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Comment by gary_0 | Hacker News Reader

It's food for thought that something as groundbreaking as HL2 and Steam almost didn't see the light of day and the developers only survived by the skin of their teeth. In some nearby universe the games industry looks very different and sometimes people go "remember Half-Life? It's a shame Valve went out of business and the sequel was canceled."

I wonder what other amazing things we missed out on because of political backstabbing, or one-sided corporate lawsuits, or crime and fraud? We'll never know, because those projects don't get documentaries made about them 20 years later.

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It's also a food for thought that we almost certainly are in that timeline in other areas too. Take your chosen Hawk button issue like net neutrality, walled gardens, anti-competitive acquisitions, or some of the more outright antitrust agreements such as those that are displayed in the recent Google lawsuit (do business with us and be forced to sign an agreement to shut out all of our direct competition, ex: offer a non-Google Android fork and get banned from offering the Play Store on all of the company's devices).

Practices like abuse of the legal system have deleterious effects in our specific timeline, but I've always thought that for so many things, It's the opportunity cost that dominates. So many fruitful branches get snipped at the bud. Yes, as you said, we'll never know, but maybe it's something we should talk about more. What it could look like. It doesn't have to be done with an ideological approach. Looking at higher order effects can help see true costs and benefits.

Edit: I'm not fixing that Auto-correct. This post has a Hawk button. Press it, I dare you...

Not stopping the Florida recount may have changed the entire trajectory of the 21st century.

Butterfly effect is hard to comprehend isn't it? My favorite tangential stat (adding a little bit of path dependence to the conceptual stew) is the huge difference in outcomes between holding a kid back from first grade or not.

For some reason that's something I was always keyed into, even as a little kid. I've always hyper fixated on these possibility nexuses, and had a hard time caring about times when it's hard to break through the walls. Those moments when the threads of fate cross are just so important in the world, and it really is a fundamental phenomenon.

These recounts wouldn't be enough, full statewide recount was necessary for Gore to win. https://web.archive.org/web/20011203132040/https://www.washi...

For every Valve saved we have thousands of other being buried. This still happens every day and it works differently from the article more often than not. This strategy is what a lot of big companies with deep pockets use to quash something even when they're in the wrong.

> "The next thing we know, here comes this big stack of counter-claims," said Valve general counsel Karl Quackenbush. "Everything from canceling the 2001 agreement, to obtaining ownership of all the Half-Life IP, to keeping us from doing Steam."

> "We're gonna put Valve out of business, and we're gonna bankrupt the two of you," Lynch said of Vivendi's strategy.

The threat of being litigated into the ground by someone with more money for lawyers is a great truth and competition burying tool and it's used every day.

>In some nearby universe the games industry looks very different and sometimes people go "remember Half-Life? It's a shame Valve went out of business and the sequel was canceled."

Meanwhile in the current universe, we sometimes go "Remember Half-Life? It's a shame Valve became a massive success and the sequel was cancelled."

after seeing that documentary I have much more respect for Gabe, most of us would not risk like he did, kudos for staying on path and with clean head.

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