toblix

Half-Life 3

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What would you guys do if Half Life 3 was just never released, and the end of Episode 2 was actually the end of the Half Life series as a whole?

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Complain on an online message board and that's probably about it. I'll never stop believing!

 

Then, 80 years later when I'm on my deathbed, my cybernetics no longer able to sustain me and my breathing becoming heavier which each breath I draw, Gabe Newell, now a cyborg, calls me. "Gabe?" I say, the sound no more than a whisper, and he says "It's alright, it's alright, Lu, Half Life 3 is coming". I smile a weak smile and a single tear runs down my cheek as I close my eyes for the last time.

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Complain on an online message board and that's probably about it. I'll never stop believing!

 

Then, 80 years later when I'm on my deathbed, my cybernetics no longer able to sustain me and my breathing becoming heavier which each breath I draw, Gabe Newell, now a cyborg, calls me. "Gabe?" I say, the sound no more than a whisper, and he says "It's alright, it's alright, Lu, Half Life 3 is coming". I smile a weak smile and a single tear runs down my cheek as I close my eyes for the last time.

 

God damn this forum needs a like button.

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Yesterday I watched a relatively new episode of Freeman's Mind and it was pretty fun. Wish this series would have a better release schedule and get to the end already, but hey.

Why on earth are you named Lu?, by the way? What is happening? I don't post on these forums for a while as intensely as before, because I'm now working as a proper member of society, and suddenly shit just collapses into insanity.

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It'd just be Lu if this forum allowed nicknames to be 2 characters long, so Lu? I guess?

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RIP No-blix.

 

Merus is right that Valve doesn't need to release a single game ever again to make money, so I think it's legitimate to ask Gabe: are you working on anything?

 

And if Speedy Desiato's hypothetical ever comes to pass, I will consider the Duke Nukem 3D expansion Duke Caribbean: Life's a Beach as the true ending to the Half-Life series, complete with Combine soldiers in Hawaiian shirts.

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 I think we all agree that Valve isn't The Best, or anything, right? But to say they're doing nothing but dicking around, puttin' spit and polish on already finished stuff is reaching, I feel.

 

To clarify on the dicking, I'm not really speaking of the aspect of the company where the team polishes the games they scooped up for release, but the mysterious think tank and R&D arm that supposedly happens day in and out. If everyone can move their desk to wherever they feel like and there's no hierarchy, then surely even after lay offs, there are still teams left that should be coming up with novel game ideas, from Valve alone, not people on forums they hired or employees at other companies with an existing prototype.

 

Maybe there's no one at Valve that even does that though, I don't have any inside sources outside of the snack bar video and I don't know of anyone who works there so I can't clarify. Maybe everyone truly is spread around exclusively polishing and tinkering with Dota2, TF2, and Half Life Episode X?

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I'm a big believer that great artists ship. If you're constantly prototyping and you never actually finish a thing, get it out the door, see how people respond to it, and use that to inform your next thing, you are basically as much of a creative force as I am, with all these abandoned half-projects that never became A Thing That Exists.

If that is your reason for thinking that great artists ship, then Valve does ship - they test everything they make, constantly, from its very first iteration to what it turns into right before they release it. They have outside people coming in constantly to test their games so that they can see how people respond to it and use that to inform their next thing. The only difference is that whereas other video game companies make paying customers test their games, and other video games make us buy shitty games so that we can tell them what's shitty about it and so that they can fix it in the sequel (I'm looking at you, Blood Bowl), Valve just fixes those things in development instead of releasing games with issues.

 

Their high profitability per employee comes from two things: Steam, which is absurdly profitable, and them convincing the community to do their work, which they get their 30% off.

That's ridiculous. Valve made a ton of money from Half-Life and Half-Life 2, because they were excellent games, before Steam was even a thing. And they made a ton of money from the Orange Box and their other excellent games before the community profit sharing was a thing. If you took away Steam and the community items, Valve would still probably be near the top in terms of profitability-per-employee. L4D2 is outselling Borderlands 2 on Steam right now!

 

I want to touch on that more: Gabe Newell's publicly said that Valve's thing, if it has a thing, is finding resources that are under-utilised and seizing on them. TF2 is basically afloat due to Polycount's work, and yes some of those artists make quite a bit of money from that, but it feels like, if they're doing professional quality work, they could take that time they're spending making hats and make a real thing that they own 100% of and sell that.

 

Yes, it's true that without community items, Team Fortress 2 would not be wildly profitable more than 5 years after it came out. But it's ridiculous to say that the game is "afloat due to Polycount's work" as if this shows that Valve isn't putting anything into it. Between the back-end for selling stuff and profit sharing, the conversion of the entire game from pay to play into free to play, the massive amounts of advertising Valve does to keep TF2 in the public eye, with preorder items and constant updates (like the entire new Mann vs. Machine game mode) and the contests they run for new items and so on... Valve has put more work into that community store and they've done a better job on it than basically any other game company has done on anything. It's not trivial to take a traditional multiplayer game like the TF2 that Valve sold in the Orange Box and turn it into the TF2 that exists right now. If you think it's easy, then you have to ask yourself why every other company hasn't jumped on the bandwagon. Or why any other company hasn't....

 

And if you feel like artists could just sell their professional quality work somewhere where they own 100%, then you should tell the poor exploited artists. I know one of the guys who won the DotA 2 Polycount contest - he doesn't seem to mind. Nobody forces anyone to make DotA 2 items or TF2 items. People do it for the exposure and because they love the game and because it's an easy way to make money if the community likes your item and because Valve gives amazing art guidelines that tell you exactly what you need to do and how to do it. If you think it's so easy to set up some sort of storefront like Valve has done, so that the artists can get 100% of their profits, go ahead and point to one of those storefronts and I'm sure the artists will all switch to selling their stuff there. In reality the only other big contender (aside from DotA 2...) is the Unity storefront, as far as I know, and that only gives you 70%.

 

But I'm not seeing what value Valve adds as a developer being much different to, say, Rocksteady, or Crystal Dynamics, who make perfectly competent games that don't push any A4-sized envelopes but are executed very well indeed. Their writing is good, but so is Double Fine's, Irrational's and Rockstar's. Their animation is great, but so is Naughty Dog's. They treat their staff well, but so does any developer that came from an industry where they had actual project managers. Their gameplay loop is polished so smoothly that these days it runs the risk of being samey. Their engine can't stream assets (which is why they're rewriting it). My point is that, yeah, they're good, but they're not so much better than every other studio out there that they deserve to be deified the way they are.

 

"Sure, they're an amazing studio, but they don't deserve to be praised as much as other people praise them" strikes me as an unhelpful sort of criticism, like calling a movie overrated or disliking a song because it's popular rather than on its merits. Surely it makes more sense to talk about the substantive issues, as you've done in the rest of your post, rather than to criticize Valve because you think other people like it too much.

 

As for the culture that allows great ideas to bloom, how interesting it is that the designers of Counterstrike and Portal had to leave the company to work on their new thing. And Kim Swift left suspiciously soon after participating in a Experimental Gameplay panel on representing sex in games. They have all that Steam money, so they don't have to actually do anything other than sit in the middle and take their cut; is it any wonder that the only concrete plan that we've heard from them about their future work is to give everyone a game store so they can sit between everyone and take their 30% cut? Do they actually intend to make any games any more?

 

Really? Do you think Valve doesn't intend to make games? A company full of game developers who can do whatever they want even if it won't add to the bottom line, and you think all of them want to work on storefronts?

 

I think the storefront stuff is extremely interesting and compelling. Valve tried to do the whole "free user created content is the future" thing after seeing the success of Half-Life mods, but it didn't work for Half-Life 2 and it generally hasn't worked with the latest generations of games. Mods are still amazing, but there are fewer and fewer of them and they are less popular. Why? Because as graphics fidelity increases and the market gets oversaturated with other games, you have to have massive amounts of skill to make anything people will pay attention to, and even then you aren't guaranteed that they'll see you on Desura or whatever the fuck backwater part of the Internet your mod has to hang out. Even mods on Steam often don't have many players. How many are playing HL2 CTF right now?

 

So Valve went back to the drawing board. They could no longer just provide a moddable engine and let their customers create content. Unreal has tried to solve this with UDK profit sharing - if you make an Unreal game, you can sell it, albeit at highway robbery royalty rates. That has been sort of neat but we haven't seen a ton of those, again perhaps because the barrier to entry is huge - your UDK game has to be beautiful. Valve lowered the barrier to entry with the content store - your content still has to be beautiful, but you don't have to make a whole mod, you can just make a few models, and you get paid for them so the effort it takes to make a perfect model is rewarded with some income.

 

So now Valve has managed to again cultivate the amazing community of creators we see at Polycount, a community that was in real danger of dying off/becoming less relevant as the modding scene dried up. Now Polycount basically lives on Valve's games. You're saying that's trivial and that Valve doesn't make video games? I'm saying that Valve has created the future, again, with nobody to show it the way.

 

And, honestly, I think most people at Valve aren't working on these storefronts. I think they're just making games at the infamous pace Valve makes games. Neither you nor I can know, but if you honestly believe that "they don't have to do anything other than sit in the middle and take their cut" and that they really just sit around instead of making stuff, then I think that far from being the reasonable person for criticizing those who like Valve too much, you're just flinging baseless accusations because you have some sort of axe to grind.

 

You scoff, but think carefully: they don't have to make games to make money any more. Their business plan was to make money from games, not to make games, but because Doom was the biggest application on Windows. That business plan is now irrelevant. How many great ideas has Valve abandoned that could have changed the industry for the better had they been made by a company that was a little more hungry, that had to unify behind something they maybe don't believe in yet because it's either that or get new jobs? Do you think a hungry Valve would have let the Oculus Rift beat them to market? Do you think a hungry Valve would have been quite so proud of the physics-driven opening of Portal 2 if they had seen what Naughty Dog was doing with the collapsing buildings in Uncharted 2, a year and a half earlier?

 

"Valve could've done better" is true, I guess, but who cares? Everyone can do better. For some, it would take more money and time - for Valve, it would take more market pressure. There's no perfect balance, unless you want to just assume Valve has struck the wrong balance, and I see no reason to think that. Portal 2 was super impressive.

 

As for their management structure, how do they defend against office politics and unspoken power dynamics, or do they assume that they just don't exist, that people don't jostle for position, access and influence? Is there a grievance process? Is there a defence mechanism against bad actors? Against sexism and racism in the workplace? Or do they assume, like so many do, that culture without rules grows organically and cannot be attacked or subverted from within?

 

Well, you can work with anyone, so perhaps they ostracize sexist and racist people. And because your pay depends on what everyone else thinks you should earn, that's another way to deal with it. But really, we don't know. I think it's pretty ridiculous to think that only hierarchical solutions can confront endemic issues like sexism and racism, though. That's a dangerous kind of thinking: companies (and society?) need someone on top, in charge, to make all the right decisions, and we should all just trust the higher ups because they will solve all our problems. The way I see it, you're just as likely to have some racist or sexist jerk higher up the hierarchy as you are to have one in your anarchical ur-collective. The best way to solve this stuff is to have an independent HR department that handles these sorts of issues, probably. I don't know if Valve contracts out for that sort of thing. Neither do you, it seems. 

 

Here's why people deify them, to my mind: a> those early Steam sales, with ridiculous bargains on indie games just as the weakness of XBLA as a platform was becoming obvious, and b> they haven't yet fucked up big. It's not to do with the quality of their games at all, which, yeah, are great, but plenty of other studios do great work too. It's to do with the fuzzy positive memories of that time when you spent way too much money on way too many games, and it was easier to transfer that onto the company that owns the service because they never gave you a reason to hate them. It's exactly the same impulse that drives the console wars - doubling down on buyer's remorse by telling yourself that no, you actually made an amazing choice. But Steam isn't that much more respectful of you than XBLA or PSN. The contract still lets them weasel out of a class action, and they can change the rules at any time, and it's either agree to it or lose access to anything DRM'd. They can say what they want, but it's how they behave that's the true measure of how they really are.

 

And they behave just like everyone else.

I don't know if I deify Valve, but if I do, it's because all the games they make are good. That's pretty crazy. I can preorder a Valve game and know I'm getting a good game. How many companies can you say that about?

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And if Speedy Desiato's hypothetical ever comes to pass, I will consider the Duke Nukem 3D expansion Duke Caribbean: Life's a Beach as the true ending to the Half-Life series, complete with Combine soldiers in Hawaiian shirts.

 halflife3.jpg

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Pretty sure Kim Swift left because she wanted to be in The Person in Charge of a video game, and that sort of thing doesn't necessarily fly at Valve. At least, those are the between-the-lines implications that I remember from around the time she left. And that's a perfectly acceptable reason to leave, as far as I'm concerned. Valve is my number one dream company, but I also sort of dread the idea of working there (partly because man am I really smart enough and partly because I want to be The Person in Charge of a video game).

 

More specifically, I remember reading that Kim had some ideas for Portal 2 that were not implemented, and that upset her. But that memory is much more hazy, and probably was just a rumor. I'm not really inclined to believe she's that petty without hearing it straight from the horse's mouth!

Mods are still amazing, but there are fewer and fewer of them and they are less popular. Why? Because as graphics fidelity increases and the market gets oversaturated with other games, you have to have massive amounts of skill to make anything people will pay attention to, and even then you aren't guaranteed that they'll see you on Desura or whatever the fuck backwater part of the Internet your mod has to hang out.

Well, that and Unity, etc. being free/cheap and incredibly easy to use. That kind of thing has essentially replaced modding.

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Not just person in charge, but it seems to me entirely possible that Kim Swift might not have been able to pull support behind her projects at Valve, just because there wouldn't be enough interest. It seems entirely possible that the company's all-volunteer structure actually discourages working on your own projects. If you're working on your own project separate from the team, not only are you missing out on the stuff that all your coworkers are into, but you're actually financially disincentivised by Valve's pay system. Valve (allegedly) pays employees on a scale based on their group contributions. Hiding in a corner and making an all new game isn't a group contribution.

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Not just person in charge, but it seems to me entirely possible that Kim Swift might not have been able to pull support behind her projects at Valve, just because there wouldn't be enough interest. It seems entirely possible that the company's all-volunteer structure actually discourages working on your own projects. If you're working on your own project separate from the team, not only are you missing out on the stuff that all your coworkers are into, but you're actually financially disincentivised by Valve's pay system. Valve (allegedly) pays employees on a scale based on their group contributions. Hiding in a corner and making an all new game isn't a group contribution.

Mhm. The structure certainly isn't for everyone.

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I think it's worth addressing those kinds of issues as objective limitations in the system. The value of one issue versus another is certainly subjective, but it seems fair to look at Valve and say, "as a company, you are very bad at doing X, Y, and Z," and opening a discussion about whether a.) the claims are true and b.) the claims actually are important, rather than just taking an "if it ain't broke don't fix it"/"if you don't like it leave" attitude. Not to single out or over simplify anyone's arguments, just broadly speaking for the discussion.

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I'm going to do this quote-by-paragraph thing again, though probably I'll end up echoing TC. Also I'm super sleep deprived, this may not be up to my usual standard of discourse

I'm a big believer that great artists ship. If you're constantly prototyping and you never actually finish a thing, get it out the door, see how people respond to it, and use that to inform your next thing, you are basically as much of a creative force as I am, with all these abandoned half-projects that never became A Thing That Exists.

I more or less agree with this as far as it goes, but it still defines Valve as great artists, because, you know, they ship. And they only ever ship extremely high quality products.

Also: yeah, great artists ship, but shitty artists also ship. Maybe great artists only ship when they've got something worth shipping, and recognise when they don't?

 

Their high profitability per employee comes from two things: Steam, which is absurdly profitable, and them convincing the community to do their work, which they get their 30% off.

I could be reading this wrong but it sounds like you're framing "convincing the community to do their work" as a negative thing? Also you forgot they make and sell extremely high quality video games.

 

I want to touch on that more: Gabe Newell's publicly said that Valve's thing, if it has a thing, is finding resources that are under-utilised and seizing on them. TF2 is basically afloat due to Polycount's work, and yes some of those artists make quite a bit of money from that, but it feels like, if they're doing professional quality work, they could take that time they're spending making hats and make a real thing that they own 100% of and sell that.

Well, guess what - that last part? Absolutely not true or there'd be no unemployed 3D artists. And there are a lot. As a 3D artist, even an extremely skilled one, you don't have a lot of opportunity to make money by yourself. You have to get a job contributing art to a game or a film or whatever. You could try just generating a shitton of generic assets and selling them to people who aren't able to find their own 3D artists, but there's a lot of those to go around so you probably won't make much. Valve have given solo 3D artists an opportunity to make money where there's been almost none before. 

TF2 is also not afloat due to Polycount's work. Polycount helps. TF2 wasn't in dire straits before they started with the user generated hats.

 

As for the culture that allows great ideas to bloom, how interesting it is that the designers of Counterstrike and Portal had to leave the company to work on their new thing. And Kim Swift left suspiciously soon after participating in a Experimental Gameplay panel on representing sex in games.

Again, I have no idea why this is suspicious. It seems irrelevant to me, unless you know something I don't. 

My impression of people leaving Valve because they couldn't make the game they wanted to there, so far, is their game can't have been that interesting. At Valve, you can just go ahead and make your game, assuming you can get the people you need interested. It's self-correcting, because if you can't get a few people interested, your thing probably wasn't interesting. Kim Swift left to make Quantum Conundrum, which was a pretty bad game without even a particularly interesting "core mechanic" or whatever. That one other guy leaves to make a tactical shooter of some kind. You can totally see why people at Valve might not have wanted to get behind these things.

 

They have all that Steam money, so they don't have to actually do anything other than sit in the middle and take their cut; is it any wonder that the only concrete plan that we've heard from them about their future work is to give everyone a game store so they can sit between everyone and take their 30% cut? Do they actually intend to make any games any more?

Like TC said, they're a large group of individually autonomous people who really like making games. They're probably going to make games. No employee at Valve is looking at Valve's finances and going "oh, we crossed Threshold X, we don't actually need to make games anymore". 

 

You scoff, but think carefully: they don't have to make games to make money any more. Their business plan was to make money from games, not to make games, but because Doom was the biggest application on Windows. That business plan is now irrelevant. How many great ideas has Valve abandoned that could have changed the industry for the better had they been made by a company that was a little more hungry, that had to unify behind something they maybe don't believe in yet because it's either that or get new jobs? Do you think a hungry Valve would have let the Oculus Rift beat them to market? Do you think a hungry Valve would have been quite so proud of the physics-driven opening of Portal 2 if they had seen what Naughty Dog was doing with the collapsing buildings in Uncharted 2, a year and a half earlier?

I don't think that Valve would see any advantage to beating the Oculus Rift to market. They aren't interested in entering areas that somebody else is handling competently. 

But what the fuck is a hungry Valve? You're suggesting that it would be a better company if it wasn't flat? If it wasn't flat, it couldn't exist. They would get literally nothing done. I have a really hard time seeing what you're trying to say here. If a fictional company existed that wasn't organised the way Valve is, but which did employ all the same people as Valve does, which would be impossible, it would be a more productive company? What even is this.

 

As for their management structure, how do they defend against office politics and unspoken power dynamics, or do they assume that they just don't exist, that people don't jostle for position, access and influence? Is there a grievance process? Is there a defence mechanism against bad actors? Against sexism and racism in the workplace? Or do they assume, like so many do, that culture without rules grows organically and cannot be attacked or subverted from within?

There's a really interesting interview with the Economist In Residence at Valve that you might want to listen to. It's on some economics podcast, you should just be able to google it, and the host asks a lot of these kinds of questions and they're answered well. Czech that out.

 

Here's why people deify them, to my mind: a> those early Steam sales, with ridiculous bargains on indie games just as the weakness of XBLA as a platform was becoming obvious, and b> they haven't yet fucked up big. It's not to do with the quality of their games at all, which, yeah, are great, but plenty of other studios do great work too. It's to do with the fuzzy positive memories of that time when you spent way too much money on way too many games, and it was easier to transfer that onto the company that owns the service because they never gave you a reason to hate them. It's exactly the same impulse that drives the console wars - doubling down on buyer's remorse by telling yourself that no, you actually made an amazing choice. But Steam isn't that much more respectful of you than XBLA or PSN. The contract still lets them weasel out of a class action, and they can change the rules at any time, and it's either agree to it or lose access to anything DRM'd.

The bold part is incomprehensible to me. People get fuzzy memories out of spending too much money? Is this a real thing?

I guess I can't really speak to the XBLA/PSN comparison because I have neither of those things.

 

They can say what they want, but it's how they behave that's the true measure of how they really are.

 

And they behave just like everyone else.

 

They really really don't. They're unique in almost everything they do. The only example you've given is that they have a contract you have to agree to to use it, like every online service ever.

I don't think I deify anything, but I do like Valve. I like them because the entire way they're structured encourages individual creativity and prioritises quality of life for the employees. And because they're super open about the way they operate and in everything they do that's not Episode 3. And because I, as some random internet nobody, can email them an interesting question and usually get a proper, genuine response back. And because they make really good video games. And because Gabe Newell bought me lunch one time.

 

Other reasons too but let's face it the lunch thing is really the clincher.

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 And because Gabe Newell bought me lunch one time.

 

Other reasons too but let's face it the lunch thing is really the clincher.

 

Let me guess, it took far too long to arrive and they threw away five dishes before bringing you the final product?

 

(This post for joke purposes only, I am Team Valve.)

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No, but the waiter did keep saying it would be 'just five minutes' for around an hour.

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