We know it was in development for quite a while. The project obviously fell apart at some point. That's definitely a management issue, not a "it's not monetizable enough" issue.
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Anon: "I worked at Valve a few years back, and I could write a book about what's wrong there" (Update: Verified ex-Valve employee comments in thread)
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We know it was in development for quite a while. The project obviously fell apart at some point. That's definitely a management issue, not a "it's not monetizable enough" issue.
I know that. I just don't see how you can fuck up a sure thing like that. The formula wasn't overdone. Better graphics. Larger maps and hordes. Profit.
You could say that about Episode 3 or Portal 3 as well, obvious places to go, obvious demand from the audience. Some combination of managerial failure and interest in other projects is most likely why. If core people are interested in other things creatively, then the team is going to take a beating, particularly in a place where you can just work on whatever.
If VNN is correct (and iirc he waited years to confirm his sources), it came to a head where all that work went to waste when Valve collectively couldn't decide whether to wait for the Source 2 tools to reach an acceptable stage or port the game to UE4... so nothing happened.
Narrative driven single player titles are way harder to pull off than L4D3 would have been. The director AI they had was gold and required a fraction of the effort for the scenario designers to tweak as required compared to other titles.
That's like, the number one emergent problem with a flat hierarchy. People will, through experience or natural leadership skills/charisma, assume leadership roles. Without systems in place to give them recognition and accountability, you'll run into this problem every time. You can have a "flattened" hierarchy, but if you fail to take this into account, you'll unwittingly embolden an invisible leadership accountable to no one.
Just to continue on my previous thought, I believe VR hardware could pivot what "bringing value to the business" means for Valve. I think that without strong leadership it's likely that bringing value to the business meant purely monetary goals that individuals and leaders could show off, and what brought more money/value than continuous micro-transactions, and software/updates based around that model? With them entering the hardware business, particularly such a high end hardware business, I could imagine goals moving beyond just the monetary, and shifting towards "how many users did this bring into our ecosystem", and what attracts users to purchase hardware more than new software? What will keep users upgrading their hardware, or buying the next generation of hardware? More software.
Maybe just total fanfiction on my part though.
Sure, but having shipped two games I can easily see why work on hardware stuff and other games might interest you more than "What if we do the same thing we just spent 4 years on, but with more content and more refined?" Creatively, it doesn't feel like something that would hold my interest necessarily. Dota 2 development was winding up as L4D2 shipped and they did work on L4D3 for several years at minimum. But it just didn't get enough momentum to ship.
I mean we have the words of team members saying they like it. Nothing else to go on.
The Campo buy felt to me like a prestige buy/starting to find their way for those things
Could do way worse than Campo when it comes to single player story-based games
Could do way worse than Campo when it comes to single player story-based games
What's happened to Valve is one of bigger bummers in the industry.
I think you're right. Could see them coming out with HL3, L4D3 with either Portal 3 or something else VR exclusive to push sales.
Also inline with HL series. HL 1 pushed how narratives in first person could be told, 2 pushed physics and 3 will push how we can interact in the game world with VR.
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So Portal 2 only made $200 million more than Artifact? I could understand if they were just continuously pumping out low risk shooters like a publisher owned studio, but CSGO is seven years old. They're not even doing a good job at being boring.
And that's exactly the problem. Because they didn't need to ship it. Years on a game and they just abandon it. Remind me again how long did L4D2 take?
it shipped one year to the day after L4D.
It's blatantly obvious that Valve heavily prioritizes working on the projects that stand to make the most money, and the idea that the current output of Valve is determined by what the developers themselves "want to make" is pure fantasy.
These are smart, creative people, and left to their own devices they would not be expending so much of their energy on developing ever more sophisticated slot machines, and maintaining storefront algorithms to maximize revenue.
You cite Artifact as an example of them doing what they want to do, but really it is the exception that proves the rule. The reason they made Artifact instead of something like Portal 3 or Half Life 3 is not because the devs "Aren't motivated to get [those games] into a shippable state", but rather it was because Artifact had a better business case.
Artifact had the potential to be a GaaS money-printing machine and those other games didn't, and so therefore Artifact got made.
You are essentially claiming here that the "Time and money spent by players" is proof of "Player satisfaction".
From this premise you can conclude that: Valve products are huge time and money sinks for their players, and therefore they have maximized player satisfaction.
The problem with this argument is clearly with the premise. There are loads of counterexamples of products that entice users to spend a lot of time and money, but ultimately hurt the consumer in the end (Poker machines, Cigarettes, etc.).
Valve is guilty of similarly exploitative practices as far as I'm concerned, with their Skinner-box style lootboxes.
Speaking as a person who has friends who fell down the CS gun-skin rabbit-hole, "Time and money spent" can just as easily be a measure of how well you've addicted and exploited your customers, rather than a measure of how well you've satisfied them.
They don't care. Seriously, why should they give any fucks about their properties when they're making hand over fist with hats and other microtransactions that take relatively little effort?
"BuT It'S JUsT CoSMeTic!" players would scream, as the industry becomes more and more creatively bankrupt.
I mean you are not wrong Sometimes publishers make bad calls of course but someone needs to put their foot down and make a decision because if no one does then nothing will ever happen.
So both Valve and CDPr are treating their employees like shit? Not sure how that's a good comparison for Valve.
And a lot of people criticized them for launching L4D 2 a year after the first game had shipped (I believe the criticism was unwarranted, but considering Valve's reaction at the time, they took it very seriously).
Okay. Do you think it's possible for businesses to do things that benefit parties outside themselves to greater or lesser degrees?
Yeah I don't think people realize that they're a company with fewer people than work on a single Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed game, and that they maintain Steam, multiple service titles, develop hardware and occasionally develop new games with that.
Unfortunately, Valve's ecosystem is so large and encompasses so much that past good decisions don't cut it today. At present, the Store is becoming crowded with trash. The client UI still exists as if frozen in 2007. Their android companion app was split into two separate entities that are spotty, instead of one. And things like the Steam overlay can still cause software to malfunction, if it even works itself in the first place.
There are countless large and small problems that pile up to the size of a mountain, despite the service iterating for years. The speed at which these issues are identified, publicly acknowledged and corrected is unacceptably lax. If Valve's leadership had prioritized maintaining their existing infrastructure. instead of tacking on tons of unfinished features, Steam wouldn't be a metaphorical leaky ship.
They are just lucky it hasn't sank.
From my understanding blame that one hacker that got access to the source code of Half Life 2. Isn't that why HL2 needed Steam?
That sort of employee turnover is a pretty awful metric.
Seems like kind of a weird overreaction. Are people not allowed to be critical of or disappointed in Valve? Minus a couple of maybe trolling or dumb posts, the discussion in the thread seems perfectly fine.
Seems like kind of a weird overreaction. Are people not allowed to be critical of or disappointed in Valve? Minus a couple of maybe trolling or dumb posts, the discussion in the thread seems perfectly fine.
This thread gives me a headache.
The hack was totally unrelated
I have no idea if this was a factor at all, but the L4D2 announcement backlash immediately sprang to mind when I read this post
I hate the hollowness of what Valve has become creatively, but tweets from the absorbed Camp Santo team have praised Valve's work/life balance. CDPr employees look like a katakan drained them
User Banned (1 Week) - Continued history of Platform Warring
None of this seems shocking at all considering what we've heard over the years, it's actually shocking that they get anything done there.
i finally got to click through and yeah this
it's random comments on a reddit-like
how is this a thread
or i guess why is this a thread
the title is incorrect even
it's not a source, it's a random dude
The crowding argument is absurd. Take movies for example, would a movie service be worse for having all the films ever made rather than a small selection? You are essentially arguing that winners should be picked by committee and that artificial caps should be put on the volume of games made because that's what happens when you put those kind of barrier into place. As a person who mainly play indie games a good fraction of those would probable never have been accepted into the store, let alone made if it weren't for Steam opening the gates.
Not to mention that the "crowding" problem has already been solved. People have other curation channels, like discussing on forums like Era or Reddit, word of mouth, Youtube, online "magazines" and so on. And if you really want the curated boutique experience it's not like there are barriers to setting something like that up - even with steam keys.
Nobody stumbles into a store and just buys the first random thing they find, people do research, look around and if they buy something shitty they can get a refund. I wonder how people find books to buy on amazon, or music to listen to on spotify, especially considering many more songs and books are released every year than games and new titles have massive amounts of content reaching back centuries into the past to compete with.
The reality is that crowded with trash problem is an imaginary problem and not a real issue.
As for their UI client that kind of stability is exactly why steam is so good. They don't try to reinvent the service like Google does with gmail every few years. It's functional, stable and doesn't come with sudden overhauls to generate buzz and excitement. That's how software used to be and frankly I think that approach is much better than continuous deployment and rapid iteration. Sure there are improvements they could make but do you honestly struggle to use steam? You said there are serious flaws with steam so please give me list of all the things that makes your experience purchasing and playing games on steam seriously flawed. Also parts of the UI has changed over the last few years and more substantial improvements are in the pipeline. Taking it slow is a massive plus here not a bad thing.
What are those issues? Can you maybe list them? I see this brought up all the time but all I ever hear is grumbling about crowding trash which we already established is nonsense.
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The real irony is once upon a time Valve was lauded for being a privately owned company. No answering to shareholders and having to chase the almighty dollar at the expense of artistic integrity and everything else!
And yet Valve ended up doing all that anyway. What a shame. Don't get me wrong, their Linux initiatives and (speaking personally) the Steam Controller are really fantastic. But god damn, at what cost?
And yet Valve ended up doing all that anyway. What a shame. Don't get me wrong, their Linux initiatives and (speaking personally) the Steam Controller are really fantastic. But god damn, at what cost?
The cost was that people didn't get a shooting game when they wanted it.
Who cares, it fits with this forum's narrative so it must be true.
Anonymous ex-employees are horrible sources.
I'm over Valve making single player games. People's wallets spoke clearly what they wanted and Valve delivered.
Don't blame devs for this. Blame the people who buys the damn skins.
Though anti-loot box bills need to be passed. It's gambling with no real chance to get a real return.
I'm over Valve making single player games. People's wallets spoke clearly what they wanted and Valve delivered.
Don't blame devs for this. Blame the people who buys the damn skins.
Though anti-loot box bills need to be passed. It's gambling with no real chance to get a real return.
Why do people in this thread keep saying this? People's wallets didn't vote for anything. The vast majority of people would absolutely prefer more single player content from Valve, and them buying hats and cosmetic items for F2P games in the interim has nothing to do with how much people do or do not want more solo experiences. No one was out there saying they wanted more Dota items instead of Half Life 3.
A lot of people here can't help themselves at an opportunity to shit on Valve. It's the usual ignorance, not-so-subtle system warring, and they don't make the games I want anymore.
Not everything is an attack by the forum on fucking Steam lol
Everybody seems to be taking this stuff with a grain of salt, I'm also pretty sure his is the same guy who's popped off about Valve before. I can't place his name off the top of my head tho