Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

The cynical take is that they've given up on singleplayer games as a whole because their multiplayer titles are far more lucrative. In the 13.5 years since Portal 2 they've only released one full SP title, HL:Alyx, and that was arguably motivated by their VR initiatives need for a flagship showcase more than the desire to make a new SP game. It just had to be an SP game because VR was too niche to sustain an MP population.

Everything else they've made in that time has been live-service forever-games which have relatively minimal development costs but generate hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, largely through predatory gambling mechanics. Putting a fresh coat of paint on Counter Strike made them upwards of a billion dollars in the first few months alone, and it'll keep printing money for much longer than Half Life 3 ever could:

https://esports.gg/news/counter-strike-2/valve-cs2-money-202...

The sad thing is that being a private company they don't need to pursue Scrooge McDuck billions at any cost like a publicly held company would, they have the freedom to make whatever they want, but apparently what they want to do above all else now is to peddle lootboxes.

That take would only make sense if Gabe Newell was running Valve like Bobby Kotick ran Activision, cancelling project left and right if they weren't lucractive. That's not how Valve appears to work: They do quite a few moonshots that don't have to pan out, and bonuses aren't about the revenue of your game.

See Half Life Alyx, or the hardware teams that did VR, or the steam deck: Not exactly people optimizing for revenue. Still, in Valve a new project needs to get people to choose to do it over alternatives, and it might be that in the current internal culture, they really lack a large enough group of people wanting to actually spend their day on a single player game. The fact that Valve is still such a small company probably makes all but the most popular ideas die pretty quickly, as one might need a pretty big percentage of the company to make a reasonable prototype.

> That take would only make sense if Gabe Newell was running Valve like Bobby Kotick ran Activision, cancelling project left and right if they weren't lucractive. That's not how Valve appears to work

If anything Valve is a big outlier in that regard. They've invested in many not-so-slamdunk products from Steam Link to Steam Controller, Steam Machine, Index/VR, Steam Deck (this panned out) and so on, and they kept maintaining, improving and building up good-will for each of those. You could've gotten their controller for cheaper than no-name Amazon crap, and it still works and supported by Steam.

In an alternative universe Valve is headed by literally anyone else, and one of their revenue streams is just releasing a new mtx-ridden, battle pass infested Half Life every other year and milk the IP forever.

Considering the steam deck uses essentially the same inputs as a.syeam controller did and it's running steamOS, which was developed for the steam machine... I'd argue these were very successful beta products

And wasn't the index the best VR headset for something like 2 years? It just hasn't been refreshed in ages because the market continues to be a gimmick, essentially. Even though I've spend multiple thousands at this point on VR in total, I consider it to be a significantly worse entertainment experience then regular gaming. Pretty much the only post it's better at is fitness games, and the Nintendo switch does these better still

The Steam Deck also capitalizes on the heavy investment Valve has done in the WINE ecosystem over the years (e.g. Proton). As someone who has been using the fruits of this for years before the Steam Deck came about, I was in awe when I realized just how long they had to be willing to continue on this path without obvious external benefits before they got to this point. In my opinion, it's an amazing example of how a company investing in an open ecosystem can benefit both compared to the usual zero-sum exploitation that I'm so used to seeing.

From my perspective HL:Alyx basically made E3 moot. I mean, it's not E3, that's obvious from a number of perspectives including abandoned content and so forth, but it serves the same function as E3, which is to continue the HL universe in another game.

I guess you could say there's still an unmet desire for non-VR HL games, so maybe in that sense it doesn't occupy the niche E3 would have. But HL and HL2 themselves were seen as moving game dynamics forward so use of VR is in keeping with that.

> From my perspective HL:Alyx basically made E3 moot. I mean, it's not E3, that's obvious from a number of perspectives including abandoned content and so forth, but it serves the same function as E3, which is to continue the HL universe in another game.

Unfortunately it's in a medium that is extremely niche, and as a result will almost certainly be played by a much smaller number of people than Half-Life 2 and have a much smaller cultural impact.

You can play it without VR.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/04/half-life-alyx-is-now...

That’s good to know! I might try that out one day.

Not to gatekeep it, but having played all HL games on PC and Alyx on VR, I don't see this PC conversion being a meaningful experience.

It's mainly because of the restrictions of different mediums, for example Alyx has much less enemy density, very narrow corridor-based levels made for limited movement of real human bodies and environments, a lot more emphasis on interactivity with the world and objects that would lose their meaning if replaced with "press F to $WHATEVER" buttons. It might be pretty mediocre as a flat-screen game.

I guess it may still be worth it if you desperately need something Half Life and want to see the story, though for that I'd rather watch it on YouTube, or just rent a VR headset for a month.

Being jump scared by head-crabs scary on 27" monitor, and entire another thing in VR glued to your face.

It does still let you experience the story, and enjoy the stunning environments. But I agree the experience was tailored too much to VR for it to be an excellent gameplay experience in flatsceen. Some mechanics are pretty mundane and the combat sequences preferred less walking movement and less enemies.

I played in VR and it was an all encompassing experience, still the best VR game I have played. I had even been playing VR games for a few years before trying Alyx, and it still blew me away, in a way that other VR games had not yet. That level of graphical fidelity and immersion is simply not in any other game. Which means it's a skill issue for VR studios, not a hardware issue (in my humble opinion)

At that point you might as well just watch someone stream the game from start to finish, at least you get the "experience" the game the way it was meant to be played.

That or the flat organizational structure is dysfunctional and leads to constant restarts / vision changes. I don't know if they are too capitalist or too communist. Or both.

> I don't know if they are too capitalist or too communist. Or both.

Or neither, Valve seems to do just fine as-is. Maybe they should just continue doing exactly what they're doing so far.

They are doing very well if you measure them by income, revenue, running successful platforms or trying new innovations.

They are not doing well as a non-live-service game company. Which is a very limited metric, but the one many people think of since that is where they got started.

Definitely is where they got started, but Steam is where they made the money to be the industry magnate they are today. They almost ran out of money making HL2. Without steam they would probably have been bought up and eaten years ago.

It's interesting to think of an alternative outcome, where they needed to keep making games to make money. I think there is something special about the small team and structure at Valve that would have let them stay nimble and release great games, but as above the industry loves to consolidate good studios and turn them inside out.

>>They almost ran out of money making HL2.

To hear them talk about that, it seemed like that was due to their legal issues with Vivendi Universal. I wonder if the same would've been true if those events didn't happen

> They are doing very well if you measure them by income

I was more measuring it based on "Producing enjoyable games" which at least is subjectively true for how I see Valve. I enjoyed Half-Life: Alyx a lot, and it was a jump in quality compared to other VR titles, and the new Counter-Strike 2 is pretty OK too, at least compared to CSGO.

They may have a flat org structure but their payments are not similarly "flat" across the org. The economic structure is still pure capitalist.

> Putting a fresh coat of paint on Counter Strike

That's not true. There's a new engine now.

The move to f2p games with micro transactions was done with the help of Yanis Varoufakis, a libertarian-marxist (his own words) Greek economist and politician who once served as Greece's Minister of Finance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis

https://web.archive.org/web/20140328192036/http://blogs.valv...

https://web.archive.org/web/20140219161902/http://blogs.valv...

This is, at least to me, a very strange leap of a conclusion from the sources posted (and general awareness of Valve and TF2 and Varoufakis etc otherwise)

You don’t need an economist to know that micro transactions are lucrative.

But an economist would know how to keep the money flowing.

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