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There's also the legitimate casualties to think of. The developer of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine apparently made absolutely no profit on that title. I don't know the publishing details but had it had a non-refundable deposit that would have made things all the more devastating.
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May 21, 2018 03:51
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:There's also the legitimate casualties to think of. The developer of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine apparently made absolutely no profit on that title. where the water tastes like wine is kind of in its own universe. the profit that dev is talking about is the strict business definition where it's in excess of your expenses. such as spending six figures on having sting narrate your game
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May 21, 2018 03:53
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The White Dragon posted:where the water tastes like wine is kind of in its own universe. the profit that dev is talking about is the strict business definition where it's in excess of your expenses. Yeah, it wasn't a well thought out expenditure. That game looks amazing and I do hope to own it soon when I have some excess money to spend on it, but outsourcing a ton of writing to freelancers and then hiring some big name voice seems insane, especially watching how hard that game is to play and how niche its appeal is. Uh, anyway, titty games are stupid.
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May 21, 2018 04:02
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WarpDogs posted:They definitely shouldn't be withholding money until X sales, but a simple system of "give us a $1000 deposit, you get it all back when you sell that much" seems like a no-brainer and about 100x better than the $100 application fee they have now A sword Valve should wield, not the people selling their game. Valve can afford to hire a full time quality control guy, someone whose sole job is to vet what comes in and reviews complaints based on clear criteria and offer concise suggestions for resubmittal if it fails. This is what consoles do, and sure there’s trash but if you see something buried deep in PSN it’s guaranteed to at least run and not surreptitiously break your rules.
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May 21, 2018 04:13
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How is Valve even organized now? The response to this whole thing on Steam seems very confused. Don't tell me they're still doing that stupid We Have No Hierarchy setup they talked about years ago. (And haven't made a game since they made a big deal about that, just sayin)
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May 21, 2018 04:21
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al-azad posted:A sword Valve should wield, not the people selling their game. Valve can afford to hire a full time quality control guy, someone whose sole job is to vet what comes in and reviews complaints based on clear criteria and offer concise suggestions for resubmittal if it fails. A fair point, but since the 360 era the Big Three have essentially traded the mantel of "indie friendly" back and forth like it's a hot potato. Switch is the current darling but you can already find plenty of people complaining about discovery in the eShop and how trash floods it every week. But whatever, you're absolutely right that Valve has the means and responsibility to solve this problem. I think we can all agree that almost anything is better than what they landed on
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May 21, 2018 04:27
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I imagine Valve HQ is a place where an entire floor has been repurposed for hotboxing while the position of project lead is determined by gladiatorial combat in the basement while Gaben watches on from his throne of knives.
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May 21, 2018 04:32
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And that's why Half-life 3 will never be made. Unless it's some kind of weird knife sculpture smelling of weed.
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May 21, 2018 04:45
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Quicksilver6 posted:How is Valve even organized now? The response to this whole thing on Steam seems very confused. Don't tell me they're still doing that stupid We Have No Hierarchy setup they talked about years ago. A dude posted:I imagine Valve HQ is a place where an entire floor has been repurposed for hotboxing while the position of project lead is determined by gladiatorial combat in the basement while Gaben watches on from his throne of knives. Another dude posted:And that's why Half-life 3 will never be made. Unless it's some kind of weird knife sculpture smelling of weed. From what I remember, when HL2 and Steam came out in '04, Valve made a million trillion dollars and could do no wrong. They embarked on some hippy-dippy "employee empowerment" thing where everyone was their own boss and employees worked on whatever struck their fancy, which was great except that nothing got done.
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May 21, 2018 06:12
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DisDisDis posted:they should kill that blackmail rape vr game colonel was talking about Night Trap??
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May 21, 2018 11:45
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Gynovore posted:From what I remember, when HL2 and Steam came out in '04, Valve made a million trillion dollars and could do no wrong. They embarked on some hippy-dippy "employee empowerment" thing where everyone was their own boss and employees worked on whatever struck their fancy, which was great except that nothing got done. I'm having trouble finding it, but there was an interview years ago with Gaben to the effect of "It's impossible to find enough people with the drive to make HL3 AND can talk literally everyone else into supporting them" with the interviewer adding his own written conclusion "... And because we have no hierarchy, no one can enforce discipline." A more recent article discussed a former valve employee talking about how things had turned into a high school cafeteria. With no structure everyone just forms cliques and things stall. They just don't seem to have the grit to force themselves to do it, or the structure to soldier through. Hierarchies and organizations exist for a reason, after all.
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May 21, 2018 12:00
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Good job Gaben, you brought the work ethic of every 70s hippie farming commune to game development.
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May 21, 2018 12:05
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it's not like hl3 could ever live up to people's expectations at this point so this is all probably for the best. on the other hand, a half-life citizen trainwreck would probably be fun to watch for a bit.
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May 21, 2018 12:21
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Gynovore posted:From what I remember, when HL2 and Steam came out in '04, Valve made a million trillion dollars and could do no wrong. They embarked on some hippy-dippy "employee empowerment" thing where everyone was their own boss and employees worked on whatever struck their fancy, which was great except that nothing got done. Not true, Steam existed before HL2 and people hated it with the power of a thousand suns because it was a broken piece of poo poo that also acted as online only DRM (there was no offline mode and when there eventually was it didn't work properly for years).
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May 21, 2018 12:29
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yeah steam took like 5 years to go from garbage fire to good. i remember my friends who bought hl2 just pirating it a few minutes later because steam was making GBS threads the bed
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May 21, 2018 12:44
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Somehow I think Newell, the founding microsoft exec whose company has a stranglehold monopoly on PC gaming, will find the strength to soldier on and keep living.
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May 21, 2018 13:37
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Discendo Vox posted:Somehow I think Newell, the founding microsoft exec whose company has a stranglehold monopoly on PC gaming, will find the strength to soldier on and keep living. 
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May 21, 2018 15:44
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From the Tech Rapter article, from a Lupiesoft representative:quote:I think adult gaming market is growing exponentially while Steam has been slowly dying. While Steam currently has the biggest market share, many of the biggest publishers are seeing less reason to publish their games on Steam, while indie devs are being surrounded with mass produced meme games, the VN scene is also seeing a lot of google translated, horribly implemented, tested VNs coming to the platform. This is spot on. I'm wondering if this crackdown was meant as a distraction to Steam's declining reputation. "See, guys, we're actually doing something! This is what you wanted, right?!" I think anime titty games range from silly, but you do you, to horrific, but their inclusion on Steam isn't the big problem Valve should be fighting. Also, I didn't know about Valve's
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May 21, 2018 16:37
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Steam is successful despite Valve, not because of Valve
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May 21, 2018 18:03
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Truga posted:it's not like hl3 could ever live up to people's expectations at this point so this is all probably for the best. I think the biggest problem is that once Valve got it in their heads that they should do something other than Half Life 2 Episode 3 they blew their window of opportunity. A solid, albeit fundamentally similar game that concluded Half Life 2 would work when released a year or two after Episode 2, but the longer and longer they pushed the release, the bigger and more fundamentally different the game would've needed to be to meet expectations. I'm guess I'm happy Half Life 3 didn't become a Duke Nukem Forever style project where they kept reinventing the game over and over in order to catch up to current market trends. But it would've been really nice if the people at Valve could've put their pride aside and just finished the loving story they were telling. Half Life 2 Episode 3 didn't need to reinvent the loving wheel, it just needed to be a good Half Life 2 expansion. But Valve let the opportunity for releasing that kind of game completely pass them by. And at this point, unless Half Life 3 is the game that revolutionizes FPS in VR or something equally monumental, it will never come into existence. FanaticalMilk fucked around with this message at 19:57 on May 21, 2018 |
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May 21, 2018 18:18
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If you want half life 3 I'd recommend Black Mesa, it's probably my favorite half life at this point.
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May 21, 2018 18:51
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OwlFancier posted:If you want half life 3 I'd recommend Black Mesa, it's probably my favorite half life at this point. And if you want a new Half Life 3 to wait for I'd recommend Black Mesa's Xen content.
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May 21, 2018 18:52
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HL3 is going to be a battle royale game, but top-down like dota and with minecraft blocks and texture resolution.
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May 21, 2018 19:00
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:And if you want a new Half Life 3 to wait for I'd recommend Black Mesa's Xen content. eyyyyyyy
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May 21, 2018 19:20
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OwlFancier posted:If you want half life 3 I'd recommend Black Mesa, it's probably my favorite half life at this point. Honestly I just really wanted a conclusion to the story. If Episode 3 had been a visual novel, I would've been satisfied.
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May 21, 2018 19:58
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Only another 5 or so years until the HL3 Kickstarter
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May 21, 2018 20:00
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Sakurazuka posted:Not true, Steam existed before HL2 and people hated it with the power of a thousand suns because it was a broken piece of poo poo that also acted as online only DRM (there was no offline mode and when there eventually was it didn't work properly for years). Half Life 2 was the Killer App; people installed Steam because it was the only way to get HL2. Fortunately most of the worst bugs had been ironed out by then.
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May 21, 2018 20:18
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Gynovore posted:Half Life 2 was the Killer App; people installed Steam because it was the only way to get HL2. Fortunately most of the worst bugs had been ironed out by then. Also worth noting, Valve transitioned all their older games to Steam-only when it was released (complete with all the horrible bugs still live on the network), taking down support for the old WONID system they used before. Anyone playing Counterstrike, DoD(?), TFC, etc had to transition to Steam or they just couldn't play, period. CS was huge back then, so that was a large live-audience bug/load-testing period with no real alternative way of playing. But yeah, I think the HL2 release and its subsequent modding offshoots were way more influential to its longer term dominance.
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May 21, 2018 21:43
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FanaticalMilk posted:Honestly I just really wanted a conclusion to the story. If Episode 3 had been a visual novel, I would've been satisfied. Wasn't the conclusion posted by the writer as a text file, but with the names changed to protect the
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May 22, 2018 03:48
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It's honestly kind of crazy how fast Valve went from a widely popular and beloved developer to a company that just...didn't do the development thing anymore beyond maintaining some already popular online games.
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May 22, 2018 03:56
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When you turn on a money tap by accident, you're probably not going to turn it back off.
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May 22, 2018 04:37
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Quicksilver6 posted:I'm having trouble finding it, but there was an interview years ago with Gaben to the effect of "It's impossible to find enough people with the drive to make HL3 AND can talk literally everyone else into supporting them" with the interviewer adding his own written conclusion "... And because we have no hierarchy, no one can enforce discipline." Valve has always been a horizontal organization where everybody is even and nobody is the boss. It worked great at first but over time, well, it's turned out to be not the best idea. For better or for worse every organization needs that one person that says "no, gently caress you, we're doing this" when the time is right. Gaben doesn't want to be that person and it's a questionable idea. Then again they've also done DOTA 2 which is absurdly popular so maybe Half-Life just ran its course. 
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May 22, 2018 06:44
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Valve has always been a horizontal organization where everybody is even and nobody is the boss. Well the thing about their recent successes like DOTA, Portal, etc. is that they were accomplished by essentially just bringing on a full team that was already working on that project on their own and saying "make this for us now". So the teams involved likely just stuck with the structure they'd already established and didn't really merge into the collective Valve development team until after finishing the thing they'd already started.
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May 22, 2018 06:47
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Also, their game successes did not require them to cooperate with other people outside the Valve bubble. Running a platform like Steam is a totally different ball game, and I’m comfortable saying that Valve is very bad at navigating policymaking.
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May 22, 2018 06:54
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no matter how good it was at the time half-life is irrelevant. its a single player scifi fps, there isn’t much it can bring to the table now.
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May 22, 2018 06:58
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They could easily shock the world with Half Life 3 by having Gordon run at 100 MPH and replacing all the enemy bullet guns with slow moving fireball guns
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May 22, 2018 06:59
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But Doom already exists
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May 22, 2018 07:08
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DisDisDis posted:They could easily shock the world with Half Life 3 by having Gordon run at 100 MPH and replacing all the enemy bullet guns with slow moving fireball guns he has to kill fast, and bullets too slow
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May 22, 2018 07:10
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Gromit posted:Wasn't the conclusion posted by the writer as a text file, but with the names changed to protect the I believe that was the conclusion to the Episodes stuff but not to the trilogy as a whole.
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May 22, 2018 07:23
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FirstAidKite posted:I believe that was the conclusion to the Episodes stuff but not to the trilogy as a whole. IIRC it could also work as an ending to the series albeit as a massive downer ending.
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May 22, 2018 08:19
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