That I definitely agree with. I also think you're right here in regards to viewing Steam's Steamworks as a sort of abstraction layer or prerequisite for their metaverses to work. Without Steamworks, TF2/CSGO/L4D/etc become isolated experiences.
It isn't fair to discredit what Valve is building on the principle that it isn't free and open. Steam is a walled garden and is adored, for the most part anyway, by its users.
> The Steam brand and mindshare is second to none in my experience.
They've certainly come a long way. I remember when they first tied the release of CounterStrike to installing Steam (CS 1.6, 2002), and that was not received well. Online auth was spotty. People were not happy about having this extra software hogging their memory.
But Valve steadily improved it, and made a worthwhile value proposition.
It's worth comparing to Microsoft's incredibly clumsy and ill-fated "Games For Windows Live". At a macro level, why couldn't they repeat Valve's success? I suppose it's a management problem.
Maybe you're right and I'm overestimating the potential disappointment from gamers. Nevertheless I think we agree overall that after the release of HL2 and Steam the company has effectively transformed. In fact I have primarily focused on the financial motivation and I think you're making excellent points that not just financially but structurally Valve might not be in the position to be able to pull of any projects that require much coordination.
I think the point you're making on structure, could also explain the failure of Steam Machines. Something that would require quite a lot of people coordinating not just with others in the company but also with people outside it.
Gaben has made it pretty clear that Steam's role as a curator is not something he wanted, and not something that will continue in Steam's future.
> "One of the worst characteristics of the current Steam system is that we've become a bottleneck. There's so much content coming at us that we just don't have enough time to turn the crank on the production process of getting something up on Steam. So whether we want to or not, we're creating artificial shelf space scarcity.
> "So the right way to do that is to make Steam essentially a network API that anyone can call. Now, this is separate from issues about viruses and malware. But essentially, it's like, anyone can use Steam as a sort of a distribution and replication mechanism.
> "It's the consumers who will draw it through. It's not us making a decision about what should or shouldn't be available. It's just, you want to use this distribution facility? It's there. And customers decide which things actually end up being pulled through. So Steam should stop being a curated process and start becoming a networking API."
You're still looking at Valve as a game maker. Are they? Or is their raison d'être to facilitate steam? I don't really see a lot of signals that they are slowing down on the steam-front any time soon, and their game production appears to be as slow as ever. I don't think we can correctly judge what's going on without understanding Valve's self perception, its internal identity.
You're talking about Valve, while OP is talking about Steam.
As someone who only uses Steam (and used to play TF2 before all the hat things, but not DotA), I still see Steam in a good way. And I actually discovered that Valve indeed created all the things you mentioned (except NFT markeplace, which I believe is an exaggeration).
I believe that it's good that EGS is trying to compete with Steam, but on the other hand, I'm scared that EGS's tactics will force Steam to use the same tactics and make it less user-friendly.
I have seen Steam turn into videogame Facebook over the years. Not my scene but there are people who care a lot about their "profile". Valve is genius.
By focusing on the Steam platform rather than on its own creative game productions, Valve has shared more creativity with the world than it could ever had accomplished on its own. It is a creativity multiplier. It's a tremendous success in business and the arts.
It's actually very little work to maintain Steam once the core functionality is there.
Valve is actually a good example of a company that's now incapable of doing anything really ambitious that has real demand. You know, like Half Life 3...
Right, and I acknowledged that in mentioning Valve. What you need is the freedom to work on what you want. Those guys are sufficiently well established as to have it. But that's very rare.
Heh, Steam for me was first just a new UI to Half-Life and my beloved CS. I hated the design but I liked where they were going with it. Being able to find mods, install mods, “shop around for mods” made steam what it is today. That, and beloved CS.
Also, if you can find it, in the Counter-Strike Beta, a lot of the levels had hidden community graffiti tags by the authors. It was awesome to see so many people. I miss the days of people coming together like that, building something they themselves want to play. Now everything is “how do I get rich off this?” loot boxes and shallow rewards for dopamine’s sake.
That's a really great point - do you have any insight into whether Valve's headcount reflects a shift in priorities to software distribution vs game design?
Meta is doing things for Meta. Yes, it helps the greater ecosystem but they have problems no one else has outside of Google and Amazon and a few foreign players. Presto, React, etc are things they needed and decided to open source. Valve needed something at went TO the source. There’s a huge difference. The few tools Meta has released for Linux were things that were important to them at that scale. btrfs, etc. While one could argue Valve did it for Valve, the sheer impact it has on small to medium sized studios is undeniable. Not having to rewrite your engine and just compile with a -lproton is wizardry. SteamOS forced graphics card manufacturers to start including drivers. GNU community being what it is, they reverse engineered it and upgraded Mesa. I’d love to see Facebook include something like making Oculus open source. React isn’t a fair comparison either because it’s a singular path architecture. There’s really only one way, the React way. If they wanted to be serious about improving the web, they would have brought the legacy along and made jsx a web standard for browsers to support natively.
Google, isn’t the same Google. Eric Schmidt is from my area of the world but advertising poisoned the company (one would argue, gave it a monetary value). Like Napster, Google was designed with good intentions in the beginning. That’s why it beat Excite, Webcrawler, Yahoo, Bing, AskJeeves, etc was because its usefulness at searching AND ranking.
All the FAANGs contribute to open source. That’s not what I’m getting at. I’m saying Valve does it not just for them but for everyone. With the only hope that Gabe can get HL3 running on a CoreBoot Linux Handheld because console royalties suck.
Yeah - that sounds ideal honestly. And I think their success bears it out. A company driven by the passions and creativity of some of the most talented programmers and artists in the industry. They gate for self motivated people through their hiring process, and it works well for them. The idea that organisational structures should be authoritarian in order to be productive is fundamentally flawed IMHO, and Valve (as well as companies like SEMCO, and educational organisations like Sudbury Valley) ably bear that out.
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