Lost all of it obviously. Not a single company has my loyalty anymore.
Except if valve were to release a mystery black box with faint lambda symbol on it. I’d pay whatever they asked for it.
Game developers and publishers start shitting the bed when they IPO and need to juggle the conflicting interests of managing investor relations as well as customer demands; that or when they're acquired and turned into a subsidiary.
I had the same experience with the Steam Deck: just very well done, including side things like the case that came with the device. I've grown used to accessories bundled with electronics ranging from basically garbage to okay (but not great), while Valve's case was as good as I'd expect from a high-end third-party product.
I threw my CV1 that I bought secondhand in the trash when facebook bought oculus then forced login. Maybe I'll return to the market when it supplies something I want.
Which I imagine doesn't lend itself to doing hard things like making Half Life 3...
Why would any game dev choose to go through a death march to perfection, if they had other project choices?
https://x.com/MuchRockness/status/1849543449906942094
Even the minority who do buy VR games on Steam are mostly playing them on a cheap Meta headset, so without Meta those sales might not have happened either. The most recent Steam hardware survey shows that of the users who have a VR headset, nearly two thirds of them are using an Oculus/Meta model.
Valve tried to make it with Alyx, and while it is amazing, it did not inspire the industry to follow up on.
I do not blame Valve for moving on when nobody followed them.
If Valve wanted more Alyx'es to happen they needed to spread their wealth around until the VR market gained more momentum and became self-sustaining.
The entire media industry on almost every format is chasing nostalgia because they refuse to recreate the environment that made endearing stories and experiences in the first place.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
I also highly recommend Divinity OS 1 and 2 for the same level of dedication to every single detail and free post-launch support, even if they didn’t have such an enormous blockbuster budget behind them.
Creating a working nuclear fusion device could be cheaper than that.
It's a pyrrhic victory, they may have cornered the market but it's still losing them $4-5 billion every quarter with no end in sight.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/30/metas-reality-labs-posts-4po...
When Alyx first came out I had a PC that was the minimum recommended specs for VR from the day the Vive launched (4790K and Geforce 970). The game ran fine.
It sure as hell got better when I upgraded to a 3900X and 3070, but it plays just fine on the original minimum requirements VR PC which was a $1500 PC in 2015.
The idea that PC VR requires a massive rig is just nonsense. Computers that run VR perfectly fine are literally being forced in to retirement, they're officially obsolete.
Whoa, what? I only hear people complain more about Windows over time.
which means they have no obligation to ship. And so it is with the valve-time, they never shipped.
Some pressure (monetary usually) is required. Not to mention that "strive to make art" is not a commercially viable objective - the owners of steam will basically be operating a charity for these artists.
It was never about the quality of Windows, but their attacks against FOSS. And I think Nadella largely repaired the damage from that.
Also worth noting - you don't need Windows to play Alyx either. SteamVR supports Linux perfectly well, and other games that don't ship native Linux-native builds can still run through Proton. If you own VR in any capacity whatsoever, you should be capable of playing Half Life Alyx; that was Valve's selling point for anyone that had Steam and a headset.
As neat as it is to see how rare it is these days (w.r.t. the asking prices I currently see online), I've always wished other fans could enjoy and appreciate it as much as I have.
If that's what it takes to make something worth playing, then so be it.
Was Bungie in its day a charity? Or did they just get it? 20 years later the magic is gone and Microsoft is desperately trying to figure out how to make the goose lay an egg. As long as they're optimizing quarterly reports they'll never get there.
They might have had enough original ideas for HL2 (and then Alyx, driven by a new medium), but still not HL3...
I haven't heard love or hate for post-acquisition GitHub changes.
As for Windows, I could be in a bubble. But I use Windows, and I hate the UX more every release. Ads, "suggestions", automatically reenabling features, UI complexity, hard to read text, unintuitive UI, performance issues, audio device issues, useless background processes, new layers on top of configuration UI rather than replacing/updating old layers. I think those have all gotten worse since Win7, some since XP. And I thought I saw that opinion corroborated generally. Maybe there's not literally more complaining, but that doesn't necessarily mean people don't agree it's getting worse. What are they going to do, type the complaint in increasingly larger font each year?
Roberts was the lead on Digital Anvil's "Freelancer", until the publisher (Microsoft), frustrated at the scope creep and protracted dev cycle, bought out the studio, demoted Roberts, and cut features so they could ship the thing.
Which also shows yet another one of Valve's problems with making games, they treat their games like they're "tech demos", so unfortunately they're not as interested in actually moving the stories in their games forward or bringing them to a conclusion. They do a "tech demo", they move on from that tech, leaving the game and it's world and community behind. Plot? What plot? Perhaps they're also stalling on making continuations or even new releases in search of some "gimmick technology" to pair a game with, instead of just telling a story through their games. For those people that do like the narratives and the worlds in their games, it sure is tough luck. There's more to a game than just 'tech', but alas.
Sure single person self-funded passion projects exist. They always have and they always will. And sure what one person can do is more than they ever could in the past. It's still not the same as something that's forged by a team of visionaries each with unique backgrounds and skillsets.
Frost makes the point more well spoken and stylish than me often.
At Cannes and your local 'art' cinema ? To be fair, I don't watch movies much, but I do still go to these sometimes.
> Where are the games publishers on low budget games?
Who said anything about publishers ? (And Valve dumped theirs as soon as they could.)
> Sure single person self-funded passion projects exist. They always have and they always will. And sure what one person can do is more than they ever could in the past. It's still not the same as something that's forged by a team of visionaries each with unique backgrounds and skillsets.
Ok, I have no idea what you're talking about, are you "no-true-scotsmanning" here ?
We have a great recent example : "Factorio (: Space Age)", which started as a one-person idea, took form as a 3-person company, got after release a 20k€ Indiegogo funding, then blazed a trail of success over the next 12 years, now with something like 5 million sales for the base game and a 30 person company.
How is that not "a team of visionaries each with unique backgrounds and skillset" ?!
Or the amateurs at Spring-Recoil / Zero-K / BAR, which show how you can do that even better than the professional, commercial RTS.
Or indeed one person projects like Shadow Empire (with some publisher support), which show how you can make a brilliant 4X/Wargame on what I assume is a tiny budget...
And there are probably many other examples here...
I get that you're trying to discredit the argument by claiming fallacies, but these aren't just my views. Industry insiders (Frost in games and RedLetterMedia in movies) have been talking about this for nearly a decade.
"Industry" insiders' opinions are irrelevant, they are just too bogged in the day to day details, they tend to forget that 99% of everything is crap and that's fine (and they do that because they have to make a living there, their incentives are different).
And you cannot predict greatness (you are the one that talked about 'visionaries', remember ?) - specifically of new teams you've never heard about before (of course once they did something great it's another thing, even with reversion to the mean they can have a lot of other successes).
Well sure, but windows has never exactly been highly praised outside the enterprise world. Much of the praise that is held is mostly nostalgic.
Would be a huge selling point for the steam deck if it could manage it on min specs
It ran, but barely. I probably spent half my playtime restarting the game, trying to find the happy coincidence of playability (because the other sessions were too rough). Being able to play Alyx was one of the reasons I chose the Go over the Deck.
Nope, no need for an expensive gaming PC, just an actual gaming PC.
As with cars, phones, etc. if your budget is tight you can always get so much more value by going for a used model from a generation or two back than you would get by spending the same money on something new.
> Would be a huge selling point for the steam deck if it could manage it on min specs
Steam Deck can technically run a few VR titles but it doesn't do it well. There is a lot of evidence that Valve has prototype standalone headsets running on Steam Deck derived hardware platforms (often referred to as "Deckard") but the hardware just isn't there for full quality PC VR.
It could be a decent environment for making great games if Gabe wantet it to be. It isn't one right now, Gabe is still a businessman first.