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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing how shortsighted & wrong one smarmy glib post can be.

Valve is kicking ass, leading massive technical charged doing great & fantastic work with none of the typical Service-as-a-Software-Substitute slimeware that everyone else keeps falling to. Great novel hardware with very high bandwidth & compelling input, best if not only useful end user drivers out there as we see with projects like Monado XR that are practically unimaginable elsewhere.

You're damned right they don't have a killer business instinct. They have a nurture protect & help instinct.

They aren't on inside-out tracking, not yet, they are building far more reliable open systems for outside-in, & that makes them more costly. But you know what you are getting & you know the raw data right out of the sensor is going to be great.

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That's an interesting take. I don't follow the VR market at all, but from my perspective Valve has been resting on their laurels for years. I've read that gaben just sits in his office playing DOTA 2 all day. Until I read your comment I would never have considered describing Valve as "kicking ass". From where I sit they've basically done nothing innovative since Half Life 2.

I think it's been easy to miss a lot of Valve's recent work since they haven't been cranking out games. Here are a few things since 2013 when DOTA2 was released:

* SteamOS, Steam Machine, Steam Controller, Steam Link (2015) hardware, porting Steam, Source, and tooling to Linux (and patching Linux to improve gaming performance). Cross platform and streaming features. Facilitating porting of games to Linux.

* Source2 (2015) wrote a new game engine and ported DOTA2 to it. Neither is a small undertaking.

* HTC Vive VR (2016) hardware, software, tooling, and VR content. None a small undertaking.

* Valve Index (2019)

* Half-Life: Alyx (2020)

In addition, there were a few projects and games that never made it to market and a few I probably missed. I'm really happy to see them trying things nobody else is, even when they fail.

On top of all that Dota 2 is one of the best supported games in history, comparable only to the likes of World of Warcraft and Fortnite.

It's not like they released Dota 2 and that was that. They've kept developing it to this day at a breakneck pace, including even swaping out the engine like pfranz mentioned.

>Valve has been resting on their laurels for years.

They aren't just a game development company anymore. Their primary product is Steam. If Half-Life Alyx was playable on any PC or console it would have been one of the best selling games of the year. Its only a niche product because, instead of resting on their laurels, they are trying to drive the industry forward.

Not only did they make the Index, which is by far the best VR Headset yet, they also supposedly helped HP develop the Reverb G2 that's coming out soon.

GabeN likes playing Dota but the idea that he sits around all day playing videogames when he's been building, improving, and expanding a billion dollar gaming empire is ridiculous.

There's also the massive progress towards making Linux a viable gaming platform. Really the only thing keeping me on Windows on my gaming system is the fact that most competitive multiplayer games' anti-cheat software can't run on Linux yet. If I played mostly single player games or casual multiplayer I could play almost everything I want to on Linux.

IMO they are plenty innovative. I wish they released more games, but aside from gaming they are doing a lot of great things for the gaming community.

Digital item economics/lootboxes/items is a big one[1], they even hired Yanis Varoufakis for a bit.

They also did a good deal of the foundational work for VR working with HTC and Oculus. Then there's steam link, Steam controller/SteamOS/Steam Machines, Player created layers in Portal 2, Steak Workshop/Mod support (and paid mods) to name a few. There's a lot of not hits and a lot of not games, but they've been at least doing some stuff.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-I6Qn56QWI

I don't know how you managed to interpret "Dota 2 is Gabe Newell's favorite game" into "he does nothing but play DOTA 2 all day, even at his office". That's downright malicious.

I'd hardly consider the Index and Half-Life Alyx to be "nothing innovative"

They are no longer interested in making games.

They are steam's landlords and hat makers, that's pretty much it.

Valve is hilariously stagnant. The Steam windows app went ignored for nearly a decade until Epic came in and started eating their lunch. The mobile app looks like a contracted out app from 2009. Seriously, go download the mobile app. Half the products or ideas they’ve come up with abandoned, never release, or are mediocre. They lack any clear vision, strategy or direction as a company. They seem like they would just absolutely rest on their laurels and do absolutely nothing if it weren’t for pesky competitors ruining their laziness.

The only reason Valve is in business today is because DRM forbids consumers from transferring their owned games to another platform. If I could abandon Steam I immediately would.

That's a really bitter way of saying that Steam's been chugging along doing fine for some time now. Epic's store was never really a competitor until Sweeney starting getting itinerant over his royalties red herring, paying developers for exclusive launches, and giving away at least a game a week for something like a year now. It's still missing a ton of features compared to Steam (though one could argue how many of those features should stay missing), and it is slow as molasses.

Steam's only other potential competitor was GOG, and it seems those two have had a fairly friendly relationship over the years. Remember that Valve gives away Steam keys to developers and resellers at very little cost, and that there are thriving third-party markets because of that.

You could argue that they have been stagnant in terms of game development, but everyone knows that isn't exactly true since Alyx was released. I don't really know what state VR was in before its release but from this outsider's perspective it seems to have raised the bar considerably.

Save for GOG, the DRM war is effectively lost, and so I'd rather be living under Gaben's benevolent dictatorship than some of the other more corporate-minded masters.

On the subject of game development at Valve, there's a lot of things that have been worked on but never turned into an actual release. There were 5 cancelled Half-Lifes between Episode 2 and Alyx (Including Half Life 3), Left 4 Dead 3, F-Stop, "RPG". A.R.T.I, SimTrek and probably a few more.

That sometimes over-cancelling willingness I think is also part of what makes the end result great-TF2 took 9 years and several versions similarly to Alyx, but I think both were worth the wait.

What stodgy complainy whininess.

I can play 60%+ of games on Linux because Valve cares way more than anyone else.

Big Picture works great for a console like experience far better than anyone elses.

Valve Controller let's practically any game under the sun be couch & controller playable.

Remote Play, then Remote Play Together, now Remote Play Tablet blow everything else out of the water.

I'm sorry the you doesn't meet your high pop culture desires? It feels much less glossy-plastic & more direct to me than Epic. That's just me I guess. The thing is, that is way way way way down my list of concerns. Steam is a technical juggernaut. No one else is even playing. Steam is super under appreciated. The lack of mainstream highly visible overwhelming successes doesn't bother me. Steam is innovating at the edge in radical ways, & they are always always always trying to spread the love, not steal the sunshine.

Anyone who says Valve is resting on their laurels clearly hasn't tried Half Life: Alyx. They've sigularly pushed VR further than all the other games and experiences out there combined.

Agreed. As far as my household is concerned there are two relevant VR experiences: BeatSaber and Alyx. (Serious Sam of all games gets an honourable mention). We would not own a Quest if not for Alyx.

>I can play 60%+ of games on Linux because Valve cares way more than anyone else.

I'd give Valve money JUST FOR THIS ! Thank you Valve - Keep kicking ass. No I'm not a fanboy I didn't even play Half-Life.

>Valve Controller let's practically any game under the sun be couch & controller playable.

The Steam Controller is dead.

>I can play 60%+ of games on Linux because Valve cares way more than anyone else.

Steam OS is dead. The open source community is more responsible for Linux gaming than Valve. Valve has supported Linux in the (hilariously) limited number of titles they've released in the last decade, and has added some support to the open source community. They are not the driver behind Linux gaming.

>Remote Play, then Remote Play Together, now Remote Play Tablet blow everything else out of the water.

Steam Link is no longer in production. Legitimately, have you ever tried other remote play alternatives? There is just no way you can say this with a straight face. The Valve apps are truly crap.

>Steam is a technical juggernaut. No one else is even playing. Steam is super under appreciated

What? This isn't a difficult problem to solve. There are a dozen game libraries similar to Steam that do the same job, but significantly better. The only thing Steam has going for it is the DRM stickiness that they acquired by being the only player in the PC space for so long.

>Steam is innovating at the edge in radical ways, & they are always always always trying to spread the love, not steal the sunshine.

Legitimately, tell me how they are innovating in "radical ways."

This is comically absurd take that is utterly divorced from reality. Half of what you mentioned to love about Valve is related to canceled or abandoned stuff.

> The open source community is more responsible for Linux gaming than Valve. Valve has supported Linux in the (hilariously) limited number of titles they've released in the last decade, and has added some support to the open source community. They are not the driver behind Linux gaming.

Valve are not the only ones doing anything for Linux gaming, but they are a pretty fucking big contributor: - Releaseing Steam for Linux, which has encouraged many games to be ported. Yes, the Steam Consoles are cancelled (or on hold), but even the promise of a new market (and the convenience of not having to have a separate distribution channel for the Linux version of your game) has changed the Linux gaming landscape from a handful of titles to more games than anyone can play (depending on your tastes ofc). - Employing/contracting people working on different parts of the Linux graphics stack (SDL,radv,dxvk,more). - Developing Proton. I mostly play native games, but Proton has been huge for many. Yes, it's based on Wine (that is a good thing, NIH syndrome is way too common is bad) but Valve have improved the parts needed to get a good gaming experience and packaged it up in a nice way that is dead simple to use for anyone. Just click a button to play your Windows games. - Lots of other small things. For example Valve's Plagman has been working on https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope which is godsent for thos of us with ultrawide monitors or other uncommon resolutions and aspect ratios that gamedevs like to pretend don't exist.

And best of all, most of those improvements have been open source and available even to those who don't want to use Steam. That's surprisingly open for what is esentially a DRM company. So saying "The open source community is more responsible for Linux gaming than Valve" doesn't even make sense when Valve are part of that opensource community.

Please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it.

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