be a greater part of culture and more people consider and stay gaming.
There has got to be effort there, even though it may not directly improve revenue on a effort / title basis.
The market is a balance of needs and desires between businesses and customers. The perfect balance is achieved when a business focuses on delivering value to customers, and charges a price that's both bearable by those customers and profitable to the business. Trying to optimize for "most money" or "least effort" further generally leads to providing less value in a non-obvious ways - on the light side, through cutting corners and exploiting relatively weaker position of customers; on the heavy side, it transitions to borderline or actual fraud. As a customer, if I sniff that a business has this attitude of maximizing profits[0] at all costs, I do my best to avoid ever having anything to do with them - because it's a strong indication the business isn't focused on delivering value, and will throw the customers under the bus whenever it's beneficial to them.
--
[0] - including, or maybe especially, "delayed profits" (aka. growth), as many startups do.
Very often the way to make money with the least effort involves some kind of scamming/fraud - and at the very least it's not usually good for consumers, so it's not good for your company in the long run.
I would say it's far more shameful when it involves the food industry, for instance, or any other industry that provides essential resources to people. In that case, their business model becomes forcefully harmful to society.
What if the most money with least effort is made though tricking or manipulating people? Lately, that seems to be the trend. I’ve played mobile games recently where the only “content” updates were A-B testing schemes.
That was my fear too, that anyone who was there for the sake of making quality games (such as you) had left and everyone still at Valve only cared about maximizing profit.
It's unfortunate, the thing I kept hearing over and over is that Valve, being a private company, isn't required to maximize profit and can instead focus on making meaningful games. That's honestly what I thought the people who worked there wanted. Gabe himself was a millionaire from Microsoft, and I assumed he started a game company to for the love of making video games.
From recent accounts of former employees, he's pretty hands off with the company nowadays, mainly playing Dota 2 in his office and occasionally coming out to see how everyone is doing. I was suprised to find out that he's one of the main reasons that Windows became the most popular PC gaming platform. He was one of the main proponents of porting the original DOOM to Windows, and him and his team were responsible for creating DirectX before he left to create Valve.
> From recent accounts of former employees, he's pretty hands off with the company nowadays, mainly playing Dota 2 in his office and occasionally coming out to see how everyone is doing.
Uh. That's kinda sad. I remember messages on some forums (edit: around hl2 release) from some gamers asking if he was okay since he had gained a lot of weight at that time.
I remember one of the guy who won a prize competition and was given a tour of Valve offices and took pictures of the crowbar (or something else, details are fuzzy).
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just what comes to my mind when I picture the Valve of today upon reading OP's comment (playing dota in the office).
It's more a statement about how depressing the whole thing is.
Yeah, I am still bitter about hl3 and the "we have the tools to churn out an hour of hl every week so we are going into episodes".
While you were there, how much was Valve still an "anarcho syndicalist" paradise? When you say projects were cancelled, was that because the teams working on them decided to stop (since everybody there is supposed to be their own boss) or was it a decision that came from the top down? Just curious how close Valve still is to its roots -- or at least the popular mythos of them.
In theory, employees are allowed to (supposed to, even) work on whatever they think is valuable. In reality, you should be working on whatever the people around you think is valuable or you're gonna get fired really quickly. (Fewer than half of new employees make it to the end of their first year.) This usually means doing whatever the most senior people on the team think is important, both because they should know if they've been there for a while, but also because they wield enormous power behind the scenes.
The problem with a company with no defined job titles or explicit seniority is that there is still seniority, but it is invisible and thus deniable. An example: in my first few months, I was struggling to find a good project and a very senior employee (one of the partners, actually) took me aside and recommended I leave my current team since my heart was clearly not in it and take some time to think about what I really wanted to do, or else I'd get let go. I took his advice seriously, came up with a couple ideas, and then approached him a week or so later to pitch these projects. He got _angry_ at me, stressing that he's not my boss, and that it showed a remarkable lack of initiative that I'd ask someone else at the company what I should work on. So: he has the authority to fire me (or at least to plausibly threaten to fire me) but the moment that authority would mean any responsibility or even the slightest effort to mentor someone, he's just another regular Joe with no special role at all. Similarly, there's no way to get meaningful feedback because nobody really knows who's going to be making the performance evaluations. Sure, you can take advice from someone who's been there for ten years, but if they're not included in the group that's assembled to evaluate you then their guidance is worth nothing.
I worked with some very smart people there, but it was the most dysfunctional and broken work environment I've ever witnessed.
The problem with a company with no defined job titles or explicit seniority is that there is still seniority, but it is invisible and thus deniable.
In groups of humans operating in "communal" mode, this invisibility of the hierarchy is by design. It's not the top brass that's doing it. It's the "will of the people."
> In reality, you should be working on whatever the people around you think is valuable or you're gonna get fired really quickly. (Fewer than half of new employees make it to the end of their first year.)
>I worked with some very smart people there, but it was the most dysfunctional and broken work environment I've ever witnessed.
Sounds like it. It sounds like a complete vacuum, void of any responsibility. Rife with cowardly management and lack of direction, I could only imagine...
I don't think I have ever read any employee account that's made me want to work in the games industry.
There's been plenty written on Valve's somewhat rare management system and how it works/doesn't work. Just do a HN search for valve and you'll find some explicit ones, and likely good discussions in more than a few in the discussions on submissions about Valve that are about other things.
Just as a side, the way Valve works is quite unusual in the games industry, most studios are more traditional with better defined roles and hierarchies.
> Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not
now.”
...
> The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.
> "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" is an influential essay by American feminist Jo Freeman inspired by her experiences in a 1960s women's liberation group that concerns power relations within radical feminist collectives.
It may sounds naive, but what on your opinion would have been the result if you'd knock on the CEO's office door, asked if he has 10 minutes to talk to you & then earnestly and honestly (but as diplomatically as you can) have told him exactly that story?
> I took his advice seriously, came up with a couple ideas, and then approached him a week or so later to pitch these projects. He got _angry_ at me
Isn't it an environment for creating ideas, rallying people around them and then leading them?
If you're new with fresh ideas then you can directly go and try to do that because formally there is no boss. You only have to fight the informal hierarchy.
Your boss reports to his boss. He can deny responsibility and blame his team, but normally if he has the power to hire/fire people that's still his problem.
From what I've heard about Valve, it sounds like there's a class of people that can fire you and therefore force you to do things, but you are still directly responsible if things go wrong. So the high-level people have power without accountability, and the low-level people have accountability without power.
That doesn't sound like a bad deal if you enter with a lot of political capital (maybe you are a world-renowned expert or friends with Gabe Newell). Doesn't seem like a particularly great place to work for everyone else though.
So, Valve is a terrible company bogged down by incompetent middle managers, just like many other terrible companies run by incompetent middle managers. The only difference is that at Valve their official title is "co-worker" instead of "boss".
Well, it can help if your boss's job description says they're responsible for your performance. Theoretically, that's why they're given the power to fire you in the first place.
If it were purely a profit case and they really don't want to make a new game. Then why doesn't valve sell the IP to publishers that want to make HL3, Portal3, Left4Dead3 etc? they'll collect a check with no effort and enable fans to have a new game.
Valve is treading water with their current games. Their current ecosystem is broadly based on goodwill of that system. If other publishers make a Valve game, like BattleField 2, and it gets called out and shunned, that ruins the good will that fuels Valve. And as long as they don't release games like that, they don't rock their boat. The problem with Epic is that they don't have any goodwill to start with that they can lose and they are smearing studios in a level of hate that is destroying those studio's goodwill.
At the end of it both will make money, but Valve will come out smelling like roses and able to pick the winners after Epic destroys the low hanging fruit.
Because HL3 would suck. First person shooters today are very different than what first person shooters were when HL2 was released. It's Quake vs Overwatch. So Valve is between a rock and a hard place; do they make HL3 in the modern style and alienate all their original fans? Or do they make HL3 in the dated style and risk a flop because the market for that dated style has only gotten smaller over the past decade and new players aren't interested in it? That's why HL3 would suck. No matter which path they take, and no matter how expertly they make it, it will almost certainly be something that leaves a TON of people dissatisfied.
So it's better for Valve to not make it. They'd rather HL3 be an urban legend than a disappointment. That's better for their image as experts in their craft.
I don't think of the style as dated. If you think of Portal 2 as a continuation of the style on a tangent, it's just heading in it's own unique direction. Portal 2 still feels far ahead of today's AAA games in various aspects.
Comparing the HH style directly to other FPS just doesn't seem right.
First off, Portal 2 was eight years ago. That's a long time and mainstream consumer expectations for what a video game should offer have changed a lot over those eight years.
Secondly, I know plenty fans of HL/HL2 who found the tone/direction of Portal 2 distressing because it was too self-aware or whatever. I don't really agree with that, but it's a point of view that's been circulating around for years. I think a lot of fans have come to terms with HL3 never being released. Continuing to not release HL3 has little apparent risk. Less risk than releasing it and making something a bunch of people will either hate or ignore. So I don't think they will.
> They'd rather HL3 be an urban legend than a disappointment. That's better for their image as experts in their craft
Sorry but I doubt they're even thinking about it that hard, at this point this post nails it [0], Valve just doesn't care about making any sort of experience that isn't maximum profit for minimum effort and isn't based around a in game item economy.
It certainly isn't out of worry that they'll disappoint their fans with a dated gametype. They look at Portal 2, a beloved game as a huge waste of their time. They're not a company that makes money from art, gameplay and storytelling anymore they make money from virtual items.
But don't be sad, plenty of companies still care about telling single player stories in videogames: Nintendo, Guerrilla, Rockstar, Kojima Prod, Naughty Dog, Sony Japan Studio etc
The concept isn't as dead as Valve believes it is.
Ok I don’t play gta:o or rdr2:o but I bought both games full price.
I’m sorry but to pretend for even a second that both those titles didn’t include expertly crafted 50-100 hour single player worlds and stories is being extremely disingenuous.
Rockstar shipped twice what people are asking from valve, yes they tacked on online but they still shipped the single player experience many in this comment section are claiming they’d happily pay valve AAA prices for.
The difference is rockstar manages to do both and just because you dislike one doesn’t mean they didn’t ship the other.
Doom 2016 was a nice tribute I suppose, but compare it to the massive success of Doom 1&2. It's not the same sort of cultural phenomenon. What I will give it though is it nailed the attitude. Doom 1&2 had a certain raw metal attitude, and Doom 2016 captured that well. I've never seen the HL series expressing attitude like Doom did.
What Valve really wants to avoid is a Doom 3 moment. When an old franchise is given a modern tuneup and the result is something nobody really thinks does the IP justice.
I think one could argue that the original Doom had more in common with Fortnite than with its newer iteration. A Doom level wasn't that big, and it was for the most part a quick little stand-alone experience, almost arcadey; you could hop in, frag some demons, and play the same levels over and over. There was no story, no RPG elements, I don't even recall whether your health and ammo and weapons carried over between levels.
As for size and complexity, there were original Doom levels that surpass the 2016 levels in every quantifiable measure. Larger maps, huge mazes, etc. All thanks to the WAD system that allowed Doom to have such long legs thanks to community driven content. With the new graphics system of 2016, community generated content was just never going to be a real thing with 2016. That is where 2016 and the original differ the most. As for unwanted RPG elements, 2016 at least has a mode that ignores that and dumps you into any level you want. To your point though, the RPG elements did alienate some fans of the original games, which goes back to my original point.
2016 was moderately successful. It got a lot of praise just for being stylistically Doom in every way that Doom 3 wasn't. But I don't think that Doom 2016 counts as strong evidence that HL3 could be made in a way that satisfies fans of the original games without alienating younger/modern gamers.
> Or do they make HL3 in the dated style and risk a flop because the market for that dated style has only gotten smaller over the past decade and new players aren't interested in it?
I get your point that they can't win either way, but I wish there were more developers that would stick to older style games, when the goldeneye/timesplitters style of shooters went out of fashion the FPS market left me behind completely, similarly when platformers became 3D there weren't a lot of options for people that preferred the 2D style.
Have you looked at the indie scene? Lots of 2D platformers there for example: cave story, shovel knight, limbo, thomas was alone, cuphead, rogue legacy, dead cells, and spelunky to name a few.
That's just not true. I really hate the newer FPS style, with the clunky hitboxes and weird movement. I miss the accuracy and smoothness of the HL series, to me HL2 shines because of the gaming experience.
And also they ended it on a cliffhanger in episode 2 instead of concluding the arc at least.
And lastly after Portal came out I was so happy because it all made sense, I was sure Portal will somehow cross paths with HL so in HL3 you'd have a portal gun in your arsenal. So much potential wasted.
they can still do both, modern squad action multiplayer and traditional story driven single player can coexist, call of duty and battlefield made a point of doing that year after year. the rest is a marketing problem, being able to reach both audiences with the correct message
I'd be curious to hear you speculate on how Valve's VR push may have come about. VR certainly has the potential to make money long term, but very long term, and that payoff is far from guaranteed.
I'm not GP, but that information is actually publicly available from the people involved, here's a basic summary if you're interested:
Gabe Newell invited Michael Abrash to work at Valve (they knew each other from back at Microsoft, and Abrash was even offered to be a co-founder of Valve originally but turned it down). Abrash was interested in wearable displays as a future platform. Valve missed mobile and even wants to reduce their dependence on Windows, so there's justification to research it and put together a team.
I guess they are afraid of the oculus store.if vr becomes a thing and something like the quest make it ( standalone vr) steam is gone for good. Then the middle man is Facebook with oculus store.
> had only made $200 million in profit and that kind of chump change just wasn't worth it
So it's harder to expand the team than keeping an extra 200m revenue? Can't find words to describe if that's the real reason. Every player I know got excited when I told them we need Portal 3 btw.
This is what I don't understand. Why not hire 100 great game developers, give them $2 million each over 4 years, and have them develop Portal 3?
We know it would sell well. What about Left 4 Dead 3? Once again, it would be an instant hit. Even if Valve develops a game that breaks even, it helps to strengthen Steam as a whole and those users go on to make purchases elsewhere on their platform.
How much money did they lose because someone else developed Fortnite? How many users started buying games at Epic instead of Steam because their first jump into PC gaming was with Fortnite at the Epic store?
Yep. I interviewed at Epic and the recruiter gave a big ol spiel about how they're working on developing a platform for cross-system gaming. Basically genericizing what they did for Fortnite and selling it as a game platform service. I could see a lot of those games going into an Epic Store that replaces Steam.
>most of which are designed by players, not the employees!
Which is kind of funny, as the original CS and TF Classic were total conversion mods made by players. I fondly remember Natural Selection, which was also later made into a standalone game. Shame Valve didn't explore the market of enabling amateur/semi-professional game design before Unity and UE ate that particular lunch. I guess the hats must be worth it.
Hey riotnrrd. I report for a video games news website. Would you like to share more about the environment at Valve? Feel free to contact me on discord - pingal#8518 or email - pingal@spieltimes.com
Well, IMHO The Lab is the best "game" made by Valve in the recent years. For a free tech demo, it has a surprisingly large amount of content: 8 minigames, plus the lobby. Three of them are score-based and have some replay value, the others are more like experiences.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there is more to it now. There is the Valve Index, but that's just a nice headset with nothing revolutionary. It may have a best-in-class display but none of the "gen2" features such as wireless communication, inside-out tracking, foveated rendering with eye tracking, varifocal lens...
Your comment seems to talk about all publicly known information and pretty much reiterates the common hate echo chamber. Which leads me to believe that you made this all up.
I joined Valve because I excited to work with what I thought was the best game studio in the world, but I left very depressed when I found out they're merely collecting rent from Steam and making in-game decorations for old games.