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.
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.
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.
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.
This model was brought to Valves free to play release DOTA2, where it further cemented the concept in the public awareness.
I'm really hoping GOG will one day provide a Linux client with Proton inside.
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.
[1]https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/category/valveconomics
[2]https://store.steampowered.com/app/280740/Aperture_Tag_The_P...
[3]https://www.patreon.com/JulioNIB
[4]https://www.ign.com/articles/2012/03/08/how-and-why-team-for...
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.
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.
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.
They are still lacking effort in marketing of Linux gaming, but their technical backing is really great.
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".
But still today RS3 is riddled with MTX while you also have to pay a membership fee.
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.
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.
The lack of communication from Valve over the years has really done them in IMO.
I wouldn't know because epic's client can't even run on Linux.
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.
Tyler McVicker/Valve "News" Network is a major component of this. His interviews with Valve are great. His speculation is trash.
here's the first link i found https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes-ruthless...
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.
Just like every other corporation, in other words.
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.
Ultimately though, jumping between a bunch of cancelled projects is not fulfilling and likely to lead to burn out in the long run.
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?
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 :)
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.
I seriously doubt it. It's rather it was a very poor business decision as people didn't want to do the boring, but very necessary, work.
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.
Ending Episode 2 in the way that they did, then just letting Episode 3 evaporate was a real slap in the face.
Yes, I do realize they did release Artifact, but that suffered more from economic issues, which internal play testing don't really catch.
For all intents and purposes, Half Life Alyx is Half Life 3.
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.
> 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’m not sure that’s true. Perhaps the right conclusion would be “we were wrong that it would be best for the company if you work on what you want”.
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
That being said, I don't really see Valve making a game like that for some reason.
Geoff Keighley ⊂ (Mountain-Dew ∪ Dorito)
