Valve succeeds by the simple measure of being the largest store between 50 and 70% of all pc game downloads occur through their service. You've spent too long in very specific circles if you think H元 memes mean anything to the storefront's success.įrankly, the fact that you think that developer confidence in Steam at all depends on Valve's own game development is.nonsensical. Outside of a few idiots whose heads have been stuck in the sand for so long they're shitting glass, nobody in the industry expects Valve to be a gaming developer anymore. If there is innovation or development, it will be in regards to the storefront, not new games (and we do see fairly frequent updates and attempts to improve the service in that regard). Steam's effective monopoly on online gaming means that in fact they can indeed just keep doing Steam and succeed just fine. If developers no longer have faith in it, they may market and sell their games elsewhere. Valve may not be a publicly traded company, but their cash cow, Steam still is a system built on faith. They were just called out on it, by one of their former head write no less, which is very bad PR. They can't really maintain such a promise anymore, not after they lost almost all their creative talent, but that was all quite enough that they could still claim it, without getting called out on it. Thing is, they managed such an action by updating their games and services, and with the promise of future things to come. As far as I see it, this past decade was a holding action on their part, for a variety of possible reasons. If they wanted to become the single greatest monopoly for PC games, well, congrats, you've done it, what now? As a for profit business, they can't rest on their laurels with Steam, or else they're going to fall by the wayside. So I read the script three times, but the ending paragraph resonated with me.īecause it lacks ambition. Now, that probably won't happen, it's very much an extreme scenario, but that doesn't change that they need to begin making new products, or they'll be left by the wayside.ĭon't we already have a thread on this? Did I just imagine it?
Valve has the money, the audience, the legacy, but chose not to this due to their shitty company structure.Ĭlick to shrink.Because it lacks ambition. The last paragraph, I think, also isn't just written by Freeman to whoever reads it, but by Laidlaw to the fans. Part of me likes it, nihilistic as it is, but a part of me is truly saddened. What happens to humanity? What happened to Adrian Shephard? Hell, Shephard to me was THE Space Marine because I was too young to know Doomguy but old enough to learn about Shepherd. It's really classical sci-fi, the kind that shows how little humanity truly matter. Gordon sees all of the universe, infinite knowledge before him, and before the ship crashes into the Combine homeworld, the Vortigaunts whisked him away.Īnd it ends. The G-Man popped up, stops time, grabs Alyx away without even a word to Gordon. Alyx Vance decided on a suicidal charge of the Borealis onto the Combine homeworld using some sort of time travelling dimension hopping tech, shot Dr Mossman because she decided the tech was too dangerous to use, but at the end it wouldn't do a damn thing.