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Comment by hibikir | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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