I used to be a huge Valve fanboy, but throughout the years they've managed to burn away all of that goodwill through a combination of not building good games anymore (or at least not releasing them, as I learned in the article), and pioneering microtransactions and loot boxes (read gambling) added to their existing games that profit mainly off of gamers with poor self control (most of whom are literally children).
Although I also blame the gaming community as a whole for collectively rejecting the subscription model for games, which made the much more exploitative f2p + microtransaction/lootbox business model the only real viable option for games that require ongoing development.
I don't know enough about the history of microtransactions and loot boxes to evaluate your charge that they "pioneered" them, and that indeed could be quite important to any calculation of how much goodwill they deserve.
But I know that in making that calculation, I personally couldn't give less of a shit about whether or not they released Half-Life 3, when they've been the patron saint of gaming on Linux. Which they haven't just barely saved from oblivion, but been the biggest single force in turning into an actual viable competitor.
I hope I don't need to explain why that matters for reasons that go beyond whether or not you are personally directly invested in gaming on Linux.
Their strongest recent competition (Epic) has not just been indifferent to gaming on Linux, they've actively done enormous damage to it: they've bought exclusive rights to popular mainstream games which fully supported Linux, and removed that support.
Though the picture is further complicated in that the other big competitor, GOG.com (run by CD Projekt, the Polish developers of the Witcher series), are easily the best citizens altogether, most importantly for their commitment to DRM-free distribution. But they also aren't the ones doing Proton.
> GOG.com (run by CD Projekt, the Polish developers of the Witcher series), are easily the best citizens altogether, most importantly for their commitment to DRM-free distribution
The commitment is weaker than they want it to sound. They're selling quite a few games now that require an internet connection or a serial number in order for multiplayer to work, or even just to access some of the single-player gameplay.
Refusing to call something "DRM" doesn't mean you're DRM-free.
> They're selling quite a few games now that require an internet connection [...] in order for multiplayer to work
How else would online multiplayer work? I suppose there's the community-run server model, but you're asking vendors to potentially do some pretty major re-architecting.
GOG's games are entirely DRM-Free for single-player and local multiplayer. For experiences that are inherently tied to online services, the concept of DRM-Free ownership doesn't really work.
Right, because I said "multiplayer", obviously I meant "multiplayer over the internet".
Multiplayer would work by letting you connect however you want.
> you're asking vendors to potentially do some pretty major re-architecting.
From a game architecture perspective, there is no difference between connecting to someone else over the internet, and connecting to someone else over a LAN. As far as the networking stack is concerned, the difference is that in the second case, you're most likely using IP addresses that are reserved for non-internet use.
But wait, there's more!
> How else would online multiplayer work?
You could just... NOT require a registration when connecting to the internet. Remember what I said about requiring a serial number? Try thinking of a more iconic, prototypical example of DRM.
> GOG's games are entirely DRM-Free for single-player and local multiplayer.
> From a game architecture perspective, there is no difference between connecting to someone else over the internet, and connecting to someone else over a LAN. As far as the networking stack is concerned, the difference is that in the second case, you're most likely using IP addresses that are reserved for non-internet use.
Well, but you're assuming the server software is actually designed to be run on end-user PCs, and not some proprietary server architecture that also hooks into a bunch of other company stuff.
> You could just... NOT require a registration when connecting to the internet. Remember what I said about requiring a serial number? Try thinking of a more iconic, prototypical example of DRM.
So I guess the question here is, what is the purpose of buying DRM Free games?
To me, it's the knowledge that as long as I can find compatible hardware, I will always be able to run a game, no matter what external server somewhere someone decides to take down. This is very powerful, and it's the difference between truly owning an experience, and renting temporary access to one.
As long as an external server is required, all of that goes out the window. Any game that uses that model is inherently a rental. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, if the experience couldn't exist any other way. I buy tickets to movie theaters, and Broadway shows, and plenty of other "temporary" forms of entertainment.
If the multiplayer already requires an external server, what does it matter whether or not there's a serial number? To me, it makes absolutely no difference.
> No, they're not, this is just false.
What single player / local multiplayer games on GOG have DRM?
> What single player / local multiplayer games on GOG have DRM?
#1. This question is not asked in good faith; games purposefully include centralized internet multiplayer, while not including local multiplayer, and this is itself a form of DRM.
#2. Northgard applies DRM even to single-player modes. You cannot use them without simultaneously connecting through the Steam^W GOG client.
So no, offline singleplayer is not working fine by all accounts, it is not intended to work at all, and this was fine with GOG when they reviewed the game. (If you start the game, you will see the message "You need to log in through GOG to access Conquest" displayed in a tooltip over its grayed-out button. It's not something you could actually miss, if you were reviewing the game.)
There's more than 1 free online multiplayer, and RTCW had keys and anti-cheat when it became free for better or worse.
I think you're conflating issues, if you give allow the community to run servers, you don't have on-going costs for multi-player (besides the discovery service, but you can make that free too).
Multiplayer doesn't need internet. Neither the client nor the server does.
I think the parent made a mental jump here: the problem is when multiplayer needs a particular endpoint on the internet, and when that endpoint is unreachable (firewall, bad connection, product discontinued), then multiplayer is broken.
Epic could certainly be described as anti-linux, for the reasons you've described. On the other hand they have invested quite a bit into open source cross platform projects Godot being a good example.
Valve have made huge amounts of money from gambling but have been tremendous in pushing Linux as a viable gaming platform.
CD Projekt are staunchly DRM free which is fantastic, and offer support for Linux releases on their store, but they are dragging their heels on full Linux support with GoG Galaxy, and talk condescendingly about Linux users with regards to their games Witcher 3 and more recently Cyber Punk 2077.
Judging by their actions I would still pick Valve ahead of the other two as the best for Linux as a modern desktop OS.
I wonder how much of Proton development is really Valve and how much is originally Wine contributors though. Fortunately Wine is GPL afaik and requires modifications to be contributed back to the community. So even if it is a cheap way for Valve to gain customers, it means there is a chance contributions flow back and forth between Proton and Wine.
The investment into linux gaming isn't only wine thought. They are working behind the scenes into fixing the rough edges and creating a smooth experience.
They pushed publishers to develop linux ports, they hired developers, they created a linux gaming distribution (steamos and the "failed" steamos console) and do their own research and development like ACO [0].
Proton in the end is "only" wine bundled with a good patchset and preinstalled debendencies, but even in the beginning you could get a good gaming experience out of the box that you only got through manual patching and tuning with wine.
I agree that steamos hasn't been a big success in the market, but I'm pretty sure Valve intended it as negotiating leverage - BATNA [1] - when Microsoft came out with Windows Store.
So long as Microsoft isn't declaring "No app stores except ours" or "30% cut of sales to us, no exceptions" steamos has been a success from Valve's point of view :)
I would argue Proton is a bit more than 'only' Wine and that it also includes projects like DXVK/D9VK. These make many, many more games playable at decent performance than would be possible with Wine's own solution.
Yeah counted dxvk as patch. Wine has it's own work on dx over vulkan and you can easily use dxvk with wine as well. It's the default for most of my wine prefixes.
Tbh I even got a wrapper script to try games with proton when they don't run well with wine just to see if it works any better and the wrapper is mostly setting environment variables and reading paths.
> I wonder how much of Proton development is really Valve and how much is originally Wine contributors though.
Both! They gained the advantage of 20 years of work on Wine before they started distributing it. Now they're continuing to push Wine forward by funding further development. Most work on Proton is sent to upstream Wine first, and is then merged back into Proton. All of this is visible in the public repositories.
This is exactly how open source should work :) Valve's Linux team are good open source citizens, you can rest easy.
Team Fortress 2 and CS:GO were early pioneers of current micro transaction models. Arguably the “loot box” was popularized by crates and boxes from TF2. Players would receive crates through casual play on any server. The crates could be unlocked with keys bought for 1.50 each.
This model was brought to Valves free to play release DOTA2, where it further cemented the concept in the public awareness.
TF2 definitely feels to me like the origin of widespread loot boxes in gaming (The actual origin appears to be MapleStory in 2004, and the appearance of widespread free to play social network games with loot boxes does slightly predate their inclusion in TF2. I’d definitley blame Zynga more than Valve for the current state of affairs personally). By the time DOTA2 came around though they were already so prevalent that I don’t think their inclusion changed much of anything though.
MapleStory had a "cash shop" in 2004, not loot boxes. Very common design at the time, it was just an in-game store that only took real money in return for items. MS was actually somewhat famous at the time for having a fair, cosmetic-only cash shop (which has now since changed)[0].
PCGamer [1] puts "ZT Online", a Chinese MMO, as starting the lootbox trend in 2006.
[0]: Albeit, this is all coming from my experiences on the Global MapleStory servers. The Korean ones could have been different
It’s actually the Japanese version of MapleStory that first had the “Gachapon ticket” in 2004, which gave random in game items and cost real money. (While it seems to have been ported to other versions later on, I can’t figure out when that happened). ZT Online is definitely closer to the modern loot box model. While they also didn’t have loot box unique items, they had the model where you used keys to open chests bought with real money. Additionally enemies didn’t drop items in the game, instead it was a combination of buying materials and smithing. This apparently made gambling with keys to get items directly very compelling in comparison. Opening a chest was also rigged in a way where a wheel span on items you could get, but the appearance rate of valuable items was more common than the rate at which you would actually land on them.
Definitely TF2 and the infamous "hats". Other games may have sold cosmetics, but none truly gamified it like Valve. They even had a proper economist [0] whose whole job was to tweak and optimize the system to make as much money as possible. In 2011, they switched TF2 from paid to F2P, which also was a huge step forward for the microtransaction model. CS:GO soon followed suit.
I'm in a sad situation where I want to support GOG but choose Steam because of their superb (just click Play) Linux integration. After many years I'm just tired of tweaking Wine/Lutris profiles.
I'm really hoping GOG will one day provide a Linux client with Proton inside.
The roll out of the current system was fairly slow and based on response to changes in TF2. Initially weapons were tied to in game achievements, and later a random drop system as well. Cosmetic hats were added to the drop pool in 09, and in 2010 a weapon, item and crate (loot box) shop, and later an update made of community creations. 2012 added a co-op mode MvM that required a 1$ ticket to play a round of the game that that count how many times you've played and can drop items, and the steam community market where items can be traded. It's worth noting that Yanis Varoufakis[1], the economist was a consultant for valve at this point. In 2015 skins for weapons were added, something that beforehand was free.
Valve's argument, which is significantly different than something like overwatch seems to be that content like hats and weapon models and skins has value, and when it's given away there's less incentive for creators to make things, which results in less things being available for players to enjoy and people who make things getting less money. A similar thought led to the introduction of the paid mods store for example. While that was extremely unpopular, there are a couple game mods for sale on the steam store2[2], and there are Patreon game modders[3].
Of course Valve's dog in this race is that they can and have made boatloads of cash in doing so[4], where in their ideal situation users make content and other users pay for it, and they just collect a fee on top for providing a platform.
GoG does not offer refunds, no-questions-asked. Also unlike GoG, Steam has location/country specific pricing and can do payments in local currencies (at some point they even used to accept Bitcoins). In the third world, you pay much lower prices if you buy through steam. Considering this, Steam has been rather a good thing for gamers.
I thought they actually started offering them as of recently?
But regardless, you can see why refunds are much harder for GoG—it goes part-in-parcel with being DRM-Free. Valve can remove games from your account and render (most of) them impossible to play. GoG, by contrast, can't really "take back" a DRM-Free executable once you've downloaded it.
Even before Steam allowed refunds, GoG had a 30-day no-questions-asked exchange policy for any game you'd purchased but hadn't actually downloaded. Sadly, this isn't particularly useful, but it's also the one situation where GoG can actually "reclaim" the returned item.
In my neck of the woods, GOG offers no-questions-asked refunds, and they also have location-specific pricing and local currency payments. The pricing is usually higher than average though, so they grant extra credit for those purchases.
I'm not sure which location you're talking about where this doesn't apply.
I think GoG still not having regional pricing for much of 3rd world. In Steam most games are available normally at 30to 70 percent reduced prices in much of 3rd world, compared to US prices.
I truly hate loot boxes, and I'll never buy any personally, but the way it worked in Dota 2 originally was a little different although it did change over time.
At first you could just buy item sets, which I didn't bother with, but you could also buy tickets to pro games, which I enjoyed and sometimes you'd get a bonus item. Also, the sets were made by third parties, and they'd get a cut of the sales. Also, all the gear could be sold on the Steam Market (generally for pennies though..).
Eventually this morphed into you could only 'gamble' for the sets by buying loot boxes which was a big step down, but there was still the option to buy from someone on the Steam Marketplace - so at least that was an option.
Overall, I found Valve's lootbox implementation the best as you could sell and buy on the Marketplace, but I preferred the original way where I could just buy a character set that I wanted.
Also as far I can tell in valve lootbox model there is no competitive advantage gained. Buyers only get new cosmetics items, achievements and secondary goals.
This is a far better standard than pay2win models that require payement to level up or skip time consuming actions.
People who pay look cool, but people who can't afford still get to win using their skills.
Note that the "it's just cosmetics" argument is flawed. Loot boxes are still exploiting the human psyche to earn enormous amounts of money from a small amount of customers (or whales, as they put it, ugh...), regardless of the perceived value they actually offer.
There's actually the toxic culture revolving around cosmetic upgrades in games, where using the default skins is considered a sign of poverty, and leads to discrimination among groups of young people. Fortnite is one of the games where this issue is more prominent.
My nephews who are _barely_ into double digits in age spend more on Fortnite than I spend in an average year on games games themselves. I'm a gamer on PC and several consoles.
A lot of that is driven by "default" culture. They joke about it between themselves and use the terms to call each other names jokingly, who knows what they're calling others online.
As a and parent in my 30s I despise Fornite as a game and the culture it's creating with young children and the money it has them spending on a cosmetic candy cane or whatever it is this week.
Not a parent yet, and not a Fortnite player either, so I might miss the point.
But I totally recall that my parents in theirs 30's were desperate that I requested to wear mostly "surfers's brand clothing" which was the big hype when I was a teenager.
Peer pressure is a thing, videogame is one way to express it, but I don't think it's the root cause.
At least with clothing, you're getting clothing out if it (though frankly I prefer the system of my high school which was to have a uniform; evens the playing field, particularly for me as a working class child at a grammar school in an upper class area).
My issue with Fornite is the speed and cost with which they produce this stuff. I see my nephews spending 10s of £s at a time every week or so.
I'm not sure how I'll deal with the peer pressure issue, my child is too young right now, but Fornite has a strong affinity to children, I'd argue it's mostly played by children and the culture is a real issue which they're doing nothing to resolve that I can see.
Even uniforms aren't perfect at hiding economic differences. Those who buy one that fits now with the expectation they'll buy a new one when they outgrow it vs those that need it to last all year and buy one for their kid to grow into. Those that have multiples to rotate between vs those that have just the one which ends up with holes in by year's end. The official uniform of my school had the school crest on and cost €50, which resulted in some of the poorer students getting jumpers with approximately the right colour for €20 and €5 iron on crests which would look obvious and start to peel in short order.
I agree. My circumstances were a little different. My family wasn't poor, we were just comparatively less wealthy as a working class family when I was attending an all boys grammar school (on merit) with the sons of mayors and company directors and doctors. My uniforms were fine (I was in the iron-on blazer crest gang) and it was never picked on, although my non-brand shoes were.
Being the only brownish person in a very white middle and upper class grammar school in a very white part of England at the time _was_ something to be picked out on.
Electronic communications & transactions enable theses mechanics to happen faster & without schedule constraints if left unchecked. Same as for bullying by the way.
As far as social interaction goes we live in uncharted territory. Does it necessarily mean that it's bad? On the other side of the spectrum this enable YouthForClimate, BLM, and things yet to come...
It's really hard to analyze thing as they happen, this is not new either ;)
PS: Also not spoiling you kid seems like a good old advice still standing!
Interesting. I didn't know skins were something people took seriously. I play overwatch from time to time. In overwatch, skins are obtained from lootboxes, which can be bought with real-life currency, but which you also get free after matches; so I have accumulated some skins. I don't think I've ever used one, and I don't think anyone's ever cared that I use the default skin.
So, I can only assume this culture arises in specific games, not out of cosmetic microtransactions in general.
Which is not to say I think cosmetic microtransactions are a good thing. Just that they're not by necessity as bad as some in this thread are making them out to be.
With Fortnite it's that my nephew's are really into Fortnite and Fornite YouTube. They're very aware, even at their young age of the "default" slur, they call each other names related to it jokingly. Peer pressure and probably influential YouTubers have them convinced they _must_ have particular skins at certain times.
They're so into the YouTube culture they recently requested (and received) RGB keyboards and accessories to adorn their desks even though they're gaming on consoles.
Overwatch seems to have a different culture than Fortnite. People might say "heh" if the play of the game is Default Skin Reinhardt using the Heroic highlight intro... but that's as far as it goes. Playing the game seems to give enough skins that nobody is particularly concerned about it.
From reading the comments, it seems like Fortnite players make fun of each other for not having skins, thus people are pressured into buying them. I am guessing that because the game has so much downtime, there really isn't anything else to do.
Yes it's far from perfect, my point is that is was still better than pay2win.
Whether free2play is more or less discriminating than DRM AAA titles with price starting at 12x the price of an optional pass is a whole other real question.
Regulation of virtual goods economics market will be an important debate. But most people don't even know about these huge markets, let alone politicians.
One key point is that current copyright laws are totally inadequate to latest technologies. Company can build empire based on copyrighted material in a heartbeat while decades are needed before anything enter to the public domain. So much energy is wasted fighting legal roadblock instead of innovating on previous concepts...
Actually I'd say that it's not any better than pay-to-win, and could actually be worse.
At least with pay-to-win you know that it's a sham and that it's only the amount of money that you spend which influences how good you are at the game (more or less).
With cosmetics and appearances it's much more stealthy since you're still a good player if you win, but there is peer pressure to pay for a skin so you can keep up with the latest fashions. You could easily spend more and more money this way before realising what a sham it is, and all you'd have to show for it is maybe a full digital wardrobe of stuff you never wear. (With no way to sell that to recoup even some of the costs).
>>Regulation of virtual goods economics market will be an important debate. But most people don't even know about these huge markets, let alone politicians.
Thats not quite true w.r.t. loot boxes. Several EU and Asian countries have already classified them as gambling and regulated them as such. I believe EA's Fifa soccer was pulled from several countries because of this.
In a way, we're not that far then from the world of Snow Crash[ß]. The thing in the book that always struck me as both unlikely and remarkably accurate as far as human vanity is concerned, was the idea of high-end custom avatars.
Stephenson's notion that in a future with ubiquitous VR there would be well-paid artists who crafted detailed, posh avatars for the well-off might just come true. I always thought it pretty far-fetched: sure, people are vain but they wouldn't be that vain. It appears I couldn't have been more wrong...
Can we stop infantilizing people who choose to waste money on digital cosmetic items and acting like they're being exploited and have no power to stop it? If someone wants to spend $1,000 on weapon skins that's their choice. At what point does personal responsibility play any role?
Literally who does it hurt if there are no lootboxes that are essentially slot machines?
Does it hurt the people who waste huge amount of money, who further develop bad economic habits and potentially harm their loved ones (their parents or god forbid their kids)? No.
Does it hurt regular consumers that want to buy the item they want instead of gambling for it? No.
Does it hurt a large abstract entity that doesn't get to maximize their profits? I guess it would! (Epic has grown from a few hundred million company in the early 2010s to an almost 20 billion company in mid 2020, literally all of it based on Fortnite which only brings money through these microtransactions)
So you're arguing for a business model that is not beneficial to any consumer, that decreases net happiness, all in the name of "freedom".
There are a million other things we don't allow because if we let people take personal responsibility for them they consistently fuck up.
It's the exact same situation with a lot of softer drugs.
Gambling addiction is very real and should be treated as seriously as drug addictions. (Serotonin is quite a drug, even if we do manufacture it ourselves in our own glands.)
I'm also not a fan of cosmetics because they make the games harder to play, when the silhouettes of characters change it becomes a nightmare.
Not to mention that they break immersion in the game too, Call of Duty Modern Warfare started off last year as a slick game with mostly realistic skins and characters, now it's full of pink anime guns, colourful tracksuits and even a Hyena...
New weapons in common quality usually popped for everyone very quickly. And were you really unlucky it's was a matter of seconds to find a trade by crafting some metal out of unwanted items.
Was kind of a meta-game, but yes definitively paved the way for virtual goods stock market. Some social science researcher should totally investigate that (if not already done).
>Some social science researcher should totally investigate that
I mean, not quite a social scientist, but they hired varoufakis at the time to study the economics of the loot boxes among other things. Here are some of the articles about it from his website.
> I found Valve's lootbox implementation the best as you could sell and buy on the Marketplace
I've been working to articulate why I think this has actually made Steam's the worst, and possibly the most nefarious.
Up front disclosure: I directly blame the Steam Marketplace for putting my account at high risk of hostile takeover (to the point I've seen evidence of a botnet cracking my password in unbelievable time), for what I believe to be the dumbest reason imaginable. (A TF2 hat I use if I play TF2 that was a pre-order exclusive of an unrelated game.)
The Marketplace seems to only push whales towards further over-spending with dreams of exotic arbitrage of their randomly gambled loot box items.
The Marketplace allows Valve to directly double (and triple and more) dip on the costs of items through Marketplace fees. Whether a whale decides to drop everything on loot box rolls or trawling the Marketplace for "deals" or any sort of would be arbitrage in between (including account hijacking, trade phishing, etc), Valve still gets their cut.
(If there's a specific over indulgence to point to, other than Steam sales in general, as to why Valve is so fat and sated and not hungry enough to develop more games for themselves, I'd argue that Marketplace fees seems an obvious one.)
Even beyond the impacts on whale and thief psychology, you yourself demonstrate why the Marketplace is more nefarious than most of the rest of loot box schemes: the option to sell what you don't want and to buy exactly what you want makes the whole thing seem friendlier. Under the hood the dynamics are the exact same: random lotteries/slot machines create artificial scarcity of digital goods and an illusion of value. In turn the Marketplace, despite and because of most aspirations for arbitrage, serves only prop up and exacerbate that artificial scarcity. Even worse, that Market puts a real money price tag on items. Sure, most of those items are truly micro-transactions at pennies apiece, but there's just enough rare items (because of course there is) that the worm gets into your head that maybe if you gamble on that $1 loot box you'll get a $30 item you could sell to pay for half your next game.
One final reason I think to mention about how nefarious Steam's Marketplace is for gaming: by having the loot box slot machines placed so near to the cashier Marketplace, Valve absolutely is playing the most dangerous game of just about anyone in threatening a Pinball Prohibition-style gambling law crackdown on videogames.
I understand, and I do agree to some extent. However, I did enjoy being able to wait for a month and picking up a set I wanted to usually < £1 rather than buying loot boxes over and over. It's the same I'd do for CCGs, which is probably the reason it felt familiar to me.
I never liked their DRM stance and personally not using Steam and buying games in DRM-free stores instead, but Valve gained a lot of goodwill by backing Linux gaming and important gaming related FOSS projects like Mesa, Wine, dxvk, vkd3d and advancing Vulkan and OpenXR in general.
They are still lacking effort in marketing of Linux gaming, but their technical backing is really great.
Well it's matter of comparing it to their competitors.
GOG actively advertises and encourages devs to eschew DRM, lots of games became DRM-free just to appear on the store.
Humble also actively advertised DRM-free games, and even source-available games, though granted, nowadays it's more of alternative steam store interface with charity, with very few direct download titles.
itch.io, due to the area they operate in -- niche indies -- it's pretty much cultural standard to have no DRM, so they don't even have to mention it.
I suspect DRM was necessary to get publishers on board in the beginning when digital distribution/stores wasn't really a thing. Steam might never have taken off without it and the big publishers would've just rolled their own clients with DRM earlier.
I don't like stores that proliferate DRM. GOG has the right approach about it. They simply don't allow DRMed games in their store and actively work with publishers to dispel their messed up DRM mentality.
> GOG has the right approach about it. They simply don't allow DRMed games in their store
This is definitely not true. There are DRMed games in their store right now. Yes, at the same time the homepage says "We are GOG.COM, the DRM-free home for a curated selection of games."
I think a great article could be written on how much of the gaming industry, including PC games, phone games and twitch streamers are funded by whales without self control, who are mainly children and teens.
'Mainly children and teens' may be true, but I don't think it is obvious without evidence. (Intuitively it seems likely that most of the people involved are kids, but most of the $ are spent by adults, and 'most of the whales' depends on the definition of whale.) But IMO there's no magic line between children and adults that makes it okay to harmfully exploit someone's weaknesses provided they're over 18. I know focusing on children makes sense, because it's even harder to justify in that case, and probably more legally dubious. But I hope we're not implicitly saying it is/would be ethically okay provided they only take advantage of adults.
> But IMO there's no magic line between children and adults that makes it okay to harmfully exploit someone's weaknesses provided they're over 18.
Seems to me freedom of choice isn't just about selecting between good decisions, but having the right to make bad ones. Freedom isn't merely the choice between 'Fresh Stripe' toothpaste and 'Total Whitening' toothpaste - it's having the choice to go without even though it's dumb to have your teeth fall out.
Any society willing to ban lootboxes for informed, consenting, mentally competent adults would have no problem with banning porn and smoking and drinking too much and bicycling without a helmet by following the same logic.
There are steps you could take short of a total ban, of course - as we do for other vices.
> "There are steps you could take short of a total ban, of course - as we do for other vices. "
Yup, there are strict regulations with regard to gambling because of its addictive nature and, let's not kid ourselves, loot boxes are an uncomfortably close analogue of gambling. I would be very much okay with putting lootbox, particularly gacha games, under similar heavy regulation.
It's common in societies to ban substances and practices which are toxic and/or harmful to people and those around them.
This includes hard drugs (smoking and alcohol get a pass primarily due to a pre-existing legacy userbase and industry, but they wouldn't even sort of get that today, anywhere, in a fresh slate, especially nicotine), unsafe practices on the road (such as not wearing a seat belt), and indeed porn where consent is not explicit and informed (revenge porn and child abuse).
And you'll note a lot of economic practices are banned in the Land Of The Free(tm), Ponzi schemes being a good example. Is this unreasonable? If you're a libertarian you might argue it is, but most people think it's a perfectly fine thing to ban.
Not saying you're wrong (although I personally would like to see some of the more exploitative practices in the games industry banned), but you are way off.
An old boss of mine was a whale. He was in his 40s and spent 100s of dollars on mobile games. I think it's mainly people with a lack of impulse control.
Someone I worked with had a nephew who spent $4000 on I think it was FarmVille in one month. It took them a while but they were able to recover the money because the kid was underage and using the parents credit card.
It's interesting how the developers and publishers managed to convince players that the only alternative to a subscription fee is f2p + microtransactions. Guild Wars was a success despite having neither. What happened to the expansion pack business model?
Guild Wars has just about always had a microtransaction shop. It's less emphasized than the boxed products, but it's tough to consider Guild Wars' model that different from an F2P model. Especially as both Guild Wars have "free to start" options today, the line is blurry if non-existent.
It's also not a model that has disappeared or anything. Not just in the MMO space where there are plenty that may or may not be free-to-start but claim their primary financial driver is expansion packs. Overwatch is sort of based on that model, but always had loot boxes. Destiny was based on that model, but always had micro-transactions. Destiny 2 is now free-to-start, and again that line is really blurry between F2P micro-transactions and "expansion pack business model".
I'm pretty sure the poster you replied to meant the original Guild Wars, which, so far as I'm aware of, was a 'buy once, and play for life' model. No micro transactions there.
Guild Wars 1 had micro-transactions for additional (DRM-ed!) music to unlock if you got bored with the base game songs as some of us did. It was an odd experiment (that I recall I paid for) that got shut down, taking the DRMed music with it as the DRM servers also shutdown, to some frustration at least from me as I had assumed it to be a more traditional soundtrack purchase.
I recall there being other micro-transactions for cosmetics in Guild Wars 1 as well, across its early lifespan, but of course, it certainly was not quite to the degree of Guild Wars 2's "Gem Shop".
The free software that "rules the word" is not free in the same sense that f2p is free. It's not the price that has allowed open source software to be in its current position. f2p is free as in beer.
Indeed I meant free as in beer. Open source runs everything under the hood, but I wasn't refering to open source in this case. I'm talking about how the most profitable companies provide things for "free" because people don't understand the value of their time.
I don't think these options you named are the only solutions to fund ongoing development. DLC or addons how they were called before are numerous. I think the models like subscription to platforms would be very bad for the quality of games.
I'm in the same boat as you. Grew up on Valve games, and they even inspired me to become a game developer. I was a mobile game dev at my last job, and it really pained me to see firsthand how much that company was in a stranglehold to develop more and more content to put into the lootboxes instead of improving and adding to the gameplay itself. Not to mention new ways to give out that content. Its a viscious cycle that never ends. I feel lucky to have been laid off now that I look back at it a few months later. I'm never going back to game dev again after that experience. That isn't the only reason but it's a big one.
Putting aside the moral issues of lootboxes, I quite like Valve's development model for multiplayer games. The revenue they get from the marketplace etc. allows them to continue improving on games for a long time without the pressure to constantly release new versions of the same game. This longevity is nice for competitive multiplayer games because the skills you develop aren't obsoleted so quickly.
To be fair Alyx is really fantastic looking I just can't afford a headset and I don't want to give Facebook my buck. Valve has always tried to do things that are next gen with every major game release. I have a friend who plays Half-Life Alyx and it is fun and he has fun playing it, but I'm not about to spend a thousand dollars on a headset.
I played it on my Windows MR headset. They can be found for cheap and their experience is better than the Oculus Quest (higher refresh rate, no artifacting) and about the same as the Oculus Rift S.
I used to play condition zero (counter strike) when I was 11-12 at the same time learning frontpage and photoshop. I used to switch between them when I got tired of one.
My brother who's 14 now, is totally addicted to CSGO and the skins / box system is totally ruining the game IMO, one streamer buys a skin and all of a sudden its on fire. Gameplay is almost second now.
I've heard of people committing suicide when valve locks accounts of high value.
I never really got into half life, after cracking halo on pc with a keygen (my first every multiplayer online) and playing one game, I was hooked. But never to the peripheral stuff. Just the game itself.
While I much prefer the subscription model myself, there's no way I would have been able to get my parents to pay for a wow subscription as a kid and now as an adult I see the problems with that model as well( grindy content, time gating etc). No solution is perfect, the problem is optimizing for profit instead of fun which is to be expected.
I would say those cards were a kind of gambling too, but the current version is much more refined and dangerous. They've had years to perfect the psychology, and it's a lot easier to lose control when you can instantly give in to the compulsion by clicking a mouse, rather than having to leave the house, go to a store, look a cashier in the eye, etc.
Who said buying pack of Pokemon cards wasn't gambling?
The redeeming thing with Pokemon was that when you spent money back then you knew exactly how much you spent and you couldn't spend more than your allowance.
Another redeeming thing was that with Pokemon you actually had a physical object that you could also trade with your friends.
By any means I'm not trying to defend Pokemon, but wanted to show that this is much worse.
> Who said buying pack of Pokemon cards wasn't gambling?
Me. A pack of Pokemon cards is a tangible investment. As are, as far as I understand them, "loot boxes." The trading value may be probabilistic, but it's not quite the same as making a financial bet as in the stock market, lottery, traditional casino "gambling"
It used to be that you'd get toys with McDonald's happy meals. I believe the toy you'd end up with was also a matter of probability. There was also a candy phenomenon in the late 90s/early 00s called the "Wonder Ball." The commercials, imploring you to consider "What's in the Wonder Ball?" Also probabilistic. I wouldn't say either of these examples is gambling.
At this point it seems appropriate to mention that it actually doesn't matter whether something qualifies is "gambling" or not. It matters only to the extent that in 2020 people are fixated on labeling things, as if the word we've crafted to describe something is itself meaningful. These words tend to be trendy and suitable for e-propagation on Twitter words like "incel" or "autistic." Or "That's gambling! #gambling-bad"
There are lots of dumb things people can invest in. And investing in dumb things has gotten easier. That doesn't mean every purchase with a probabilistic value on the market is gambling, or that "gambling bad" and "not-gambling good."
The main reason Pokemon cards (and the like) aren't legally gambling is because the company can claim to not be officially aware of the price of the cards on the secondary market. If those same cards were sold individually by the company they would no longer have even this flimsy defense.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare it directly to gambling, as in actual gambling the odds can’t be changed dynamically while you play to increase addiction.
So are you saying the loot box model is more addictive than standard gambling? There are currently efforts to implement more skill-based gambling into digital gambling, ie fight game machine tournaments with money stakes, etc
Once it starts being skill based it changes from pure gambling to skill based betting.
Loot boxes are purely "luck" based gambling, where your "luck" is dynamically altered based on how much the operators are get you addicted. Including occasional "free" rewards to encourage you to buy more with actual money.
And let's not forget how CSGO feels abandoned and eaten by cheaters. VAC is practically useless and they've avoided writing or licencing a proper anti cheat engine.
What's a 'proper' anticheat? Do you mean one of the kernel-level rootkit ones? No thanks. Thankfully there is more backlash recently against client-side anticheat, which is a fundamentally flawed idea anyway, eg https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-05-21-doom-eternal-r...
I think they don't care because they offer a subscription mode that is 99% cheater free in my experience. I got promoted to prime mode after playing the game so much (I don't pay for it). Cheaters are not willing to burn the prime fee ban after ban so stay on the free servers.
I've been playing CS:GO for 5 years, totalling close to 3,000 hours. I can tell you cheaters are still a huge problem, especially at high rank.
Also, the matchmaking system is utterly broken. It's insane that half of my games are plagued with at least one low-level steam account with a player that's totalling 400 hours and dropping 35 kills in a game. Also, being LE and queuing up against MGE that instantly headshot you while jump shooting feels sad.
Considering CS:GO has 500,000 to 800,000 concurrent players at any time, I find it difficult for the system to create such unbalanced and flawed games.
If you're interested, Valve uses deep learning model called VACnet to "watch" every player on their servers[0][1]. If any dodgy gameplay is detected, it gets submitted into a moderation queue called Overwatch[2], which is basically delegates the decisions to ban cheaters community. It's really cool how they've gamified this.
It goes beyond that. Overwatch is now mainly use to train the machine learning algorithm and confirm cases. The whole VACnet thing is automated and cheaters are now either automatically banned or put in a separate queue so they play against each other until the system (or a human) confirms they are indeed cheating.
Same goes for griefers and ragers, they're assigned a low "Trust Factor" so that they play together, leaving other more serious players play together.
> Considering CS:GO has 500,000 to 800,000 concurrent players at any time, I find it difficult for the system to create such unbalanced and flawed games.
Do you know of any other game at that magnitude that doesn't have cheaters? I'll wait.
Oh sorry. CS:GO is divided in 18 ranks, from Silver 1 to Global Elite. The rank distribution follows a bell curve, and comes a point where it's really hard to go from one rank to the next. LE is Legendary Eagle, the 15th rank. MGE is Master Gardian Elite, the 13th rank.
Matchmaking is supposed to be done in a way where you should not meet people that are way lower or way higher than your rank. But since it's a team game, it takes into account the average level of the team. I won't go into too much detail but it's definitely not uncommon to meet teams that are a complete mix of random ranks and for some reason a guy that's supposed to be much weaker than the rest top frags everyone.
It's a really complex system, as a few months ago Valve introduced the Trust Factor, an index which, through machine learning, supposedly puts cheaters in an alternate queue. It takes into account multiple elements, such as your account age, how much you've spent, how much you play, with how many people, how many people report you, etc, etc. Sometimes it works wonderfully. I get to play with people that are nice, have great game sense and communication, and I'm having a blast. Then I get queued with ragers, team killers, it's super annoying.
Just last night I played two games. The first one was really good, then we got absolutely obliterated by a guy who had the most perfect angles, timings, speed, you name it. I checked his steam account and saw he was level 4 (you can level your steam account through using the service) and had 450 hours in the game.
Now I'm not saying that I'm the best there is. But I've clocked close to 3,000 hours, and I've played on the three major platforms (Valve MM, Faceit and ESEA) for years. I have a 11 years steam account with 250 games on it, and in 5 years I must have had maybe 3 penalties caused by my internet crashing. So I'm confident my Trust Factor is good. Then again I get queued with and against cheaters constantly. It's just super annoying, especially considering the fact that a game typically lasts 45 minutes to an hour, and with a 3 years old at home, I can crank one, maybe two games a day at most.
Thanks! It was the acronyms that lost me but the rest is super interesting. I'm an occasional gamer but of a very different kind (single-player games only. play for the world building and the art direction mainly. only finish about half the games I start) and competitive gaming is just another world to me.
Prime is not 99% cheater free at all. I'd say you'll find a cheater in one out of three matches at least. And one cheater is enough to ruin a match, which lasts around and hour. It's an appalling experience.
For me it's just how terrible the steam client was for the longest time. Epic comes around, releases a client that ends up having features people were asking and they've been really transparent about what they're working on.
The lack of communication from Valve over the years has really done them in IMO.
The Epic client lacks basic features Steam offers. They tried to set up their platform because of the massive liquidity from fortnite, which is completely funded by micro-transactions, which are not an inch less predatory. What features do you think Steam is missing?
> We sort of had to collectively admit we were wrong on the premise that you will be happiest if you work on something you personally want to work on the most
What do they say about this? What is it that they found that invalidated this "premise"? I can't seem to find anything in the article.
I wonder whether that means that The Valley of Gods will eventually be finished... or to the contrary, not at all.
This is a game which was being developed by a studio called Campo Santo. The devs were hired by Valve, but they could still work on their game at Valve. At some point, the devs were really happy (based on their social media accounts) to switch and devote all their time to Half-Life Alyx instead, and the development of their original game was put on an indefinite hold. Now that Half-Life Alyx was released, what does that quote imply for The Valley of Gods?
I'm still mad about Campo Santo. I couldn't give two shits about Alyx or Half-Life or any other of Valve's games. But they had to consume one of the most promising story-focused indie studios and relegate them to making games I just have zero interest in, and don't have anything really interesting to say or let you experience about the human condition. Firewatch felt like a real story about real people. Alyx et al are just completely different genres. Now we're never going to get another Campo Santo game and it's a significant loss for gaming culture.
I really don't see why it wouldn't. Unless all those devs quickly switch to the next Half-Life game in the works, why would they not go back to working on Valley of Gods, which seems pretty far along?
Also, if you accept that Valve no longer runs on "work on what you want", as you imply, it means people will be forced to work on and finish that game.
The fact that the store page still exist and is up (which is more than you can say for any unfinished Valve project) gives a clear sign that they still plan to finish it.
The implication is that Valley is not in Valve's genre wheelhouse, as it isn't an FPS (or even a modified puzzle FPS like Portal; Valley would not have been expected to have a gun at all), isn't expected to have the audience scale or demographics Valve typically targets, and only exists at Valve because it was IP of what was presumably only an acquihire (underscored by the fact that they immediately moved the team to Alyx). Even if Valve now thinks they'll force games to finish, it seems unlikely that Valley would be a priority from above in Valve "management".
I wonder if they will ever collectively admit that building a profit center out of gambling for children was not a great idea, despite the rewards it brought them.
Debatable. DotA 2 yields around $100m revenue annually, a quarter of which goes to funding tournament prize pools. From the remainder, they have tournament organising costs, developer salaries, server costs and so on. I’m sure it’s profitable at the end of the day, just not the main source of their profit.
A bigger source of their profit is taking 30% of most PC gaming revenue with minimal overhead. This was such a money spinner that other game publishers eventually got wise to it and started their own stores. But Steam is still the big dog here.
Whilst it is somewhat difficult to find up to date information, it looks like DotA 2 yields somewhere north [1] of $18M/month [0] in revenue, which is more than double the number you've referenced here.
Not to suggest that a good slice of Valve's profits don't come from Steam, but they still make a reasonable amount from individual games.
Every TI, the prize pool surpasses 25m. Which means that just by buying compendiums and treasures, people have already paid 100m (25% is contributed towards the prize pool).
There's also multiple compendiums per year, or battle passes or whatever depending on the year.
And there's a lot of random loot box releases, Arcana items etc.
On top of that, Valve extracts an extra 10% (or is it 15%) of the trade value of every item that gets sold through the steam market. And those items are sold and bought A LOT.
My feeling from the article was that people just jumped on the hot new thing, because let’s be honest “new” or generally more interesting than “old”. That could easily be a source of projects spinning up, taking devs from other projects(dooming them), and then in a full circle leaving to join whatever new project had come up.
Eg, if the direction is always “work on whatever you find fun right now” you run into problems ever actually finishing anything. Which matches what happens in my ~/Projects folder quite well :)
A common theme I heard from internal sources was that they had serious issues with software quality because nobody wanted to do the difficult work of fixing bugs, addressing security vulnerabilities, etc. As a result someone eventually had to be pressured into doing it, but now they weren't really doing what they were passionate about and they'd catch criticism for not being Passionate or doing Highly Impactful Work.
If nobody fixes the security holes in Steam's overlay sandbox and protocol handler, every single person with Steam installed gets a crypto-locker installed. The old Valve model didn't really have incentives to encourage people to do the hard work necessary to achieve those fixes, especially if that hard work was interfering with other people's fun.
To be specific, it was a failure because, as they point out, they basically did not finish any games for the entirety of the 2010's. The ebook goes into all the projects they worked on that lead nowhere, and the lack of focus/direction that resulted from the "work on what you want".
I heard lack of effective management structure was a far worse consequence of Valve's unusual structure. Heard influence became based on connections and favors, not good results or ideas. Heard many good projects died, even ones that would make sense to a third grader (HL3 L4D3). Hearsay but its all over internet if you're curious
Part of me will never fully forgive them for just letting Half-Life 2: Episode 3 die, never officially cancelling it (even to this day), and refusing to communicate with their fans about it.
People meme about HL3, but most of us Half-Life fans just wanted Episode 3. Episode 2 ends on the most heartbreaking cliffhanger, and we just wanted some sort of conclusion to that story.
From my estimations they could not release Episode 3 as public hype eclipsed anything any game studio could produce. The anticipation became too strong as people expect nothing less than perfection. They used Alyx to re-anchor expectations
Edit: I believe a similar phenomenon occurred with Disney's Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, objectively some mistakes were made, but the sheer outcry from fans is an order of magnitude stronger than the mistakes made, imo this is caused from the mismatch of the idea of what Star Wars can be/means to you versus what you can concretely produce (with technical and cultural constraints)
Could you share a few spoiler-free thoughts about HL:A as a dedicated series fan?
I'm in the same boat. Loved HL1, then HL2 even more, it's one of the very rare games I regard as perfect. Then both Episode 1 and Episode 2 surpassed my expectations, and I was very disappointed with Valve's refusal to say anything at all for years. The HL:A announcement took me by surprise, as I had given up on more HL.
Do you find HL:A to be a good Half-Life game first and foremost? Do you feel it has the top-notch environmental storytelling and attention to detail that the series is known for? Does it make good use of VR's potential?
I'm considering upgrading my PC this year, largely for HL:A and Cyberpunk 2077. The last time I tried VR was with the Oculus Rift in 2016, and it felt underwhelming to me. Very cool for an evening, but then the novelty wore off and the actual gaming felt less satisfying than traditional non-VR.
Of the handful of games I've played in VR, Alyx by far feels the most like I am physically present and able to interact with the world. The one time I've ever been tricked by the illusion was when I bent down to look under furniture in a room, and then I tried to push on said furniture to help me stand back up, oops.
Like other Half-Life games it has great physics. You can pick up a marker and write on a pane of glass; you can shake a bottle and see the liquid inside slosh around. The gravity gun concept returns and it is as much fun in VR as when you first picked it up in HL2.
I won't go too much into VR-centric game mechanics for spoiler reasons, but I'm impressed with how creative they got with hand tracking. As one example, reloading is combat is tense because I have to actually go through the motions of getting out a new clip, ejecting the spent one, chambering a round, etc. while a zombie lumbers toward me.
The other comment did a great job of explaining HL:A specifically, but I'll answer a few other parts of your comment.
> Do you find HL:A to be a good Half-Life game first and foremost
Absolutely, it's raw HL. The game itself is in the 12 hour range, which is very much in the HL1/HL2 range. It does feel a bit shorter (narratively), but it still is full of content switching between puzzles, combat and story telling.
> Do you feel it has the top-notch environmental storytelling and attention to detail that the series is known for?
Absolutely. It is a bit different, since this is a VR game, but if anything I would say it's even stronger here. The focus is different to fit the controls, but there are truly "WOW" moments. I still remember having my mind blown in HL2 when the huge tower falls as you ride the boat. This game similarly amazes, but in an even more immersive way.
> The last time I tried VR was with the Oculus Rift in 2016, and it felt underwhelming to me
As someone who has had the original Oculus prototype, then the HTC Vive, then the Valve Index. I will say that each iteration made an order of magnitude difference in almost every metric: immersion, comfort, motion sickness, etc. With the latest setup, I would easily spend 3-4 hours straight in Alyx, until the point where my legs started hurting (before my face/stomach, which was the case before).
> I regard as perfect
Unfortunately, I think this is why it ultimately took them so long. It was truly hard to follow up all those great games, and they wanted something they could really be happy with. HL:A does mostly deliver that, though partly sidestep the issue by switching to a different medium, where the standards of a perfect game have not yet been created.
At the end of the day, it does very much feel like a HL game, to a veteran who has played their games over and over.
> Do you find HL:A to be a good Half-Life game first and foremost? Do you feel it has the top-notch environmental storytelling and attention to detail that the series is known for? Does it make good use of VR's potential?
Yes, 100%. It's the best VR game I've played and I own ~30. Its the only VR game I've played for more than ~1.5 hours straight (I finished Alyx in 2 4 hour sessions and 1 3 hour session).
It's not a novelty. There's segments in the game (particularly at the end) that are incredibly engrossing as a result of VR.
I've been playing it as well, but I'm not too far in. It hasn't grabbed me much yet. Part of that might just be that 2020 has me in a bad headspace, so it's hard to enjoy things as much.
They are the sellers of a VR headset, and want to increase the odds of that market taking off by adding a great game to it. Business decision wasn’t based around the game’s ability to sell well, but it’s ability to sell headsets. While this one game isn’t going to get me to buy a Vr headset, enough games at this level could, and there 100% are people who bought the headset just to play Alyx.
Which isn’t to say that Alyx could have been made as a non-VR game, from what I know VR is completely integral to the experience. But in choosing to make a different game that could have sold gangbusters vs making this game to support their hardware, they chose the latter.
Edit: Oh also they are so loaded they can do whatever they want basically and as a private company have no authority to answer to that can force them to pursue profit. I get the feeling Gaben is entirely happy with his current level of ludicrous net worth and values seeing a big change in the landscape of gaming in his lifetime over making more money. (It’s also possible that attempting to make new markets for Valve to take a 30% cut of is the best long term strategy to make money regardless)
I had thought the same, until I actually played it, and then it made complete sense. It's hard to express how difficult it would have been to have designed a non-VR counterpart with it until you're in the game experiencing it -- the pacing, the environments, the Combine, etc. I feel it's completely different than any Half-Life game, or FPS game that I've played, but familiar at the same time.
As far why they did a VR game at all: I suppose they like to test the waters.
This is my own analysis, as a Valve veteran for 20 years and someone who has followed every twist and turns. People will say they made this game to sell VR headsets, but from my vantage point, it's the opposite. They actually created VR mostly for Half-Life.
In one part, HL games were always a place for innovation and pushing the gaming boundary forward. It may have just been fun games to you, but HL1 defined storytelling in FPS games, and HL2 defined physics puzzles and grand landscapes. Each game was better than the previous and eventually they got stuck no being able to make something they were truly happy with.
Valve has always been more satisfied creating something new than more of the same. They experimented with a lot in the past decade. They tried making a horror game with biometric sensors, which did not work but lead to the Steam Controller. They tried a lot more things but VR finally fit the bit. It allowed them to partly sidestep the "perfect game" issue, by switching into a new area that wasn't yet explored and allowed for innovation again.
So yes, they made a VR game because they are once again able to push gaming forward and create a truly unique game, which is the only way they will be satisfied enough to release a game.
People talk a lot of shit about Valve without having a clue, a consequence of their secrecy and their position as a premier game developer. I wouldn't trust anything that is said about Valve that didn't come from someone who has worked there.
Tyler McVicker/Valve "News" Network is a major component of this. His interviews with Valve are great. His speculation is trash.
1. Steam became a success because of the games Valve developed.
2. Epic created Fortnite, which you likely know is a popular release. That game is leading to the Epic store getting off the ground and gaining traction. This is causing a rather large loss in revenue for Valve.
That's why games are important. If you control the top games, you control the users, and you control the platform.
Epic Store is light years behind Steam. It is very barebones and primitive. In Steam when you go to the games in your library you see a lot of content, you see your DLCS, achievements, community content, etc. In Epic Store you don't even have a page for each game in your library, just a small cover to launch the game. Steam has Play on TV, Play on phone/table and Remote Play together which are great features. Also Epic catalog is so much smaller than Steam's.
Also, it is interesting to have some context of Epic Games.
I remember when it was Epic MegaGames and they released the original Unreal games, THAT was the hit that defined the company as they also started to license their Unreal Engine (which they still do today).
Long story short, around 2012 the massive chinese giant Tencent acquired a big portion of Epic Games (40%) that allows Tencent to nominate directors, and the company shifted towards GaaS (Game as a Service). Many long time Epic Game employees left the company around that time.
Epic Games used one of their games, Fortnite: Save the World, to develop Fortnite Battle Royale, which was a huge success.
It's very important to note that Fortnite's biggest competitor, PlayerUnkown's Battlegrounds (PUBG), is owned and developed by Tencent.
Also note that Tencent owns 100% of Riot Games, as well as having various stakes at different gaming studios.
All no doubt very good points, but they also don't meaningfully matter. The cold fact is that Epic is doing way better than most people want it to, regardless of how bad it is or how shady it's investors are.
Eh, you only need strong games to get your platform started. As you pointed out, HL/CS helped really kick starts Steam, and similarly Fortnite helped kickstarts Epic. But once your store picks up, I don't think game exclusives are as necessary as you imply to keep it going. Do you think all Steam games are just going to leave if Valve never makes a game ever again?
> Steam became a success because of the games Valve developed.
So what? That was years ago, and that says nothing about the present state of affairs.
> This is causing a rather large loss in revenue for Valve.
No it isn't, because you are missing the fact that the gaming market is not a zero-sum game, fix-cake that you can only get a share of. It's constantly growing, and new games create new public the whole time.
> So what? That was years ago, and that says nothing about the present state of affairs.
You overlooked my second point, about Fortnite leading to the Epic store gaining traction, which is the present state of affairs. Also look at EA Games launches their store in the past by using their AAA games as leverage. All these gaming stores and trying to use games as a way to get their foot in the door, so I think you're wrong by saying it's no longer a valid approach. In fact, it's the only approach that seems to work.
> No it isn't, because you are missing the fact that the gaming market is not a zero-sum game, fix-cake that you can only get a share of. It's constantly growing, and new games create new public the whole time.
It's very much a zero-sum situation when these stores sell the majority of the same games. When you spend your $60 buying Grand Theft Auto on the Epic store, that's a $60 loss for Steam, because you're not going to buy the game twice. When one store wins your sale, the other loses it.
So let's say you make 10 bazillions dollars per day just by running your store, and releasing a new game that takes a lot of efforts and 3 years of work would only result in 0.001 bazillion dollar in 3 years of sales, does it make sense to sweat making games anymore? The maths speak for themselves.
Let's say you make 10 bazillion dollars per day running your store, then you pay someone else 0.0001 bazillion dollars to make 0.001 bazillion dollars in 3 years.
No, it's worse at flat management companies like Valve. Since you don't have anyone in charge, and everybody works on what they want, there is no objective measure of whether or not you're doing well. Everything comes down to politics, from bonuses, to who gets laid off during downsizing, being very good at your job isn't enough. That's how it's been at the flat management company I worked at, and how it seems everyone who's worked at one describes it.
Yeah, I think the complaint was that Valve is/was theoretically flat, in that people could self-manage, but in practice, it had an implicit hierarchy that was obscured by the officially "flat" structure (which, let's be honest, was always kind of a lie, because I guarantee you there's someone there who can fire other people, which means it's not actually flat). And an implicit hierarchy means that there's no way to say "I had these goals and objectively achieved them"; you aren't making your case to a defined supervisor, you're making a case to the informal supervisor. That'll almost always wind up with favoritism without any potential escape.
Some of these problems exist in any company, but at least in a standard hierarchy, if your boss is sabotaging you or ignoring you, there are routes you can take (go to their boss, go to HR) to (imperfectly) route around that. In a flat structure, you're grasping at ghosts - after all, no one's your manager, so it shouldn't matter if one person has it out for you, but of course, if they're politically entrenched, it absolutely does matter. And there's no one in the company to complain to, because the company's official position is "this is impossible, we're a flat company", and your complaints are minimized if you complain externally, through some combination of "sour grapes" + "but it's a flat system!".
Honestly, it's a great trick on management's part - everybody has the responsibilities of management, but no one is an official manager, and there's an easy playbook to run on anyone who complains.
Any "objective measure" that a regular company uses is mostly a way for management to pose and bluster about what they actually want. Corporations are fundamentally all the same.
If I am doing the math right it’s 14 years since HL3 was announced.
If I am doing the math right it was also 14 years between the initial announcement of Duke Nukem Forever and it’s release. Guess HL3 is about to become the longest-running vaporware game.
It is only nine years between the release of the second book in The Kingkiller Chronicles and now, despite its author’s claim around the time the first was published that all three were ready to go in quick succession. But it is 27 years since volume 4 of David Gerrold’s War Against The Chtorr.
Episode 3 was never even officially cancelled I believe. Valve just stopped talking about it, stopped answering questions about it, then everyone just started assuming Half-Life 3 was coming instead.
Ending Episode 2 in the way that they did, then just letting Episode 3 evaporate was a real slap in the face.
Maybe I'm an optimist, but Valve doesn't release games unless they are very happy with it. HL:A was excellent and I don't see why HL3, if it does come out, would be Vaporwave. Valve heavily tests their games internally and if it is not a huge success, they will not go forward with it.
Yes, I do realize they did release Artifact, but that suffered more from economic issues, which internal play testing don't really catch.
>... combat sequences through procedurally generated towers and buildings, chained together by crafted plot events.
There's a fantastic game out right now called Hades from Supergiant Games (of Bastion fame, this one could comfortably be called "Bastion 2.0") which does this roguelite-action-rpg genre very well. Highly recommended, checkout the trailer from the recent update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNrt43epkG0
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.
To put it in perspective lets look at auteur studios held in similar regard as Half-Life.
(I'm ignoring side releases, just focusing on mainline games)
- Half-Life: HL2 2004, HL:A 2020
- Kojima : MGS3 2004, MGS4 2008, MGS5 2014, Death Stranding (worth pointing out his studio was rebuilt from nothing for this too) 2020
- Rockstar : GTA:SA 2004, GTA4 2008, RDR 2010, GTA5 2013, RDR2 2019
If Valve hadn't had steam, the company would not still exist today with that output. If HL:A good, yes. But we put it next to Rockstars output in the same time and it's not even the same league.
Something has seriously gone wrong within Valve and I think the charitable way to frame it is "Oh they just care so much they only release when its perfect" but I'm not really buying that, I feel they have instead of being freed creatively by Steam they have been shacked by it.
Steve Jobs sales and marketing speech comes to mind [0], the people calling the shots are only focused on running a digital videogame Walmart, artists push and push get burned out by not shipping and leave. At the head of it I guess Gabe just doesn't have the passion or care enough about creating art to push for anything else.
Now if you're a big Valve fan what I'm saying might annoy you, but really think for a second. What have you as a Valve fan been denied because the people in the company care more about running a store than making art. What games exist in the reality where Valve never made steam.
> 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.
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).
I mean, you think people are happy when they never get to finish their projects and no one ever gets to play their games? I certainly wouldn't be. In fact, I would start to question what I was doing with my life.
My grandmother always said “if you want to have an unhappy life: just do whatever you want all the time”, and I think about it a lot when finishing a project. The first 50% of any project is so fun - the rest is hard work!
I'd like more details as well. I imagine the originators of an idea attracting a bunch of help, then when it got complicated and tough, they were willing to see it through but couldn't get support from the unconvinced. Rinse and repeat for 15 years.
They've worked with him many times. He's done similar "Final Hours of..." projects for the original Half-Life, Half-Life 2, and Portal 2. He's had a close relationship with Valve for decades now.
Although I also blame the gaming community as a whole for collectively rejecting the subscription model for games, which made the much more exploitative f2p + microtransaction/lootbox business model the only real viable option for games that require ongoing development.