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> Valve makes so much money being the only real PC gaming platform that they stopped making games.

The Steam Deck is an incredible device. And Alyx is one of the truly great games made for VR (which they pioneered generally). It might not be much but I'm not writing off Valve entirely.

Both are nice, but very niche.

Now if they do Half Life 3 - that’ll be a mainstream blockbuster, but they won’t, as they’re not the company that can pull that off anymore.

Nitpick: niche, sure, but the deck isn't very niche. The mobile gaming market is a established market open to all sorts of gamers.

I agree with you on VR though, that's very nice atm.

Yeah, I was saying niche because the Steamdeck experience isn't as plug and play as other consoles.

For example if you want to play Batman Arkham Asylum, you need to go into desktop mode, download a different Proton version then go back to the console mode, switch the used Proton version and then you can play. There's a whole bunch of other games where you have to tweak settings, maybe use the CLI to tweak things. And then add on top of that of managing settings to get optimal FPS and battery life.

That's a lot to throw at kids or non-technical people. It's quite a different experience than a Switch where you just download it and it works at optimal for the device resolution/fps.

VR absolutely niche, but Steam Deck has delivered on its promise far more than I expected, and this seems to be being reflected in impressive sales.

I'd happily place a bet today on there being a family of Steam Deck devices forming a material part of the PC games industry in 5 years or earlier. Much of the implementation such as the store experience is already leagues ahead of the garbage Nintendo get away with on the Switch.

When they inevitably release a second one with an OLED display and more performance and battery life, its going to be massively compelling. Sure we can all point to failures like the Steam Boxes, but from those failures came Proton which has been directly responsible for the Deck concept working so successfully.

It's unclear whether Valve is playing the long game or simply hedging their bets. My recollection is that their investment in Linux was expressly stated to be a hedge against a future where Microsoft put Windows in a walled garden, like iOS.

On the other hand, I know that a bunch of people are unhappy that the Steam Controller has been discontinued. Secondhand prices are through the roof.

After having a Steam Deck for a bit I really really hope either Valve or some other decent controller company like 8bitdo makes a controller with the same style of setup. The dual haptic trackpads+paddle buttons combined with the customizability is incredible. To me it is easily the biggest leap in controller tech since the analog stick with the N64.

I've never used the original Steam Controller and I still think the dual analog stick setup is better for some games but having the trackpads is good for many others.

It should be noted that Sega released their analog controller for the Saturn before Nintendo released theirs.

And Atari released theirs back in 1982.

was that controller really analog though?

The Atari 2600 had a digital joystick. The Atari 5200 was completely analog. If you tear the controller down, there's a complex mechanism that links the stick to two rotational potentiometers. It's similar in outcome to modern analog thumbsticks, but the mechanism is completely different (and is MUCH bigger).

The 5200 joystick didn't self-center, though. The only centering force was from the rubber boot. This ended up being advantageous in a game like missile command, but is widely seen as the Achilles heel of the controller.

>Secondhand prices are through the roof.

Really? I never use mine - guess I'll have to look at selling it!

I might have overstated that. Looking at eBay "sold" prices, they seem to go for anywhere from 30 USD (controller only, no accessories) to over 100 USD (used, but in box with accessories) or 200 USD (sealed in box). But even then, there's a lot of price variation - there are sealed controllers for as low as 130 USD.

I'd argue this to be a pretty dated take on Valve's strategy, personally. Gabe stated it was a hedge over 10 years ago, in response to the risk of Windows 8 moving to mandatory Microsoft Store:

> https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/07/26/windows-8-i...

Obviously none of that came to pass, we are two more Windows releases on and much has changed since. It is serendipitous the tech built is so great for delivering a portable experience - I think Valve's actions and words demonstrate it to be far more committed to the Deck than prior efforts, I don't see this as hedging bets. And why wouldn't they? At this stage they appear to have a hit product on their hands.

In 2022, Microsoft and Valve have strategic partnerships too, which certainly wasn't the case in 2012:

> https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18645250/microsoft-xbox-g...

> https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/26/22952086/valve-microsoft-...

> https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/25/22550103/microsoft-new-wi...

Yes, I should have been clearer. I meant that their Linux investment started out as a hedge, but over time they were able to pivot it to something else.

I'm not sure what the impetus was for the Steam Deck. I could see it as a hedge against anticipated future, dwindling laptop sales. I could also see it as an attempt to expand into the same space that the Switch occupies. After all, with the exodus of Sony from portable gaming, Nintendo's only competition is cell phones.

The impetus is it’s an obvious vehicle to sell more games via Steam? I don’t think it is any more complex than this.

AMD finally delivered a chip that can make the dream of desktop-ish performance in a handheld work. That simply wasn’t all that possible until very recently.

It depends on who is buying the Steam Deck. If it's people who don't already have a PC, then sure, Valve is broadening their market. But if it's people who already have a gaming PC, then it probably won't lead to a lot of additional software sales.

The VR niche has grown significantly recently with the Quest 2 selling 15 million units. Just today, what I would consider the most promising game/platform in VR released, which is BoneLab. The state of the art VR experience wise in my opinion was Boneworks, and that was only on PCVR, so I'm excited to see where we are headed with VR. It has been a slow-growing niche but it's still fighting on.

They are still pulling off big projects and pivoting well though though steam proton/steamdeck which pivoted from the initial failures of the steambox push

they may not really be in the AAA game business as much but I'm not sure that's a bad thing

> as they’re not the company that can pull that off anymore.

No company could ever pull off Half Life 3. This game is hyped to death before it's even announced and everyone would come in with sky-high expectations. To make matters worse, everyone would expect that game to be something different and it would be impossible to make even just half of the players happy. There's no point in creating a Half Life 3, it's a guaranteed disappointment.

They could just take the old game engine as-is, give it a new plot and art, and I would beg them to take my money.

And this is how you end with "Jaws 19: This Time It's REALLY REALLY Personal".

This is the opposite of what Valve has always been doing, with one exception being Counter Strike.

I wouldn't mind this, honestly. a game can be solid even on an old engine. just look at how long the Monster Hunter series had been on their old engine before overhauling with World.

Always leave the audience wanting more.

Not if they figure out how to interact with the signals in my brain stem it won't be!

I agree it's becoming sort of pointless to make HL3. As a fan, I'm perfectly happpy with keeping HL3 as only an asymptote and getting episode1, 2, Alyx and hopefully more.

I strongly disagree. First, to adress the grandparent comment, Valve is a private company that is still lead by its founders, so the sentiment does not apply to them.

First, Half-Life Alyx, from the technical standpoint, is a more complex project than a regular AAA fps due to the sheer amount of innovation that was required to make it work. They also developed their own VR set alongside it.

Second, measuring a company's capabilities by how popular their products are is not fair, imo. Activision, Ubisoft and the like have been churning out "blockbusters" for years at this point, essentially packaging the same game under a new title. Are they really more capable than Valve, which has released an innovative product in a completely new field?

Third, the reason Valve does not release HL3 (and this is me speculating) is not because they are unable to "pull it off" - technically, they are, they just did it with Alyx. The real issue is that the amount of hype generated behind the title is so immense almost anything they make would be underwhelming. Their decision to venture into VR complicated matters even further. VR, still being niche, would essentially make the game inaccessible to most of the fans. With valve having developed their own set, it would have looked like an intentional rip-off.

Alyx was the result of an acquisition (campo santo) and it killed their work a non-franchise game "Valley of the Gods" after "firewatch".

Citation needed. Wikipedia at least says that they were acquired while Alyx was in development and that they just joined the overall dev team.

It's an opinion comment on the internet, not a dissertation, but I base it on talking with one person who worked at valve hardware for a time and public information from the ex campo santo people's blogs and things. I could be very wrong and would love to hear from them, but I have a strong "what could have been" for 'valley of the gods.'.

Thanks for explaining. You made a claim outside of your personal experience, so expect to be asked to back it up. I’m not sure why you’re surprised.

Killed their podcasts too, which were good even if they were inveterate hipsters who played the video games you’d imagine Portland hipsters to play[0] and couldn’t pronounce Japanese names.

[0] Earthbound inspired platformers about how it’s okay to feel sad sometimes

St(r)eam.

Valve's issue is pretty much just a lack of serious competition against Steam. They do occasionally put out something new, just at their own pace. They aren't in any rush since their core business is virtually unassailable at this point.

They have less to fear about "professional executives" worming their way in because Valve is not a publicly traded company, unlike the other examples you mentioned. It's private, Gabe Newell calls the shots at the end of the day. There's no real avenue for people to buy their way onto a board of directors and exert influence on the company from on high, or oust its historic leadership. Valve's pretty well protected from that. But it can't protect itself from sloth induced by a lack of competition.

Realistically how does this end though? Unless technology is created to immortalize Gabe in a machine, at some point he presumably will want to sell or die.

Does it just become a bozo filled public-company at that point, chasing quarterly numbers? I think it's the biggest risk to Valve, speaking as a customer who loves their products/services today.

I would not at all be surprised to see it end in a Microsoft acquisition or joint venture of some kind, given their current appetites.

> I would not at all be surprised to see it end in a Microsoft acquisition or joint venture of some kind, given their current appetites.

This is absolutely what will happen.

>Unless technology is created to immortalize Gabe in a machine.

Who knows, this could be how the Machine God is made.

Can't Gabe name a successor among the people he really trusts? Not all companies have to go public and become cash cows for investors.

I’m not ruling that out - naming a successor is much the same as selling - ownership still transfers to an entity which at this time is unknown. There’s all manner of odd ball alternative ownership structures in existence that can be considered, but each of them would be still a transfer of ownership.

Passing to “people you really trust” is not an ideal foundation for an entity which has the potential to exist for many decades.

He has sons. He will pass the company to them. They will decide how it is run. Let's hope he's been a good father.

Someone with actual experience at Valve would be better suited for the role.

I mean, if Valve was just a deli or a corner store sure. It is very likely one of the most profitable-per-employee companies in the history of the world, and probably in the running for one of the most valuable privately-held companies in the world too. We also know Gabe adores making money, so... I think it to be very unlikely it just gets passed to a kid, but who knows.

Being private, we also don't really know how much of Valve Gabe actually owns - there may be other sizeable stakeholders with a say too.

> Unless technology is created to immortalize Gabe in a machine

Ah, this is what Valve is working on...

My impression is that Google actively tries to hedge. They are aware of the fragility of the ads business.

But it's difficult to set up a business when your baseline is "Google Ads".

I thought they have it with Cloud. I'm still puzzled how it went wrong.

Their cloud is better, or at least I like their interface better, but how do you know they won't just shut it off? Azure or Amazon are safer choices.

they won't, it makes a lot of money, it's b2b, etc.

gcp has a lot of business continuity guarantees.

still, I don't recommend them. because google acts like a dangerous savant at this point.

People only put up with GCP because AWS is owned by Amazon, a notoriously ruthless company. AWS is better from the perspectives of API stability, customer support, and third party support, aka the primary things cloud customers care about. Now that Microsoft has Azure, they are going to crush GCP into the ground and there is nothing Google can do to stop it even though Google invented most modern cloud technology.

Azure has been around for > 10 years. If they’re planning on crushing GCP then they’re taking their sweet time about it.

Sure, but they have only really been on the radar of traditional IT teams for the last 3 or so years.

Why should anybody at Azure care more than anybody at Google? Both are comfortable.

People at companies like this are only provoked to action by what affects company revenue, whether increasing it or preventing loss. And hardly anything can be demonstrated to have direct effect on revenue. (Certainly, unhappy users don't, as Microsoft was first to discover.)

Haha what a joke. First, Azure is around as long as GCP. As someone in tech I can tell you that GCP and AWS are used everywhere and no one is talking about Azure. I think their fast growth as reported in their earnings is due to their office cloud services and not "core" cloud services.

> As someone in tech ...

... you do realize that goes for 99% of people posting here? In my biased experience in consulting for ~4 years, the distribution is more like 80/10/10 for AWS/GCP/Azure.

Yet anecdotally I see an _awful_ lot of Azure use in traditional corporate IT teams looking to move away from onprem...

I’m not, it’s the other problem after the promo issue. Google is an engineering only company, if you aren’t an engineer you’re second class. So engineers see a cool problem like live migration and solve that. But they do an awful job at building a product customers want(product managers), and supporting(customer support, marketing) that.

If you look at stadia, they built the cool streaming platform, but failed to actually sell it.

Wasn't stadia absolutely dreadful at release with lags, bugs, stutter and shutdowns?

Peter Drucker is so wise for urging companies to "kill your cash cow". The unfortunate constraint is that it requires extraordinary leaders and amazing luck to execute such killing successfully.

>Blizzard has the same problem. World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else.

$15 x 6 million players is good money but it's peanuts to something like Google. I wouldn't be surprised if Google spent that much just on Stadia itself in some years.

I was formerly at Google on a team tangentially related to Stadia. A VP told us it was at least a billion dollar investment.

They could have paid me a million dollars to tell them it was a bad idea and saved the other 999 million. Oh well.

I'm pretty sure there are teams out there that could have developed a successful product for that money, if you don't include the infrastructure costs.

>... World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else

This fact reminds me of the resource curse.

>become hollow money machines that are preyed upon by professional executives

I've long struggled to find a way of expressing this sentiment in a few words, but this approaches perfect. Thank you!