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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.
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
Steam? Sorry, I actually meant hats and crate keys.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
This space available.
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?
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.