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Gabe Newell On What Makes Valve Tick
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kbrickley
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That isn't totally true ... PC games were trailing off during the console heyday ... it was the ready access of digital (which PCs made the transition to well ahead of consoles) that brought about their boom ... Indie software is also experiencing a Golden Age due to the high quality and diversity of titles ... although there are certainly some less involved gamers that eschew the Indie genre (the PC equivalent of the console gamer) the broader based Renaissance gamer can find lots of genuine Indie classics (along with plenty of other PC exclusive games or primary platform PC games)
As to those that dismiss Steam as a platform and think someone else would have done it, why didn't they ... we have one quality digital platform for PCs right now and that is Steam ... there are other platforms but most lack the sophistication and capabilities of Steam (which continues to expand)
I can understand if a few fanboys are upset that they can't get their momentary enjoyment from another entry in a crowded FPS field but Steam has definitely redefined PC gaming (enough so that we now have multiple competing digital platforms) ... we should also see the last generation of console physical media with this round of competition so that from this point forward consoles and PC will be almost exclusively digital distribution
You played and purchased what you liked, the end.
Steam came around and bombarded you with old, cheap titles which are obviously discounted because 1. there is no physical copy to make, 2. there is no physical distribution, 3. no in-between party to take a % from steam and you. What that adds up to is savings, which is why they have so many sales.
I myself admit to buying games that are cheap, which I dont even play half the time.
The guy that stated that Valve revived, or revolutionized the modern day era PC games should have said it evolved what steam is today. However, it didnt improve the PC market in any way other than bombarding you with cheap titles.
rudy
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What steam did was probably coming sooner or later, games were already moving in the original direction steam implemented early on it would have only been a short matter of time before one of them said hey, we already distribute games X, Y and Z of our own on this why don't we sell other people's games? Blizzard, with battle net, heck tribes 2 had damn near everything including auto updates implemented. id, whoever.
But the very success of valve brings them trouble, the whole advantage of steam is a centralized place for every game,... but why not have a centralized place for every piece of software too? And that is exactly where OS makers are heading and why valve was really so scared of windows 8. Once I can get all my software in the windows store why not also get my games? Now I don't even have to remember if it was a steam game or not.
Valve was ahead though, they brought it to us fastest and that gave them their lead.
But the very success of valve brings them trouble, the whole advantage of steam is a centralized place for every game,... but why not have a centralized place for every piece of software too? And that is exactly where OS makers are heading and why valve was really so scared of windows 8. Once I can get all my software in the windows store why not also get my games? Now I don't even have to remember if it was a steam game or not.
Valve was ahead though, they brought it to us fastest and that gave them their lead.
Exactly, moving away from the old model of physical titles was going to be done sooner or later. I like that steam exists, but I dont buy that they saved PC titles one bit.
Blizzard will continue to use their own form of distribution, along with EA Origin, I wouldnt be surprised if more start to spring up. The only thing Steam has going for them is user generated content which can be good and bad.
the guy you quoted and myself would probably be very casual pc gamers, or worse console gamers, if it werent for valve and steam. there are thousands, maybe millions, more like us. youre absolutely right that the cheap online distribution ecosystem allows for a lot of sales, often on crappy games. but that is exactly why it's so great. do you really think millions of people would have bought terraria, or bastion, or trine, or limbo, or super meat boy, if they had been $20 or $30 on a shelf at walmart? definitely not. sure not everything produced is going to be great, but steam gives indie developers a chance to get their game out there to millions of people for just a couple bucks each. then a few people buy it, and if it sucks it dies, if it's good then the word spreads, it goes on the best sellers list, people make youtube reviews of it, and the game sells millions. These are games (and game creators) that never would have made it before steam. if having these games i mentioned over not having them is not improving the market, then i dont know what is.
in addition to that, even AAA titles i never bought before because they were $50 or $60. screw that. and if you bought the game a couple years later for cheaper, then youd have to dig around the developer's site for current drivers and patches, if there even were any. then you find that your disc got scratched or you lost it, etc and there was nothing you could do. and you had to devote entire shelves or boxes in the attic to keeping all these games and if you wanted to go back and play one you had to search through archives of games. now with steam all these games are in one place, theyre cheaper, they take up no physical room, they auto update and auto patch, your friends are right there and you can even see which ones have what games, you can text and voice chat with them on or offline, and the list goes on. im actually getting myself super worked up now because there are SO MANY ways in which steam improved the pc gaming market and community that to deny or not see it is just absurd to me.
what? "someone else was going to do it eventually, therefore steam didnt help anything." so fuck newton, someone else would have discovered gravity. fuck einstein, someone else would have come up with the theory of relativity. fuck steve jobs, someone else would have invented the smartphone. i admit that i am a total valve fanboy, but that is for one simple reason: they provide an amazing service really well. if you really think someone else would have invented a steam alternative that is as good as steam, then youre out of your mind.
I loled
rudy
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By eventually I mean pretty soon. I am not saying valve deserves no credit just saying that it was coming fast one way or the other. Also you either were not here the whole time or have a short memory steam was a major headache for a long, long time. So much so that most people did not even bother using many of steams features. The features steam implemented have now eclipsed other solutions due to vertical integration not quality. Can you even keep logs of chats yet? Outside of games does anyone use steam chat? The major functions of steam that make it great are all being overtaken by OS stores like windows store, app store and play store. The only thing that they are missing is the game integration, IE the steam overlay. MS could actually just port over their features from xbox and probably do huge damage to steam if they were not so conflicted in interest.
No one knows what history would have brought but I and others asked valve constantly for years for what would eventually be known as big picture mode. Long before there was even an xbox 360. The fact that valve was so slow to implement it means they missed the hey day of the HTPC. Can they get it back? maybe but they had a much better opportunity back in the days of windows XP and back then they would not have needed to go to Linux and screw half their library. Would another company have done this better, who knows maybe or maybe not. But what we know is the slow valve time and disorganized direction of the company certainly has slowed them down in some areas and caused them to miss opportunity.
Steve jobs did not invent the smart phone. In this case it is not even matter of opinion or some missing feature it is literally completely false.
Do you know who the biggest enemy of PC gaming is / was? PC gamers themselves. Just like console gamers when steam launched people FREAKED out. There are probably still people today that run their own non steam servers because they freaked out so bad. They said all the same shit, oh no we can't have DRM, why can't I resell my games. Then you have the pirates. All these people slowed down the evolution of the PC gaming pricing model so much that even though I used steam ever since it was first launched the real gains of cheap games and so on did not come to fruitation till probably 5ish years ago just around the time the mobile explosions happened. So ironically steam has been kinda late to executing their plans and this has caused them to honestly have rather bad timing. Some people who PC game think PC gaming is in its prime, but it's not at all, millions of Americans are hardly touching their PCs anymore as they stick with phones, tablets, etc... And valve has no way in these markets at current. So valve didn't see the future they reacted to the present. The fear that mobile and OS stores would wipe them out.
kbrickley
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Soon is relative ... 2004 (when Steam was released) wasn't a boom for PC gaming ... multiple generations of consoles were firmly entrenched and high speed internet was still a developing commodity ... I think it is as dismissive of Valve to claim another company would have gotten around to it, as it is to Amazon to claim some other company would have dominated web based shopping
I am not sure what big picture opportunity you think has been missed ... more homes own large HDTVs than ever before and next generation 4K TVs are looming ... consoles and DVRs and streaming devices still sell well and a HTPC is capable of replacing or integrating with all of them ... I think that boat has yet to sail so the opportunity still exists
Apple didn't invent it but they definitely changed the form factor ... touch wasn't as elegantly implemented prior to the iPhone ... and they rewrote the book on smartphone data (data consumption on mobile devices changed overnight with the release of the iPhone) ... and they redefined the relationship between the mobile device manufacturers/designers and the carriers
On this I would mostly agree (especially on some of the obnoxious PC gamers on the DRM and ownership questions) ... with more than 65,000,000 accounts and a recent record for concurrent users I wouldn't write off Steam just yet as having missed the boat on anything though
rudy
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It was certainly a better time than now. CS was mature at that point and one of the most played games in the world. In fact the entire success of steam can probably attributed to none other than counterstrike, just like the entire success of origin relied on BF3. Also for the record steam was running probably as far back as 2002 but it wasn't until 2004 that they forced everyone to use it, mostly against the will of the players. If amazon is not where they are buy.com or some other company would have been the new online walmart. It's not dismissive at all. It is the natural progression of things. Sorry it is one of my pet peeves when someone takes some individual who was developing something and struck it rich and starts saying things like we would have none of this if not for that person. In fact did you know that it is claimed valve didn't even want to develop steam they tried to get others to give them the functionality and companies including MS turned them down? Technology was moving forward if the winner was not company A it would have been company B or C. You can watch this in many industries over and over and over. It is very natural for one company to seemingly dominate early in a product cycle. Ford did it with cars, MS did it with PCs, Nintendo did it with consoles, Google did it with smart phones, over and over. You cant sit there and say that that repeating theme over would not have happened in a similar fashion if any one of those companies was deleted. It would have happened simply with a different company.
Windows Media Center, there was an early push for the HTPC this would have been a great time for Steam to push as well, instead MS made a sorry half assed push on their own no one even bothered to back them up. And ultimately the short sightedness in the PC industry caused PC gamers to loose their dominant spot as eventually consoles would grab pretty much all of the key advantages PCs had at the time. Not sure what your other point is on the resolution of TVs at the time or now. The point was presence in the living room. And opportunity nearly completely missed by all major PC gaming players.
No apple did not change the form factor, the LG prada released before the iPhone in exactly the same form factor. Data consumption had nothing to do with apple it had to do with the fact that data plans were finally becoming affordable and apple just happened to be well positioned with the success of the iPod to make people think that apple invented this just as ridiculous as it is to think that apple invented the MP3 player. Same with the form factor the size of screens and percent of a device they consumed had been going up steadily with time. I do give apple credit for redefining the relationship only once again because they had the power because other companies tried and the carriers screwed them over.
On this I would mostly agree (especially on some of the obnoxious PC gamers on the DRM and ownership questions) ... with more than 65,000,000 accounts and a recent record for concurrent users I wouldn't write off Steam just yet as having missed the boat on anything though
I am not writing them off but I am going to say that there was a much better time to do this that could have ended in a much better result. I know many people here think this is ridiculous but there is the very real possibility that steam will simply not be important in 10 years. When you really look at computing vertical integration is critically important and the OS players have always had the upper hand in this area. This is why gabe busted a nut and flipped out and went to Linux. He finally saw what he should have seen years back. The very vertical integration he enjoyed and that gave him power over any game developer and publisher was about to be taken away by a more powerful player.
I was a pretty casual gamer before Steam. Maybe purchased a couple titles a year from Best Buy/Gamestop.
I was a very slow adopter of Steam. I started using it consistently maybe 2 years ago, and ever since my library has grown to more than 100 titles.
I contribute this to Steam. I know it's a direct cause of Steam because I'm the one sitting in front of my computer. So yea, Steam had a huge impact on gaming for myself. I really couldn't give a shit what other people seem to think
I was a very slow adopter of Steam. I started using it consistently maybe 2 years ago, and ever since my library has grown to more than 100 titles.
I contribute this to Steam. I know it's a direct cause of Steam because I'm the one sitting in front of my computer. So yea, Steam had a huge impact on gaming for myself. I really couldn't give a shit what other people seem to think
I'll drag my soapbox back out again.
All the integration is nice, very nice and easy and a great way to gain total control.
Is it just me or do I sense that ALL companies with the control of the selling and/or distribution of software have become drunk on power and money?
When was the last time anyone read the EULA or a TOS? Read them once and if you can sift through the Smokey contract law you will find as an end user what you have bought is the right to use software (not own) and for any reason such software can be revoked from use at any time for any reason with NO legal recourse (the legal FU card.)
Take for instance the cc from adobe: you buy the right to rent software, and anything you create with it remains on their servers and if you don't pay rent for whatever reason all you IP and work is up on the adobe clearing house for auction. IMO Bad Bad Bad business model.
Adobe is gone forever from my computers.
Steam: great at the start now if you have a slow connection to the servers consistently you get VAC banned after a few warnings. Not so bad eh? Well what about all the gaming consoles tied to that account? What about the software you just bought off the shelf (which is hard to do anymore) which never states you need to activate it through steam...oh ya I have been banned for lag issues and my IP just won't work and it's my only provider choice so OH WELL stuck with a useless piece of software because the manufacture tells you to deal with steam/valve.
Total control over the free market by just a few companies creates legal juggernauts that plow through the creative free market.
Go ahead make a great game and find out how you are going to distribute it and I think you will find out if you by-pass the big guys you just might find a cease and desist letter sent to you stating you cannot distribute your software in Europe because you did not give the American company first crack at it along with a suit stating you that if you are going to electronically distribute your game we came up with that idea first so see you in court.
What's that you don't agree? Oh well how much money you got to spend proving us wrong?
Bottom line I hate renting software just to be told a single player game has to phone home to base or it won't work. What happened to the time when I bought a game installed it downloaded a few updates and had fun? Talk about killing off a market that is a sure way to do it.
Make a company that distributes software for the sole purpose of distribution and I will be happy, no other BS involved just a service to get me what I paid for since pressing plastic is too expensive.
It is not just about the content or delivery anymore. It is about a lost of consumer freedom no matter what company is creating/distributing product.
Consumers are dead, that's a bad business model. Leasers, now that's more like one huge ren-a-cent-er!
Off the soapbox again
All the integration is nice, very nice and easy and a great way to gain total control.
Is it just me or do I sense that ALL companies with the control of the selling and/or distribution of software have become drunk on power and money?
When was the last time anyone read the EULA or a TOS? Read them once and if you can sift through the Smokey contract law you will find as an end user what you have bought is the right to use software (not own) and for any reason such software can be revoked from use at any time for any reason with NO legal recourse (the legal FU card.)
Take for instance the cc from adobe: you buy the right to rent software, and anything you create with it remains on their servers and if you don't pay rent for whatever reason all you IP and work is up on the adobe clearing house for auction. IMO Bad Bad Bad business model.
Adobe is gone forever from my computers.
Steam: great at the start now if you have a slow connection to the servers consistently you get VAC banned after a few warnings. Not so bad eh? Well what about all the gaming consoles tied to that account? What about the software you just bought off the shelf (which is hard to do anymore) which never states you need to activate it through steam...oh ya I have been banned for lag issues and my IP just won't work and it's my only provider choice so OH WELL stuck with a useless piece of software because the manufacture tells you to deal with steam/valve.
Total control over the free market by just a few companies creates legal juggernauts that plow through the creative free market.
Go ahead make a great game and find out how you are going to distribute it and I think you will find out if you by-pass the big guys you just might find a cease and desist letter sent to you stating you cannot distribute your software in Europe because you did not give the American company first crack at it along with a suit stating you that if you are going to electronically distribute your game we came up with that idea first so see you in court.
What's that you don't agree? Oh well how much money you got to spend proving us wrong?
Bottom line I hate renting software just to be told a single player game has to phone home to base or it won't work. What happened to the time when I bought a game installed it downloaded a few updates and had fun? Talk about killing off a market that is a sure way to do it.
Make a company that distributes software for the sole purpose of distribution and I will be happy, no other BS involved just a service to get me what I paid for since pressing plastic is too expensive.
It is not just about the content or delivery anymore. It is about a lost of consumer freedom no matter what company is creating/distributing product.
Consumers are dead, that's a bad business model. Leasers, now that's more like one huge ren-a-cent-er!
Off the soapbox again