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Maybe one day he'll miss the feeling of being asked about Half-Life 3 and we'll get Half-Life 3.
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Jan 29, 2023 21:49
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Mokinokaro posted:Pretty much. The vibe from ex employees at Valve is that it's basically Gaben's fiefdom where all the teams fight over getting him to support them. Has there been any discourse or reporting since that one twitter thread that basically described it as "barons" moving pawns on an invisible chessboard? I remember that insider also claiming that the employee handbook was strategically "leaked" to make the company look better
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Jan 29, 2023 23:40
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I used to work with a few guys who worked at Valve. One of them did a lot of thankless backend IT-type work (e.g. keeping the Steam servers from falling over) because no one wanted to do it but someone had to do it. The other one had horror stories of GabeN's short and explosive temper. Could not pay me enough to work there.
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Jan 30, 2023 04:23
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Pseudoscorpion posted:I used to work with a few guys who worked at Valve. One of them did a lot of thankless backend IT-type work (e.g. keeping the Steam servers from falling over) because no one wanted to do it but someone had to do it. The other one had horror stories of GabeN's short and explosive temper. I do devops and SRE stuff and threw them a resume once out of curiosity. The initial tech screen (such as it was) got me to withdraw my application.
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Jan 30, 2023 04:33
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Have they always been this way? How did such a dysfunctional company make Half Life and Steam?
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Jan 30, 2023 04:34
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Bucnasti posted:Have they always been this way? How did such a dysfunctional company make Half Life and Steam? Being a dysfunctional company is not exactly unique. And video games tend to be a mess under the hood a lot of the time Steam definitely started off in a bad place and only got great later on
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Jan 30, 2023 04:38
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Bucnasti posted:Have they always been this way? Bucnasti posted:How did such a dysfunctional company make Half Life and Steam?
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Jan 30, 2023 04:48
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Bucnasti posted:Have they always been this way? How did such a dysfunctional company make Half Life and Steam? Strategic Tea posted:Doesn't Valve have a 'cutting edge' management structure where everyone works on whatever they want and are judged on the results? CharlieFoxtrot posted:Has there been any discourse or reporting since that one twitter thread that basically described it as "barons" moving pawns on an invisible chessboard?
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Jan 30, 2023 04:53
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Bear in mind Gabe and one of the other founders were participants in the initial rocketship trajectory of Microsoft, with the resources to match. From the start, what made valve stand out was that they had functionally infinite money to spend on trying, building out and dropping entire systems. Half Life 1 is in many respects the product of a whole stack of those systems; the same approach has been true ever since.
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Jan 30, 2023 04:59
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LIVE AMMO COSPLAY posted:Being a dysfunctional company is not exactly unique. And video games tend to be a mess under the hood a lot of the time Sure every studio I've worked with has been dysfunctional in some way or another, but they managed to produce stuff because they had some sort of management and oversite to make them get poo poo out the door. Discendo Vox posted:Bear in mind Gabe and one of the other founders were participants in the initial rocketship trajectory of Microsoft, with the resources to match. From the start, what made valve stand out was that they had functionally infinite money to spend on trying, building out and dropping entire systems. Half Life 1 is in many respects the product of a whole stack of those systems; the same approach has been true ever since. The story I heard was that they basically created Excel for MS, then hosed off with their fat stock options.
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Jan 30, 2023 05:44
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in most cases, there are external pressures that mean something has to be produced eventually. valve never really had very much in the way of external pressures but earlier on they were small and focused enough that things still got finished - half-life 2 was given no deadline and newell promised to dig into his own fortune to fund it if necessary, but there was still a top-down plan of "making half-life 2". there's been reporting that suggested that alyx only really happened because people realised the existing approach lead to nothing being finished so much more effort was put to focusing most of the company on just making alyx rather than letting pretty much everyone do whatever they wanted and letting internal office politics sort out which projects got attention (though rarely enough for any to be released).
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Jan 30, 2023 06:47
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Bucnasti posted:Have they always been this way? How did such a dysfunctional company make Half Life and Steam? Steam was a shitshow for almost the entirety of its first 4 years, people bitched endlessly online about problems it caused with Half-Life 2 until The Orange Box shipped.
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Jan 30, 2023 07:58
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cmdrk posted:if the power structures aren't explicit, they'll be implicit and that's worse. I've been to communes who labelled themselves as 'anarchist', and that was my takeaway as well.
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Jan 30, 2023 09:12
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Discendo Vox posted:Bear in mind Gabe and one of the other founders were participants in the initial rocketship trajectory of Microsoft, with the resources to match. From the start, what made valve stand out was that they had functionally infinite money to spend on trying, building out and dropping entire systems. Half Life 1 is in many respects the product of a whole stack of those systems; the same approach has been true ever since. valve almost went bankrupt trying to get half life out lol. Gabe Newell's buddies just brought farmland in iowa or something. Also early Steam was something you had to tolerate to play half life and TF2.
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Jan 30, 2023 12:52
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:Steam was a shitshow for almost the entirety of its first 4 years, people bitched endlessly online about problems it caused with Half-Life 2 until The Orange Box shipped. Ironically, this probably helped Valve massively in the long term. Steam being such a vocal and visual failure in the first three to four years while still quietly making a poo poo-ton of money and growing it's external partnerships likely slowed down anyone's interest in making a competitor until Valve had both THE KILLER APP of the generation in the Orange Box and had figured out the right formula to get people to not just use Steam but embrace it. By the time anyone else figured out exactly what a goddamn industry sea change Valve had created, it was waaaaaay too loving late for anyone to even pretend to be a real competitor just because of the amount of mindshare Steam had. And still has.
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Jan 30, 2023 14:11
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Personally, it really did feel like an overnight change where Steam went from being this annoying front-end for a game that really didn't do much other than be a library application that the Windows start button already covered (at least as far as the player was concerned), to being an actual storefront that basically did for video games what Amazon did for general products. I'm not sure if it heralded the start of the end of boxed games, or was just conveniently placed to take advantage of the switch to digital media over actual discs, but either way, they were quite lucky that everything fell into place when it did.
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Jan 30, 2023 14:38
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DVD cases marked the end for big boxes.
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Jan 30, 2023 14:56
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Randalor posted:Personally, it really did feel like an overnight change where Steam went from being this annoying front-end for a game that really didn't do much other than be a library application that the Windows start button already covered (at least as far as the player was concerned), to being an actual storefront that basically did for video games what Amazon did for general products. I'm not sure if it heralded the start of the end of boxed games, or was just conveniently placed to take advantage of the switch to digital media over actual discs, but either way, they were quite lucky that everything fell into place when it did. The very first Steam sale I feel is when the wind changed. That was the point every one clicked at what Steam WAS: a store, accessible in 2 mins from the internet. Steam sales are still strong today, but the first ones where such immense, well done, bait. e: oops this is the Games Industry thread. Didn't notice so sorry for the chat. Unless it's ok to do so now?
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Jan 30, 2023 15:09
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Mr. Locke posted:Ironically, this probably helped Valve massively in the long term. Steam being such a vocal and visual failure in the first three to four years while still quietly making a poo poo-ton of money and growing it's external partnerships likely slowed down anyone's interest in making a competitor until Valve had both THE KILLER APP of the generation in the Orange Box and had figured out the right formula to get people to not just use Steam but embrace it. By the time anyone else figured out exactly what a goddamn industry sea change Valve had created, it was waaaaaay too loving late for anyone to even pretend to be a real competitor just because of the amount of mindshare Steam had. And still has. Epic is doing a lot to build a bridge over that moat. And it's working. The Fortnite generation play games in epic. Steam is going to be like the fox news platform of millennial games. Iron fisted stranglehold on an aging demographic.
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Jan 30, 2023 16:08
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leper khan posted:Epic is doing a lot to build a bridge over that moat. And it's working. The Fortnite generation play games in epic. Lots of people have EGS for UE5, Fortnite or free games. But how many people actually buy games through it when Steam has the same game for the same price? I’m sure some of this data has come out in the Epic vs Apple lawsuit, like if Epic is spending more money securing timed exclusives than actually making money through the store (outside of Fortnite).
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Jan 30, 2023 16:18
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leper khan posted:Epic is doing a lot to build a bridge over that moat. And it's working. The Fortnite generation play games in epic. The Fortnite generation play Fortnite on phones and console and older players use the store entirely for free games. Last I saw devs talking about it games don't actually sell that well on the Epic Store, hence why Steam hasn't had to do anything with its 30% cut. 70% of decent sales is a lot more than 88% of nothing. Also a lot of people seem to treat Epic's timed exclusives as early access, let everything that's broken be fixed while it's on Epic and then it'll all be fine when it comes to Steam.
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Jan 30, 2023 16:21
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EGS has a strong niche but it's still far from threatening competition
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Jan 30, 2023 16:21
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Basically no one buys games on EGS, and Steam is inarguably more popular than ever, with momentum picking up if anything. Epic spent a fuckload of money to establish themselves as a store that a good amount of games are released on now but they haven’t done anything yet to get people to buy anything from them.
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Jan 30, 2023 16:34
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njsykora posted:The Fortnite generation play Fortnite on phones and console and older players use the store entirely for free games. Last I saw devs talking about it games don't actually sell that well on the Epic Store, hence why Steam hasn't had to do anything with its 30% cut. 70% of decent sales is a lot more than 88% of nothing. Also a lot of people seem to treat Epic's timed exclusives as early access, let everything that's broken be fixed while it's on Epic and then it'll all be fine when it comes to Steam. Fwiw you can’t install Fortnite on android phones unless you use the EGS They removed it from the play store.
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Jan 30, 2023 16:36
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leper khan posted:Epic is doing a lot to build a bridge over that moat. And it's working. The Fortnite generation play games in epic. Kids don't buy 60 dollar PC games in general.
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Jan 30, 2023 16:36
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I wouldn't be surprised if GOG still has a bigger market share, if we purely count profit, and not active members or whatever.
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Jan 30, 2023 16:36
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[Citation Needed]
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Jan 30, 2023 17:01
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leper khan posted:Epic is doing a lot to build a bridge over that moat. And it's working. The Fortnite generation play games in epic. This is the opposite of everything i've heard. 10s of millions of people might be playing fortnite on PC, but almost none of them are actually buying or playing anything else on EGS.
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Jan 30, 2023 17:30
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Epic prioritized market share above everything else and by that standard, it's pretty successful. It's probably going to be sold off at some point and the new owners will try to convert users of the launcher/free games into paying customers.
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Jan 30, 2023 17:38
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Bucnasti posted:Have they always been this way? How did such a dysfunctional company make Half Life and Steam? There's a video of the making of Half-life and valve takes ALOT of credit for something that was worked on primairly by another studio.
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Jan 30, 2023 17:58
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Valve's strength as a developer - when they were actually developing and releasing games - was buying out other peoples' ideas and concepts and then polishing them and refining them to a mirror shine and cranking the production values to the skies. They did it with Half-Life, they did it with Portal, they did it with TFC/TF2, they did it with Left 4 Dead, and they did it with DotA 2. In gaming news, Microsoft attempted to do a vaguely good thing that makes a lot of financial and environmental sense for everyone involved, and people are very mad about it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-01-27/microsoft-s-xbox-power-saving-options-trigger-lots-of-political-outrage The TLDR is that Microsoft is trying to cut down on energy usage by having idle xboxes power down more often and only automatically download updates during hours where renewable energy sources are most available, so of course this is being turned into a minor culture war rage bait issue by the political right about how woke Microsoft is taking away your god-given right to leave your xbox on 24/7.
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Jan 30, 2023 18:14
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No one should give a poo poo or report on whatever this week's right wing troll culture war poo poo is. Attention is what they want. Ignore them. They'll move on to something else tomorrow.
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Jan 30, 2023 18:26
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Buckwheat Sings posted:There's a video of the making of Half-life and valve takes ALOT of credit for something that was worked on primairly by another studio. Eh? Can you explain this?
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Jan 30, 2023 18:27
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Kanos posted:Valve's strength as a developer - when they were actually developing and releasing games - was buying out other peoples' ideas and concepts and then polishing them and refining them to a mirror shine and cranking the production values to the skies. They did it with Half-Life, they did it with Portal, they did it with TFC/TF2, they did it with Left 4 Dead, and they did it with DotA 2. i never got into tf2, but it sounds like it got neglected in a lot of ways too? valve seems like a company that's easily distracted into focusing on something entirely new
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Jan 30, 2023 18:42
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Specifically the Xbox always had the auto power-off feature but it was disabled by default -- it would stay on forever in reduced-power mode so the ~kinect~ could listen for voice commands in the background. They were wasting power on a feature nobody used for years. The recent nothingburger is just them realizing "hey wait nobody uses this kinect thing, we even sell consoles without a kinect built in!" And changing the default setting.
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Jan 30, 2023 18:56
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you can also switch it back at any time. its not even a 'good move' or anything from microsoft it is literally nothing. if anything the nicer detail is that it saves your power bill a couple bucks. it will have approximately 0 environmental impact.
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Jan 30, 2023 18:58
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kliras posted:i never got into tf2, but it sounds like it got neglected in a lot of ways too? Team Fortress 2 is probably one of the most dev-supported games in video game history.
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Jan 30, 2023 19:09
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The console versions of TF2 however. I think the PS3 version got 2 patches since it was farmed out to EA.
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Jan 30, 2023 19:10
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to be fair its pretty abandoned now. it still has an active playerbase but theres been no substantial updates in years even though there's still bugs and issues.
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Jan 30, 2023 19:11
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If we're being fair, Team Fortress 2 was released 15 years ago.
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Jan 30, 2023 19:16
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