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

Nothing to do with Portal

[the_raptor]

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.

Re:Simple

[Stormwatch]

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

Re:Simple

[Jafafa Hots]

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.