Hacker News Reader

Comment by robbrit | Hacker News Reader

People in their early 20's don't even know Half-Life (released at the end of 1998, over 20 years ago now), let alone Quake. We're definitely getting old!

View on HN

Half-Life has been dormant (2007-2019) for longer than its release timeframe (1998-2007).

Blame Valve's lack of interest in maintaining their franchises for that one.

i lowkey kinda feel that the pervasive gamer hype about half-life 3 (for example the "hl3 confirmed" meme was extremely pervasive) made valve feel like it would be impossible to match the hype, and any flaw would be hyper focused. maybe now that it's faded a bit there won't be as much pressure. or i could be wrong about that mattering.

The book "The Final Hours of Portal 2" has a section where they explained how much pressure they felt to try and have Portal 2 live up to Portal 1. Even effectively shutting down development of of other games for 2 months so the whole company could focus on prototyping experiments for new gameplay concepts that could be incorporated into Portal 2.

I would not be surprised of the pressure they feel for Half-Life 3 to be great is an order of magnitude greater than what they felt with Portal 2

Team Fortress 3 when

To be fair if I was in their shoes and had the cash cow that is Steam, I probably wouldn't care too much about maintaining franchises either. Games are expensive to build and profit isn't guaranteed; a distribution platform that is being used by everybody has much better economics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com