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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.
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.
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.
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.
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".