miskGabe Newell caps off Steam Machine week by taking delivery of a new $500 million superyacht with a submarine garage, on-board hospital and 15 gaming PCs
Chloé 🥕
CerebralHawksHe used to make games. He stopped making games to sell other people’s games.
I get why people like Steam, but when people say you shouldn’t play games that require other launchers, especially when all-in-one launchers like Playnite exist… I think people should get off his dick a bit.
The problem I have is that Valve used to make GREAT games. And there’s so much trash and shovelware out there, it would be nice to see a good developer come back. The hope is that they will at least make good gaming hardware.
even then, “he used to make games”… was he alone? did he not have a team with him? where are their billions?
valve is an alright company all things considered, but it’s baffling to me how many people act like they’re the second coming… people should know better. valve is a corporation operating under capitalism. they’re not above doing shady stuff for profit.
How Valve is Profiting from Steam's Back-Door Casinos
overloadAlso, I’m pretty sure Portal 1 was in development by a studio that was bought by valve when they saw the game prototype. Not exactly “Gabe Newell making Portal”. Though I do think that was a savvy investment (Portal 2 being the better game also).
Snot FlickermanErik Wolpaw, who wrote Portal, was absolutely a Valve employee by that time already though, and very arguably the writing is what made the game so special. The team developing it wouldn’t have had Wolpaw as a pull for a writer without being acquired by Valve.
DaveValve have really opened the floor for others to make good games though, right? I remember hanging out in indie game dev spaces about… 15-20 years ago, and many people’s best hope was to get accepted by a publisher and get 40% of sale revenue (publisher kept 60%). Getting onto Steam back then was very difficult (before greenlight).
Now anyone can publish on Steam, for better or for worse, and there are heaps of really cool indie games that rise to the top. Indie games were instrumental in the early days of VR as well.
Valve seem to have switched to a supporting role. They are developing hardware because it’s a gap they see in broadening their audience, and they let developers fill in the software because today being a game developer is really accessible.
To be fair, HL: Alyx was a pretty great game, that arguably gave you experience jumps like the original Half Life. I don’t remember much about it but I remember enjoying playing it. The little moments when you discover things like how you can write on a whiteboard by picking up a pen, or that you can only carry two grenades on your belt, but you can pick up a bucket and carry it around full of grenades, things that weren’t really possible in the same way until that new medium that they developed top of line hardware for.