No Hope for Valve To Make Future Games Anytime Soon

[thiosk]

with the money they've been making with steam they could even stop making games at all...
but not. they are not doing it. instead they keep making games. what they do now that they make that much money though is to take their time. they don't have a third party publisher whipping them to meet deadlines. their creativity is allowed to flourish,and they make use of it.

This is where we get pretty close to the real strategy. Once they figured out that steam was the golden goose, their entire business model seems to have collapsed to getting people "on steam."

Hook them with the biggest sales in the industry, and then give them things-- TF2, one of the premier multiplayer shooters of the era, has gotten continuous updates for YEARS. All those players log on and see steam deals every day. DOTA 2: take a big trend, flesh it out and get into this MOBA business. Keeps people on steam. Things getting dry? get press for releasing alien swarm, a fun little mutliplayer gem of a game, made for practically nothing on the in house engine and give it away for free. As long as you have steam.

Incidentally, this is EA's exact plan with Origen. Get them committed to their titles, so that the users remain on platform, and consuming your targeted advertising. I argue its less effective because getting titles from origen is through coercion. If you want sim city 5, must be through origen, or no dice. Steam is not always a requirement, on the other hand. It can be, but theres GOG and other options as well for many of the titles (and if theres not, thats not steams fault, thats the publisher).

Valve really gets the best of all worlds. Platform exclusivity through uniform DRM, no external publisher demands, no requirement for yearly mega-hits to maintain profitability, and it supports all that in part on distribution proceeds created by everyone else who works in the field. THEN, they get all the accolades for their ardent support of the indie community and the sales.

 

[Dragonbums]

Well first of all it was a joke. Second of all this topic has been done to death and has been proven wrong several times. Third of all, just because Valve's line up does't go along with your tastes, that doesn't mean they have stopped being a developer. You can always look forward other games with actual release dates. Standing around whining about a independant developer that are known for their erratic schedules (for good reason) won't accomplish anything. As I said in my first post, this thread is utterly pointless. It is like complaining about yearly Call of Duty releases when you don't care about the franchise. Who the hell cares?

Your being a little spicy over here.
I'm not complaining. I'm just making an observation about Valve making games in the near future. There are plenty of topics on the Escapist that I've seen that have been done to death. This isn't about my tastes or anyone elses. A lot of people can agree that Valve for the most part has basically kept Steam in top shape, and kept up official content with their more popular franchises like CounterStrike, and TF2.
Did you see me whining in the OP? No.
Did you see me saying GIVE ME HALF LIFE 3! No.

I simply made observations that perhaps Valve aren't really doing anything is because they like to be a company that stands out, and with everything and their dog emulating what made their shooters successful they just simply decided to do something else.
I even concluded that I was perfectly fine with that. That I would rather have Valve do this than spew out shit games on a 1-2 year basis that may be mediocre or complete shit with only a few being good.

And clearly you care. Seeing as how your bitching and moaning about the topic of a thread. If you don't like it, don't waste your time commenting about how "pointless" these threads are.

And just for the record I don't think there is anything wrong with a CoD fan making a thread wishing how they would be perfectly fine with having a 3 year development period for the sake of quality.
Funny, just because a thread topic doesn't line up to your tastes, doesn't mean everyone should conform to your views of what makes a thread worth it.

 

[Sonntam]

Weren't there recently news about how Valve is playing around with immersion goggles and other fancy tech?

I think this is the only direction Valve can go now if they want to keep up with the genre. Kinect, Wii got the right idea and Valve wants to push forward, create some new tech that could blow our mind. That is not a small goal, though. But with the support of Steam and the existing games they have enough time and money to support themselves while they work on this behemoth.

Expanding to other genres does not sound like Valve's style, really. They try to be excellent in one specific area, not expand to other genres. I doubt they even have enough people to be interested in anything other than puzzle/shooter/physics stuff. If they wanted to gain foothold in other genres they would have to hire a lot of new folks rapidly and that does not sound like Valve either.

 

[KungFuJazzHands]

Weren't there recently news about how Valve is playing around with immersion goggles and other fancy tech?

I think this is the only direction Valve can go now if they want to keep up with the genre.

Valve don't need to keep up with the genre, though. They have a huge fanbase of dedicated, long-term followers with plenty of expendable income, and that's enough to keep them at the top of the industry for the foreseeable future.

As far as I'm concerned, things like VR goggles and sweat detectors and console boxes are merely vanity projects for Valve's worker bees. Their project process is open-ended, meaning that -- with a few constraints -- employees are allowed an amount of creative freedom that's unique in the industry. That type of openness leads to an overabundance of ideas and projects that will never get into the hands of the consumer. Any other company running their business like that would eventually learn it's not financially viable from a long-term perspective.

If anything is going to stunt Valve, it's going to be their lack of focus. I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that the Steambox (or whatever it's going to be called) is going to be a resounding failure -- console players will ignore it for the most part, and most PC gamers certainly don't need it. Throw in a bunch of other ideas that will never see the light of day, and that adds up to millions of dollars of potential waste. Laxity like that has killed bigger companies.

The only thing that's going to keep Vale afloat is a) a focus on customer satisfaction, b) their dedication to Steam as a flagship product, and c) their games. Anything else is just wasteful fluff.

 

[irishda]

It's a sequel to a mod built by other people with the entirety of development being transferring the exact same aesthetics and heroes as the original to the Source engine. Hell they even picked up the Warcraft 3 composer to do the score on this. This is creating a new game in the same way that tracing a picture counts as drawing one.

Valve cliché #853: Valve only uses other people's mods.

Dota 2 is being made from the ground up as a standalone game not a WC3 map.
There have been multiple versions of WC3 DotA over the years with hundreds of different people working on them. So it's not as easy as copy-and-paste.
Trying to balance a multiplayer game that has multiple classes with unique abilities (over 100 in Dota 2's case) is a tall order. TF2 took 8 years but it paid off for Valve.

Face it, Dota 2 will make a hell of a lot more money that Half-Life 3 ever will.

A: It sounds an awful lot like this is another person's mod, so I'm not sure why it's a "myth".
B: It seems like it is as easy as copy-and-paste, since a look over the DotA 1 heroes and the DOTA 2 heroes shows that they have the same abilities, and even the same friggin' names in most cases(some of the heroes from 2 use the titles of the heroes from 1 and some use the actual names from 1). So the balance is already done for them, since they're just recycling heroes. Therefore, it's not being made from the ground up since they're recycling a lot of material.

I'm not debating the potential success of this, merely the merit of being able to brand it as a game Valve "made" in the same sense we refer to other games and their developers. To me, saying this is a new game is like saying Madden 2007 is a wholly different game than Madden 2006, except worse since at least Madden has the decency of updating the roster.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

The Half-Life series- I want to say that they do INDEED have the final story for the series but the reason why they aren't really doing anything is because name brand alone isn't enough. They would have to do something wildly different to make the game standout gameplay and visual wise.

Actually, with the way that FPS gameplay has devolved in the past 10 years or so, they can leave Half-Life's gameplay untouched and it will be something wildly different so far as the current generation of gamers is concerned.

 

[Dragonbums]

The Half-Life series- I want to say that they do INDEED have the final story for the series but the reason why they aren't really doing anything is because name brand alone isn't enough. They would have to do something wildly different to make the game standout gameplay and visual wise.

Actually, with the way that FPS gameplay has devolved in the past 10 years or so, they can leave Half-Life's gameplay untouched and it will be something wildly different so far as the current generation of gamers is concerned.

But by doing so could they not risk people calling them out for being backwards or lazy? Yeah it would be different, but not diffrent in that it's different. But different because it's just an outdated playing style.