Hacker News Reader

Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

To me Valve lost its way as a game developer long ago. What have they released recently? CS 2 in 2023? That IP came from a mod they bought 25 years ago just like every other game they released since HL. The only thing "new" have in the pipeline is a MOBA FPS.

I am however eternally grateful Steam allows me to painlessly run Windows games on Linux so I never have to deal with MS in my personal life ever again. As a game distributor they are awesome. And that is what Valve does best, distribute games.

View on HN

Not exactly recent but they definitely delivered in VR. The SteamVR demo (a collection of minigames/experiences) is awesome, and so is Half-Life Alyx.

Half-Life Alyx actually took me by surprise. As in: "What? Valve still makes games?". And while it is the Half-Life franchise, it is different enough to stand on its own.

Is VR a big market? I used a few of the early devices and was impressed but not moved to invest in it (before Alyx was announced I had regular access to a private Vive setup in a dedicated room.) Two friends bought Oculus but lost interest after a while. They haven't touched them in over a year and one friend has kids who don't care about it at all. Gamer people I know either don't care about it or like me think it's cool but not compelled to invest in. They lack compelling titles. For me to play Alyx, I'd have to invest hundreds of dollars on hardware in addition to buying the game. I can play hl2 right now on my existing PC.

Maybe I'm not enough of a hardcore gamer to like DOTA or MOBA style games. I loved TF2 but you can only play for so long.

I would like to see Valve come up with some fresh new imaginative IP that isn't something decades old. Half life was a ground breaking game and to this day I will fire it up and play through about once a year after I get the urge. On a rail was my favorite part. I feel dread when I get to Zen because I know the end of the game is near.

To play Alyx costs $299 if you were to buy a Quest 3S. Even less (~$200) if you were to buy a used Quest 2, which for PCVR isn't that much different in terms of overall experience. The barrier to entry is extremely low. Hundreds of dollars sure, but only just, barely hundreds.

But PCVR isn't really why people buy these things (which they do, Quest headsets cumulatively have sold ~30 million units) it's a value-add, most engagement is with Meta's store. The reason why this engagement isn't noticed by you is because the demographic showing the fastest uptake for VR is kids and teens, while you, I and everyone else posting here is old as fuck.

if by "DOTA FPS" you mean their new MOBA Deadlock, AFAIK it's not related to DOTA in any way.

Thanks. Yes, I mixed up the acronyms.

Other than being developed by the same guy, IceFrog, that originally developed (the final versions of) DotA. That's been the community "common knowledge" for a good while at least, I don't know if it was ever officially confirmed.

Oh, is Deadlock by IceFrog too? I've been keeping on its development but hadn't heard that.

Well, they released Artifact in 2018 (to poor reception), DOTA Underlords in 2019 (and stopped updating it after a while), and half life alyx in 2020.

https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Released_DESC...

They also likely have another half-life game in the works, as mentions of half-life-esque things have popped up around their codebase (as published through updates of their existing source 2 games):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWlRkzwHLwI

For what it's worth, it is an exceptional MOBA FPS. It's genuinely one of my favourite multiplayer games of all time, and it's not even released yet. I know MOBAs aren't everyone's thing, but Deadlock may be the peak of the genre.

Yeah seems to me Valve almost entirely stopped being a game developer in the early 2010s after Dota 2. Which I suppose more or less coincides with when PC gaming became a real mainstream alternative to consoles in the gaming space, and it became beneficial to lock themselves in as the PC gaming platform provider.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com