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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.
If you can make bucketloads of money with very little effort, why try to do something hard?
Circumcision is child abuse.
It took them 6 years to make Half Life 2. It took them ONE year to make left 4 dead 2.
Yes, you're right. Remind me how long it took for HL2 Episode 3 to be released...
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
I am still disappointed that they released l4d2 that quick. Franchise milking is reserved to Activision and EA.
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.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
This makes sense: All the leveldesigners, modelers, texture- and concept artists; They all work on Steam...
I assume that the sarcasm is noticed.
There's no need for Valve to work on Episode 3 in a hurry; Whenever it will be released, it will be sold by the millions.
And to be honest; I rather wait some more (actually, I'm not missing it), and get yet another awesome game, whereas I don't get the feeling that something is incomplete because of rushing it out for a certain date.
Other than that, I also have a theory in which I think that right now, they might be working on HL3, and just skip the whole Episode 3.
Then again, pure speculation of course.
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
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.
The problem is that publishers have this fantasy market separation still in place between the UK and the rest of Europe ... which doesn't exist in the real market because the UK is in the EU common market, imports will force reality on prices in shops. They force Valve to keep the fantasy alive on steam though.
If developers could they would raise the prices in shops too, the EU common market benefits us in this regard.
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
It took them 6 years to make Half Life 2. It took them ONE year to make left 4 dead 2.
L4D2 is hardly the same level of work though. Designed primarily for co-op multiple player play with paper thin plot they didn't have to plan narrative elements of any complexity, the engine and was basically there already (as it was for L4D, but not HL2) as was the game framework on top of it. The amount of work needed on just EP3 is much higher then L4D2 - getting the story elements right will be a massive task compared to another chapter of zombie onslaught as there are many plot points to close (plus presumably a few to leave open enough for another sequel down the line), new ideas to develop for this instalment, all while staying tru to what has gone before and maintaining a quality that won't leve the long-time players feeling let down. If there are genuinely new things going on in EP3 then there may be much more significant engine and game framework tweaks than there could have been between L4D and L4D2. Considering how much extra work EP3 is compared to L4D2, you can see why HL2 was a ball-acher of a project relatively speaking: they were writing the core engine pretty much from scratch at that point, rather than making evolutionary changes, on top of developing the game around that engine.
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.
Someone reeks of sour grapes and lame duck.
Last time I checked, Valve hasn't rushed a game out the door and had to do the walk of shame once everyone realized the sad shape the game was in.
Valve is one of those few developers who are in a position to say "When it's done" and take the time to polish/complete the game to the quality standards they set for themselves... and gamers expect. If there's a reason for Ep3/HL3's delay it's because they've been busy with improving the Source engine (or building a new one?), L4D, L4D2 (Brad conveniently disregards L4D2 was 100% Valve), Portal 2, and oh yes, continuing support for TF2.
He also conveniently left out the fact that while they did acquire Turtle Rock (and later let them leave) and a couple of student teams from Digipen, there was still level of involvement from people already at Valve. In particular, Chet and Erik were writing for the Half-Life episodes and were moved onto the L4D and Portal projects.
Insert Sig Here
L4D2 was essentially a mod to the original L4D, so of course it didn't take long. That and the storyline is half-assed. And there are few maps and all of the maps are strictly linear with minimal need for exploration.
Also, while I do agree to an extend with the premise of the article, Stardock is essentially direct competition to Steam/Valve, so take Brad Wardell's comments with a grain of salt. Not to say I don't like Stardock and didn't have a few minutes of game fever with Sins of a Solar Empire.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Lest we forget, the L4D series has pretty much been the coolest tech demo ever.
The original was released largely as a way to test the AI Director tech, that improves replay value and difficulty curves.
The sequel was released largely as a way to test the dialog selection tech, that allows characters to hold conversations at appropriate times and with greater attention to what's going on around them.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
first person shooters are some of the easiest games to make, provided you're using an existant engine
That's sort of like saying "Great writing is easy. After all, you already have words and phrases."
Which is technically true - you're not having to invent a language first.
Brad Wardell has had a huge chip on his shoulder about Steam for a long time. He never seemed to miss a chance to criticize it, and seemed on his blog to continually stress out about Steam and his own competing product, Impulse (which was recently sold to GameStop). So, yeah, Brad Wardell is a little bit biased on this issue. Based on his longstanding battle against them, I have a hard time believing that he's going to give an objective assessment of Steam, even after he sold-off Impulse.
> It took them 6 years to make Half Life 2.
"No one will remember if you ship a bad game on time.
No one will remember you were late if you ship a great game."
> It took them ONE year to make left 4 dead 2.
Technically it was Turtle Rock Studios who developed L4D. Valve bought them in 2008.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_Rock_Studios
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion I guess.
My opinion is quite the opposite of yours however. I beleive the current mix of FPS available on consoles today (and lets face it, FPS's are made primarily for the console platform these days) have a weak/non-existent story and are all pretty much the same tossed up mechanic over and over.
The story-telling in both Portal and Half-Life II were top notch and not the over-used, action-cutscene-action-cutscene, you ARE the story, you are part of the cutscenes, instead of just sitting back and watching a rendered event, yawn.
I beleive there are many forms of FPS's, and Valve fills the fantasy/action/sci-fi arena very well, and is largely untouched. I see TF2 as a casual fun fps and would not fill the boots of, say, BF2142 for that FPS "urge".
Sometimes developers live in a bubble so long that they really have no way of comparing what they just did to what everyone else is doing, there's just a huge built-in bias. Brad Wardell seems pretty level-headed (then again, he did switch his games to DRM after denouncing its use for many years), maybe he just believes way too much in what he was working on. Maybe it's stupidity, not malice, but either way you're right in that his statements should be taken with a grain of salt.
Twinstiq, game news
The cash shop came out what, 3 years after release? Valve had already gotten all of the money the needed to get out of boxed copies to make the game a success. It isn't taking a chance when "failure" on your gamble amounts to a massively successful game.
Also, there was already a modernized version of the classic. It was called (wait for it) Team Fortress Classic. And that's a semantics game, anyway. Neither a sequel or a remake would have been risky.
What's sad is that I think there are some great examples of Valve taking more risks than publicly traded companies would in their position (I think the fact that they never went public with their stock is one of the biggest factors working in favor of the company). They aren't necessarily huge risks, but things like bringing the Narbacular Drop team in to make Portal were not nearly as boring and predictable as putting out yearly Half-life installments would have been. Team Fortress 2 just isn't a good example of what you are trying to give Valve credit for.