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Comment by tapoxi | Hacker News Reader

It looks to me like Valve has been missing the boat constantly. They completely screwed up SteamOS/Steam Machines, haven't shipped a game in years, their current games have been essentially under maintenance mode, competitors have built their own storefronts/launchers that have caught up to Steam, they didn't react to obvious gaps with communication (Discord) and streaming (Twitch).

They shipped SteamVR with HTC, which is cool! But you need a powerful PC, $800, and plenty of free space. There's no competition to the $200 Oculus Go.

I guess the flat management structure isn't all that its cracked up to be.

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> I guess the flat management structure isn't all that its cracked up to be.

I guess it's also because they feel absolutely no pressure to do anything. As things are right now, Steam generates massive revenues for them (and profits since they remain a fairly small organization) so everything else looks like pocket money in comparison, especially anything hardware related.

A problem that Apple faces too -- any product proposal that doesn't derive 10-20% profits out of the gate is derided as a non-starter, so product development becomes stagnant.

Is that true?

That is a dangerous mindset though. From intels perspective everything done beside the Desktop was pocket money.

Now they have no pockets to put todays money into for tomorrow.

The steam streaming is perfectly acceptable if you use it for it's intended purpose: streaming games to 1-2 close friends rather than 1000s of faceless "nobodies". It requires absolutely no configuration on the streamer side. Two clicks and you're live!

Without SteamOS and Steam Machines we wouldn't have 3100 games with linux compatibility on steam so I would consider that a moderate success. For the remaining unsupported games using the windows steam client via wine works reasonably well because the client installs the missing libraries automatically.

But you're right they are certainly lacking in focus.

There's no competition to the Oculus go because nobody wants the Oculus Go.

This is in line with my anecdotal experience. A few of my coworkers got Oculus go when it first came out, and all of them ended up returning it. The only thing it seems to be good for is watching normal non-VR content, which they don't need a VR headset for. It doesn't have enough power for gaming.

I could see it being useful like, on airplanes or something, but I don't think we're at a place yet socially where someone could wear a VR headset on a plane and not look like a weirdo/pervert.

The Go's design (materials and form factor) are far from obtrusive and would not appear out of place any more than a neck pillow in the long run.

To jump to "weirdo/pervert" is quite a leap. Consuming 2D video in a headset that fits correctly (the Go is not adjustable in width) is much more relaxing and reduces eye strain in my experience.

As another commenter posted this has a lot of potential as a media consumption device (movies, moving comic books, spatial data) outside of the immersion or 3D gimmicks.

Weirdo I get, but pervert? Huh?

There's a fair amount of VR porn already. It's maybe not quite entirely fair to associate porn with new display technologies, but I can see why people might. And in this case, who knows what you're really looking at?

I bought and love the Oculus Go and I also have an Oculus Rift. It fills the spot my tablet used to fill for watching stuff and consuming media in bed.

Also watching / listening to ASMR on the Oculus Go in bed is a very relaxing almost therapeutic experience.

That's very short sighted.

While I will concede VR is still, at it's best, in to it's toddler years you should still give credit where credit is due.

The form factor and experience for the first standalone, wireless VR device is above par and raised the bar. The price point is, IMO, still too high for fast adoption but the experience is unparalleled and, dare I say, revolutionary in its space and makes me very excited to see where VR is going to _go_ (pun intended).

I own a Google Cardboard (literally the cardboard version), HTC Vive, and I've tried Oculus and the Samsung version of Oculus as well as Playstation VR. My vision in this area is probably better than most. Even a full Vive/Oculus with motion controls gets old for most people, and the portable Oculus Go/Samsung Gear are even more gimmicky.

Why would you accuse Valve of 'missing the boat' just because they aren't the best at everything?

Do they, or we, even want a single company to run the most popular game distribution service, the most popular gaming chat service, the most popular game streaming service, the most popular VR platform and the most popular gaming OS?

That sounds awful to me.

competitors have built their own storefronts/launchers that have caught up to Steam

What's a competitor store that's caught up with Steam?

Not a storefront per se, but I think Blizzard's Launcher that includes most of their newer games (as well as Destiny 2!) is a good example of one that's gone from nothing to pretty-darn-good while the Steam client has been relatively stagnant.

Right, there are clients/stores from some of the very big players for their products and some stores for more niche products (e.g. GoG) but I can't think of anything else on PCs with the scale and money-printing power of Steam.

I wouldn't call it good, at best it looks pretty while it is functionally lacking, especially when you compare it to Steam.

Activision is starting to move all of their big multiplayer games to Battle.net. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 will be the first PC release of a Call of Duty game on Battle.net after it being a Steam only game for 11 years. For big publishers and tentpole titles it makes sense to completely control the platform, because people will install a custom launcher and make a new account to play a big title, and there is no reason for publishers to give away 30% of revenue to Valve. The same trend is happening in video streaming with Netflix and Netflix isn't hurting.

That said I think the Valve hating in this thread is... overblown? DOTA2 and CS:GO are some of the most played games period outside of Fortnite, LOL and PUBG. HN has been complaining about Valve not releasing a new game for years but why release a new game when you have multiple, popular, heavily played titles? All the complaints seem strange coming from a site where many of the users work for SaaS companies that don't follow a business model that requires releasing an entirely new product every year or two.

Steam is crap but they have a captive audience. Can't transfer your Steam account to a competitor so your years of gaming history is stuck.

GOG is trying to alleviate some of this with their Steam Connect stuff, where you can connect your Steam account and gain access to some of those games on GOG, but it'll never be 100%.

I can't imagine any competitor is anywhere near what Steam has in user numbers, however many publishers have their own exclusive clients now. EA with Origin, which actually has great customer service (you can chat with customer service reps without waiting a month), Activision-Blizzard though I think Activision still releases games on Steam, GOG which I have no experience with but hear its good and then there's Uplay which is fine, integrates with Steam. But I like many Steam users am invested in the platform, I just wish they did some things better.

> GOG which I have no experience with but hear its good

You heard right. They have quite a good setup: the Steam-style GOG Galaxy client is entirely optional, you can also download, install and run your games manually without hindrance.

Well done web site with lots of user reviews. They also have very cheap older games and regular freebies - they're such a nice seller that you feel like buying something more expensive (Witcher 3 at half-price was a good deal ;-)

Edit: they also have a 'connect your Steam account' feature that allows you to have some of your Steam library games added to you GOG library.

When I tried last fall, I was able to buy Total Annihilation on GoG on Windows 10 client, but unable to launch the game on Windows 10. That was rather disappointing - no messaging it would be broken before purchase, no insight into if it would ever get fixed.

In instances like those, they'll refund you. I haven't had to do it myself, but I understand that to be the case. Since they sell a lot of old games, some of which they have to actually use cracks to disable the DRM on, they don't always work on newer machines unfortunately.

Activision has historically released their games on Steam, but their last PC release, Destiny 2, and their upcoming game Black Ops 4, are both only on Battle.net (Blizzard's client). Looks like they'll be releasing their games on Battle.net from now on.

Re: the flat management structure, this essay is worth a read if you haven't seen it.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

I think there was a problem in that it is difficult to get good performance from games written for Direct X ported to Open Gl. If graphics performance is always worse on the same hardware, it is hard to offer good value. Now there are some alternatives (Vulkan) but the concept has essentially failed and would be hard to restart.

> Now there are some alternatives (Vulkan) but the concept has essentially failed

I don't think so. DXVK is extremely promising, as a way for running DX11's crap API on Vulkan.

Yet that crap is being adopted by Khronos and Google, as a way to entice AAA studios to use Vulkan by having first class support for HLSL.

Crap is having a 3D API and respective shader language stuck in a C world in 2018.

Rather than turn this into a programming language flame war (lol), care to explain how an API only designed to run on a proprietary OS is not crap?

By using a modern language, having a C++ subset as shading language, SDK with support for fonts, texturing, 2D, math library with SIMD support, input devices, model loading, a debugger than can even go through shader code.

Instead of having to play "go fish" for libraries of various quality and support levels.

By the way, this applies to same productivity offered by Apple, Sony and Nintendo 3D APIs as well.

If you read the article properly, the only place where Vulkan is getting traction is on Linux.

Even on mobile space, Samsung and Google keep trying to advocate it, because being optional and with only Pixel and Samsung S devices having good support for Vulkan, no one is really bothering to use it, when considering targeting the widest user base.

https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/vulkansupport.php#android_devices

I meant the concept of a Steam Box has failed. I think the concept of a Direct X replacement is still viable.

>haven't shipped a game in years

The Lab was released in 2016, Artifact recently went to beta.

I think the point stands.

The Lab is a VR demo, I would not call it a game.

That's technically "years".

Two years is not a large gap for a game company that employs ~300 people and allocates some employees to the development of hardware and Steam. Valve is not as big as Sony or even Nintendo, and a lot of people don't seem to be aware of that.

The last game before Artifact other than some F2P stuff that they farmed out to places like Nexon (and The Lab, which was a pack-in tech demo) was Dota 2, which hit beta in 2011. Seven years is a large gap for a game company.

While safe bets, they did launch Dota 2 and CSGO. The only question was wether the pre exisiting communities would accept them under Valve.

Production on CS:GO was handled by Hidden Path Entertainment.

No, they've just become Microsoft. One big cash cow that is generating money with barely a human needed. It's resource curse, on a micro economy level.

If anything, Facebook is the “one big cash cow” of the big 5 tech companies. Microsoft is actually relatively diversified in terms of income sources.

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