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When Gabe dies, how much do you want to bet valve is going to suddenly want to start working on half life 3? Only to produce a buggy shallow generic AAA title with micro transactions? I’m hoping I’m wrong, but I’m a little cynical about the whole gaming industry these days.
You are aware the Gabe was there when Hats and Karambits were added to TF2 and CS:GO?
Newell isn’t some saint, he’s running an obscenely profitable business. The games Valve are actually maintaining, CS2 and DOTA2, both have a lot of microtransactions. I really don’t understand why you’re making out that Valve would never add MTX until some evil corpo suit takes over after Gabe’s death.
I’m not saying it’s perfect. I’m saying it could get much much worse. That’s all. Valve is a breath of fresh air in comparison to other corporations and publishers at the moment. Steam deck, valve index, the steam platform in general.
Steam is why they don’t make games anymore.
They’re retailers now.
I was okay with hats and cosmetics in TF2. Didn’t play CS:GO, but I’d be okay with that as well. It’s just cosmetics and you can unlock every single one of them through playing or crafting. It had zero effect on the game play. When different weapons were added I found them to be refreshing and a new lease on life for the old game. It’s stupid and silly but it was fun.
CS:GO cosmetics appear to be obtained by gambling with real money.
I put a few thousand hours into Dota 2 and never spent any money on it, didn’t feel much pressure or any desire to since idc about cosmetics. I think it’s great though, if a game is free and other people who care about visual skins subsidize it for you.
It’s still a private company, so if he has a worthy follower it’s not going to happen. Let’s just hope there is someone to start running valve like it’s supposed to
Gabe’s choice of successor is arguably going to be one of the most important decisions in gaming, ever. Crazy to say, but finding someone who can maintain course and propel the medium without getting greedy is likely gonna be tough. Gabe always had vision, or at least hired people who did and listened to them. Hope he makes the right call.
You can’t build an empire if you’re, at the same time, cashing it out.
Not sure, whether this is possible in the US and how to correctly translate that…
A company in the area where I live had a founder, that feared, that his company might change to a new (more capitalistic/ “evil”/generic) corporate culture, when he would eventually step down and some other manager takes over. So, when he resigned, he transferred all his shares I to a trust? foundation? endowment? to make sure his vision and culture stays with the company as this legal entity enforces it.
Counter Strike?
They didn’t create CS
CS:GO, they did. As well as CS the game, but not the mod. Also people who made original CS are all employed by Valve, so they weren’t just part of the company at the time.
Even CSGO was originally made by Hidden Path. CS2 and CS:S are the only ones fully made by Valve (+community maps/skins). Regardless the series itself was not made by Valve, they hired the original mod team after it was already a popular HL1 mod.
Sure profit from the loot boxes
Half Life Forever
Half Life recently got an installment with Alyx, and just got a free remaster 25 years after release, with the whole non-VR franchise is perfectly playable for dirt cheap on any old system. Portal has received spin-offs. Team Fortress isn’t getting the attention it deserves, but is perfectly playable on modern PCs and has aged like fine wine while receiving bugfixes and new community-made, Valve-approved content every so often. Afaik Dota 2 still has an actively supported pro league. CS got an overhaul, for better or worse.
Valve is unique in that they are one of the few developers that understand that sometimes you don’t try to fix what ain’t broke-- this is why TF2 outlived Overwatch, and will almost certainly outlive Overwatch 2 as it has many other games.
Valve doesn’t hold out on releases out of intentional neglect, but are instead painfully aware of how hard it is to meet growing expectations and continue to improve on what many would already consider to be near perfection. That’s why we don’t have HL3.
HL3 would have to be a revolutionary game, one to set the expectations for games for a decade. because anything less than that would not live up to what HL1, 2 and Alyx did to the industry.
I strongly disagree.
First of all, what did Alyx do to the industry? It was higher fidelity than most other VR games at the time, but that can hardly be called revolutionary the way HL1’s environmental storytelling or HL2’s physics systems were. Very few VR games have attempted to follow in its footsteps at all, because lookin’ good is more about dev hours than it is creativity and game design. Other than convincing a few extra people to buy VR headsets, it didn’t do anything at all to the direction of the VR market. Games before and since Alyx have used much more interesting, immersive movement controls and ammo management systems.
Second, the expectations for HL3 don’t have to be All That. If it were a fun game at all, it’d sell like crazy and people would be happy. It’s Valve’s self-imposed roadblock of new games being “different” somehow that stops them from finishing anything. But even then, I’m not sure they’ve been accomplishing that. Beyond CS2 being little more than a glow-up and Artifact being… ill-received, I’ll stick to HL and beat up on Alyx a bit more–it was just fine, But what little story it had shat on the 12 year cliffhanger in the least satisfying way possible, its weapon selection was just sad, and there are a hundred smaller things I could bring up from the sound design to the repetitive puzzles that stop actual gameplay every 2 minutes. Everything from the movement to the combat was dumbed down to the point where it might be accessible for a first time VR user, but at the cost of being extremely repetitive for anyone playing through a second time (though I will grant them props for including tools for community mappers to make much more interesting encounters).
Yet people hail it as some industry changing turning point. Don’t get me wrong, for all its faults, I enjoyed playing it, but it’s not this new Valve masterpiece that so many people make it out to be. It’s just fine. And the way it’s been lauded for the last 4 years proves that “fine” is good enough for Half Life.
I’ve agreed with this for the past decade. But considering the scope and costs of games made today, I think that sort of expectation is far too high for Valve to achieve anymore with the type of company they are. The size of development teams has ballooned at every other studio to keep up and budgets are many times higher than what Valve has spent on any game ever.
Sure, Valve makes loads of money from Steam and they could conceivably pour untold millions into hiring a massive team of talented developers to try to produce a worthy new Half Life title as a passion project for Gabe Newell. To what end? It likely still wouldn’t live up to the hype and the process would irreversably upend the way Valve has operated very successfully for decades.
Valve doesn’t hold out on releases out of intentional neglect, but are instead painfully aware of how hard it is to meet growing expectations and continue to improve on what many would already consider to be near perfection. That’s why we don’t have HL3.
What Valve doesn’t understand is that not every game needs to be technologically innovative. Sometimes we just want the rest of the goddamn story!
There is no way they were talking about Dota over L4D.
has aged like fine wine
This has nothing to do with your actual points, I just wanted to share a neat fact about wines and this common phrase. The quality of wine has little to do with it’s improvement with age. In fact, most wines - fine ones included - are intended to be consumed within a year (Usually less) of bottling or being sold. Wines typically have to be designed to age over long periods with a number of different small ingredients that can affect it. Most wines will start turning real vinegary after a year and be basically all vinegar by year 3-ish. Though wines with metal screw-caps will last longer, though not receive any of the benefits of the aging process should they be “age-able” as small levels of oxygen that leaks in through corks are essential to the aging process.
More to our actual point, I remember hearing a theory once when Alyx came out that Valve releases new large games like that when they have new technology they want to show off. Half-life showed off the physics engine. Portal used the physics but showed off the portals. Alyx showed off the VR tech. And they only do it when they know they can do it well. Since their goals aren’t direct game sales but to just make a really good game that uses a specific tech, they succeed but have no intention to milk the franchise.
Actually, after writing that I looked and found an interview with Gabe after Alyx was released where he outright stated that the series was meant to be used this way and not to sell games.
Newell said “Half-Life games are supposed to solve interesting problems,” and explained that Valve doesn’t want to just “crank Half-Life titles out because it helps us make the quarterly numbers.”
We crave more of the things we love, but it almost never lives up to our expectations.
Not doing it because you’ll upset fans is a terrible reason, you modernize it and gain even more. Just as many fans want a new game and they are upsetting those ones already.
You’ll never please everyone, that’s impossible and just because you’ll upset either new fans or old fans is no reason to not try. It’s an excuse to not do it, no more.
I disagree. Valve has no shortage of money, and would only end up burning goodwill by putting out a subpar product. From their perspective, it’s better to have a loyal, if rabid, fan base rather than the backlash a bad product would generate.
But they have all that money to NOT put out a subpar product, but instead they hoard it for themselves.
It’s a strange argument to make in this world, the corp should keep the money instead of spending it putting money back into the market through hiring and wages? Making a product for people to buy?
They already get bad backlash from the lack of updates and content, they clearly don’t care about that, they want their hoard.
There are no haters like fans. Valve quit while they were ahead. Otherwise you get franchises that are reskinned versions of the same old crap and flogged to death, the only new things added are ways the company tries to insert micro transactions or whatever else to get you to shell out cash for skins or DLC packs.
Storylines get wrecked some way, somehow or dissected by fans for being “too much “ this or “too little” that, or worse yet the dev sticks a Jar Jar Binks in it.
Nah. They did the right thing. The only thing worse than not getting the game would be actually getting it.
May not fit perfectly, but Halo series comes to mind.
Perhaps they are good because they have been left alone like a fine wine?
Good thing wine doesn’t have a hacker problem like TF2.
Wine doesn’t age in the bottle.
You can get “neglect”
Or you can get a perversion of a once good game for profit.
Modern gaming, baby.
Or you could’ve bought Left 4 Dead 2 and still get bug fixes.
Or you could’ve bought Garry’s Mod and still get feature updates (most servers are shit, with pay-to-win mod packs, but the base game hasn’t changed)
They don’t ignore or neglect Half-Life, TF2, Counter-Strike or DOTA2. All these continue to receive updates (Half-Life just recently got a complete overhaul for its 25th anniversary and the other 3 are their bread and butter money makers and receive regular updates).
Only Portal, Richochet, Alien Swarm and L4D get ignored.
TF2, Counter-Strike
Nah man. TF2 is unplayable outside of community servers because of all the cheaters and spinbots, and CS2 is just a CSGO update that killed community servers and removed a significant amount of content.
I mean they did do a lot of work for CS but at the end of the day only 1 of their 3 flagship multiplayer games are being properly taken care of
Lmfao TF2? Really? You mean the game with a severe hacking/botting problem?
We got one, it was great. We got another, it was also great. We got yet another, also awesome. Another one after that, beautiful. And not to say that nothing else they’ve done isn’t also worthy of praise.
We’ve just become spoiled and accustomed to the Marvel/Disney reboot and sequel plague that’s made everything trash.
Appreciate what we were given, fellas, it might simply be over.
Which ones?
Half Life, Portal, Left4Dead, Counterstrike, DOTA2? Or am I misunderstanding
It appears that, like Valve, you have neglected Team Fortress
Ricochet, Day of Defeat, Death Match Classic, and Alien Swarm obviously /s
Alien swarm is amazing
Team fortress 2?
HL Portal and L4D definitely. Pretty sure Dota and CS get plenty of attention. But let’s be honest, do we really want those franchises turning into clusterfuck cash grabs like halo, modern warfare, name a sports game?
Yeah I guess it’s true. They in fact do owe us something /s
I am here yo say HL Alyx was mid at best, it banks entirely on visuals and setpieces to wow you but the gameplay is irritating, combat especially was a slog. On one hand it’s nice, a new hl game.
On the other, it’s on a peripheral system less than 15% of all players have that costs nearly as much as remodeling a bathroom. Pretty vodka physics though 🤡
