Steam Success Holding Up Half-Life Development?

donniebaseball23 writes "Steam is a huge success, and it's arguably the leading digital distribution platform for gamers on the PC. But has the growth of Steam's business led to a slowdown in Valve's own games development? Is the so-called 'Valve Time' actually a symptom of Steam's hogging Valve's resources? That's the argument that Stardock's Brad Wardell made this week. 'If you were to look at a timeline of games developed in-house by Valve – not developed externally and then acquired – and you look at before Steam and after Steam, it's definitely had an effect,' he said." It's probably also slowed by the imminent launch of Portal 2, which is due out next Tuesday in North America.

Comments

Say What?

[Majikk]

Here is the list of games published by Valve, according to Wikipedia. I have checked each description to make sure everything was done by whom I thought it was done by. Note that Steam gets released in 2002:

1998 Half-Life
1999 Team Fortress Classic
1999 Half-Life: Opposing Force (Not valve!)
2000 Deathmatch Classic
2000 Ricochet
2000 Counter-Strike (Not valve!)
2001 Half-Life: Blue Shift (Not valve!)
2002 Steam
2003 Day of Defeat (Not Valve)
2004 Counter-Strike: Condition Zero (Not Valve)
2004 Counter-Strike: Source
2004 Half-Life 2
2004 Half-Life 2:Deathmatch
2005 Half-Life Deathmatch: Source
2005 Day of Defeat: Source
2005 Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
2006 Half-Life 2: Episode One
2007 Half-Life 2: Episode Two
2007 Portal
2007 Team Fortress 2
2008 Left 4 Dead
2009 Left 4 Dead 2
2010 Alien Swarm
2011 Portal 2 (Coming out Tuesday)
2011 Dota 2 (Not yet released)

First of all, how the hell could you possibly know that game development has changed in any meaningful way since the introduction of Steam? The only thing Valve had really released was Half Life. Everything else was just a mod or a third party expansion they had nothing to do with. Secondly, if anything more games have come from Valve since Steam. They haven't pushed out Half Life 3 yet, but it would be hard to claim some logistical problem when they have released Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal.

Please remember that Brad Wardell is a business man, and he just sold his own game distribution network to Gamestop. His next action was to badmouth his (former) competition for continuing to be in the business he just got out of. Stay classy.

Re:Nothing to do with Portal

[gman003]

The Episodes also destroyed the idea of episodic content for Valve. They said, when they first announced them, that the entire thing was an experiment. They've now said that "episodic content doesn't work for this type of game, we're scrapping the idea, episode 3 will basically be a full-length game".