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Steam Success Holding Up Half-Life Development?

Posted by Soulskill on from the freeman-is-coding-the-whole-thing-himself dept.

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.

9 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Simple by Stormwatch · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you can make bucketloads of money with very little effort, why try to do something hard?

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    Circumcision is child abuse.
    1. Re:Simple by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I doubt running Steam is "very little effort". Sure to the usual idiot it may look like so, because they don't see or know what actually is required to be done behind the scenes.

      I'm actually happy Valve is concentrating on Steam. Half-Life would be passing fun, while Steam provides me great service all the time (and has done so since 2004). From the games front, I actually like Portal more than HL. It's something different and fun. Half-Life is kind of seen already.

    2. Re:Simple by Stormwatch · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Steam? Sorry, I actually meant hats and crate keys.

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      Circumcision is child abuse.
    3. Re:Simple by Jafafa+Hots · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I have to agree.
      I had stopped buying games years ago. Not playing them entirely, but stopped buying them entirely.

      Steam, despite the misgivings I shared with many others, has turned out to be a great service. I have now bought a metric shitload of games (by jumping on the sales, the $2.99 deals, etc.)

      I'd sworn publishers would never get another cent of my money especially if there was DRM, but I have TONS of steam games because it's so easy, and CHEAP (provided you wait for sales... which, for top titles, can take a year or two. Year or two? Big deal. I'm middle aged now - two years is nothing. I've got t-shirts ten times that old.

      Shit, a 2 year old game is "new" to me.

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      This space available.
  2. Nothing to do with Portal by the_raptor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The timelines for HL2: Episodes 1 and 2 slipped by more than a year each and that was before the main Valve dev team touched Portal (Portal was almost entirely done by the Narbucular drop team that Valve hired). The HL2 episodic content is one of the things that destroyed the idea of Episodic content for me. The whole point of it was to deliver content more frequently instead of a whole game every 2-3 years, but Valve can barely get out 1/3rd of an Episode every 2-3 years.

    I suspect they are either suffering from Dukeitis (a condition where developers keep iterating because they need to live up to their previous smash success) or the major designers have their fingers in every pie instead of working one or two projects at a time and are slowing everything up.

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    CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
  3. Re:wat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I am still disappointed that they released l4d2 that quick. Franchise milking is reserved to Activision and EA.

  4. No shit! by mattbee · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yawn, another fine morning at Valve! Shall we slog on with another episode of our popular game franchise for the fanboys, or shall we work a bit harder at our store front that takes 30% of EVERY PC GAME SALE ON THE PLANET? It's not quite that dramatic, but if >50% of PC games sales were downloads last year for the first time, Steam must be taking the lion's share. And last I looked they were only 150-odd employees - still quite impressive.

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    Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
  5. Re:wat by sortius_nod · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The key is that Valve have always focused on releasing quality products rather than masses of them.

    Not every game company wants to be a cash grab house, sometimes they actually want to produce products that keep customers. I can't say that I've ever felt a Stardock game was of any quality, so maybe they're just cracking this shits that they can't churn out crap while trying to keep their horrible store online.

    I don't think Gabe Newell is worried at all by these comments, they'll keep making money off other people's games to fund quality games of their own.

  6. Re:Stupid? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Valve is owned by Valve employees. They do what they love doing, there are no external shareholders to force them work faster. Everything Valve does makes sense when you replace greed as primary motivator with desire to make great products.

    The exact opposite to Valve would be Activision with it's leader Bob Kotick. You should read up on him.

    "Kotick doesn't play his games, and it shows" - Ben Kuchera, Ars Technica