Valve

[AndyT]

Just been reading some of the other EA/THQ threads here where people are giving both of these developers/producers a really hard time. Maybe rightly so, maybe not.

As I was reading both I noticed that Valve was brought up as the shining example of all that is great about PC games. They are held aloft as a sacred beacon of awesomeness in a mire of self-serving cash-cow milking developers. Hailed as the only true pure thing left in the industry. God save Valve etc.

This type of thing almost always comes up in threads like those mentioned above and it got me wondering, when will Valve's reputation slip, as it surely must at some point?

To be honest, yes they make/made good games. Steam is great as a platform for buying, storing and playing games, but really, what has Valve they done recently except flog you more games you don't even want?

Are gamers that short sighted to realise that Valve has become just another big business built purely to flog you games. EA sell a lot of sub-par games, but so do Valve. Steam is bloated with a load of tat that you don't want, but everytime you load it up it tries to offload some of it onto you. The seasonal sales are marketing genius. The amount of games sold and never played is incredible. There are countless confessions on this forum of players who have bought a load of games off Steam and never even installed them - I am one. We seem happy to forgive Valve for this, probably because of Half Life, Portal etc. and Steam itself. Yes they have done loads for PC gaming, but these days they just sell us things really. Don't they?

There are no ground breaking game-changers forthcoming, not that I'm aware of anyway. So really, what is there to keep Valve on the pedestal that they (rightly) earned, but probably should have fallen off by now.

Lets be honest, the forthcoming Steam console is just another way of selling more PC games.

Valve's reputation grew out of it's games development. Recently there hasn't been much of note and Dota 2 just looks like another run of the mill clicky-clicky-stabby-stabby-spells game.

I have nothing against Valve EA or any other developers really and I don't want to see any of them fail. I have great respect for Valve and hope they produce more great games, but when I read about the hatred for EA etc. I do question people's loyalty to Valve. Surely the most evil of all corporations is the one who sells you stuff you don't want or will never use. In this sense, what makes Valve any different from EA?

So, what are your thoughts?

EDIT: As some people are clearly missing the point, this is not a rant at Valve. It's just a discussion about why gamers are so keen to slate some developers and defend others

 

[AndyT]

I dont think they sell you stuff you dont want, just that you dont have time to play them all.

I bought a shed load of games in the last summer sales, total cost was abou £100 for 60 odd games.

Only played probably around 10 or so of the games, but with even them 10 only played i feel i have got my moneys worths for the total spend. And still have all the other games to play when i get chance.

OK, maybe you are right in some sense, but my real point is that their output of quality games is fairly slow, yet they sell loads of other peoples games and make a lot of money out of it. Which seems to be pretty close to the reason everyone hates EA.

 

[AndyT]

Personally I couldn't give a damn. If a company makes a good game then ill buy it who cares if they are money grabbers ? People are too fast to jump on the band wagon when somebody else starts moaning about something. Should you be the same if it was your company? Surely you would want to make money...

Like I said, I doesn't bother me in the slightest, I buy my games and play them. I don't care where they come from or who makes money out of it. My point is that gamers seem so happy to slate certain developers yet defend another to the death. It all just seems a bit ridiculous to me when you look at it.

 

[AndyT]

If you are a PC gamer, why are you even asking these questions?

I'm not sure what you mean?

 

[AndyT]

Main reason i think they get credit is because in a time where the PC has been under threat as a gaming platform they have been one of very few companies to continue to invest heavily and put PC games first.

Good point

 

[AndyT]

EA and Activision for example have **** on gamers time and time again, they are all about the money, that is FACT and are ran by people in suits with no passion for the industry, just its bank balance.

Valve have Gabe.

/thread.

Thank you for making my point so eloquently. It's your own fault for buying COD. You don't have to buy it, so why get all butt-hurt about it? This is what amazes me about gamers. They have such an air of self-entitlement and are so short sighted and fickle. How has a company **** on you? Did they slash your tires or something?

 

[AndyT]

Remember when E.A pulled all their sports games from the PC?

Ha! I actually hadn't noticed this as I'm not really a sports gamer. Good point then I suppose.

 

[AndyT]

LOL

I have not purchased a COD game since COD4.

It was rather childish to presume I had to be honest and go off on a rant like that against me.

E.A and Activision HAVE **** on gamers and the gaming industry, that does not mean I purchase their games.

Oh dear. Well crying about some big bad companies, holding Gabe Newell in idolity and trying to be all clever with /thread things etc. has made your high horse collapse before you even got on it. And all from a 34 year old man.

All this thread asked for was some sensible, mature debate. I allowed myself to be drawn down to your level and for that I am disappointed.

 

[AndyT]

WTF, I never thought I'd agree with you .

I'm sure most of this has been mentioned but the main reasons I "dislike" (I don't really care that much tbh) are:

EA etc release games and then either charge for DLC which should have been a part of the game or make it pre-order/Limited Edition only etc, Valve offer new content for their already sold games for free.

Valve's micro-transaction stuff for their free games (TF2/DotA2, I play neither game ) are all just cosmetics (again, I don't play, so this is afaik), skins and all that, they have no ingame benefit. Other companies basically force you to spend money to be able to actually play properly.

Valve don't buy up smaller/indie devs, then make them release rubbish games until they just close the studio, instead they publish their games on Steam giving them a much larger audience to sell games (that they made/decided stuff on, not Valve) to while taking a cut of the proceeds. Making money is fine, doing it to the detriment of the consumer is what people dislike.

Yeah, I kind of agree with most of this, but Valve's EULA means we are effectively renting the games we buy. Other companies would certainly not be allowed to get away with this, but for Valve - it seems ok.

 

[AndyT]

Yup, agreed with OP, except personally I don't think they make great games anymore, and heavily use(and have used) the promise of future titles to keep people coming back while putting in seemingly next to no effort or profits into their "big" titles of their own.

Its become a commercial selling platform, not just the program they use for their own games.

Portal is great, but short, and portal 2 for me was significantly worse, easier and less daring than the original like any other series. Likewise HL1 was the best, HL2 was good but not as good for me, all the episodes I think have been complete crap, rehashed rubbish, reusing much of the same stuff, same area's, same feel, nothing new, overpriced and way too short and years between small games without much new content.

The only reason people have complained less is... they're only making one or two series worse because they only have one or two.

Is steam fantastic, no, its a basic shop and game launching client, it offers me no more or less functionality than any other app that does the same crap for me. As said in the OP, they keep offering you stuff that is a great price... and humans in general(me included) hate passing up a good deal just in case, however I haven't been sucked into the Steam experience of spending on stuff I'll never play. There are guys who bang on about steam sales who also say they have 100's of games they've never played, never will play, never really wanted to play. I'd prefer to pay £30 on a game I want than 20p each for 100 games I don't want to play JUSt because they are cheap and I might eventually open one of them.

Steam suck on pricing for stuff you actually want, offer nothing no one else doesn't, spends a lot of time and effort getting you to buy stuff you don't really want and spends seemingly very little of its vast profits actually making games, and not making great games.

In terms of being a good platform for indie's to get their games up.... I honestly don't know if thats true, it is, lots of people use it and people can put their games on it, but I have no idea if they make much from each sale, if Valve are good, or have become a giant and take most of the profits.

I see nothing brilliant about Steam, origin, Uplay or anything else, nor anything particularly bad with them, the love for steam I don't get, its an application, its a list of short cuts, you can put a list of shortcuts to all your games in a folder and have identical "all my games are here" functionality people keep banging on about.

Its like people think shortcuts and arranging all your game ones in one list is... magic? I find how much people like a list of shortcuts so valuable, but thats just me.

If they aren't charging indie game makers through the teeth for each sale, good for them, but ultimately I see Valve as a massively profitable retailer... who very occasionally release a game.

This is pretty much what I think, but you've said it in probably a much better way. It's just a game shop. HL Episodes 1/2 weren't great, let's be honest. There is nothing ground breaking on the horizon. I just think, so what?

Games I have enjoyed by other developers in the last 2 years:
Battlefield 3
Far Cry 3
Tiger Woods
F1 2012
Max Payne 3
Sleeping Dogs
Skyrim
etc.

Games I have enjoyed by Valve in the last 2 years:
.........

I have nothing against them, just not convinced by people's devotion to them. They are just a shop that slowly makes good games.

 

[AndyT]

Let's see why EA/Activision get so much hate shall we, compared to Valve;

EA

Pros

+ Have some of the best game IPs out there which they are supporting (Sims, Need for Speed, Battlefield, Mirror's Edge etc.)

+ Decent customer support (compared to Valve anyway)

+ Their client they force on us isn't that bad, it at least has it's own convenient downloader (unlike uPlay, for example)

+ Decent ports across the board, can't remember the last time a game ran like **** that had an EA logo (I know EA don't develop a lot of them, but still, they must at least respect the PC platform enough to make sure their games work unlike others *cough* Bethesda *cough*)


Cons

- Ruined Command and Conquer with Tiberium Twilight, absolutely murdered it in the name of dumbing it down to sell to idiots

- Absolved almost every single developer they bought out

- Killed Bioware, buried them, and then blew their grave up with C4

- Started this bull**** trend of locking half the game before release and selling the rest as DLC

- Too obsessed with the success of CoD/Battlefield and spending all their resources trying to cash in on them, neglecting amazing games like Mirror's Edge

- Never listen to the fans; where is NFS Underground 3? Must not like money then...

- Pompous and arrogant upper management, "If Dead Space 3 doesn't sell 14 million units we are killing it'' or something along those lines, lol just lol.


Activision

Pros

WiP (not looking promising)

Cons

- Showed everyone that bad crap sells, and the less skilfull and less intelligent you make your games, the more they sell, which is a trend that's crashing into most developers. Blame Activision for the poor state of Far Cry 3.

- Overprice their games, what makes them think they have the right to sell CoD for £39.99 on PC? The standard price for a game is £29.99 due to no licence fees, understandable on the consoles but on PC? Talk about arrogant, but then again, they know their fanbase are the exact same idiots that fill their coffers for their pile of turds.

- Killed Tony Hawks, Spyro, Crash Bandicoot, Guitar Hero and countless other games

- Will butcher Deadpool

- Release nothing but ****, gimmicky arcade titles these days

- Removed Radical Entertainment from the industry, despite the fact they make the best game under Activisions banner (Prototype 1 + 2)

Valve

Pros

+ Steam, and it's features

+ Okayish games, never really made a bad one

+ Steam sales

+ Seem to respect the PC platform



Cons

- Steam is a broken mess, that they refuse to fix, even though it's what gives them their billions of $

- All their IPs are gimmicks, except Half Life

- Never make any games, have a huge studio, yet are clearly lazy

- Way too many blind fanboys

- **** customer support

Pretty much says it all, they each have good/bad points, yet Valve are treated as though they give out free ****-jobs and EA/Activision as though they murdered your Grandma. Strange.

 

[AndyT]

I detest the direction the industry has been guided towards and the manner within which the self proclaimed AAA publishers go about their work, they have no respect for the industry, those who work within it or the consumers of it.

I singled out E.A and Activision but just look at all the **** which they have caused within the industry over the last decade.

Look at all the EXCELLENT studios they have purchased and either shutdown or merged with the rest of their operation. Look at the quality of games they now produce. With the budgets they have, they should be making the best games, EVER. Not the same rehashed ******** with added day one DLC.

Look at their execs who have the bare face cheek to tell us that sales are bad and DLC is their shning beacon. The same execs who enforce decisions regarding the direction of a game based on monetary gain alone and not taking gameplay into account.

Look at Valve...

To add to the discussion - If I don't like the look of a game I don't buy it. If I buy it and it's rubbish I learn not to buy the sequel or the DLC. I can't actually think of an game since the previous MOH that has made me curse the developer. Maybe only the colour tweaker with BF3/DICE recently, but really, that's not up to me. I didn't make the game. I knew what I was buying. How can I complain?

Sequels often, but not always get stale anyway. Where is the guarantee that these software houses wouldn't have ruined their own IP if they hadn't been bought out? We've seen it before. id for example, haven't made a decent game in ages.

 

[AndyT]

I apologise, I quoted drunkenmaster in error, post edited.

Thanks, I also apologise and have edited my post accordingly. Cheers.

 

[AndyT]

Is OP really having a go at Valve for offering you a huge variety of games at cheap prices? That has to be the dumbest thing I've heard. If you buy a game and don't play it, then you are a fool and you deserve to lose your money.

Also, I suggest you wait for HL3 or whatever Valve is working on atm (let me assure you, Dota 2 is nothing but a side-project), before you accuse them of doing nothing.

I despair. Are you incapable of reading an entire post or a series of posts? I am not bashing Valve. This is not a Valve bashing thread. Your response is EXACTLY the point of my OP. Many gamers seem simply unable to remain impartial when talking about Valve. How dare anyone question them?!

Same goes to the guy above talking about Valve bashing "becoming a thing". This is not a Valve bashing thread.

 

[AndyT]

I suppose if I bitch about valve then the op will say "this post I can agree with, why can't more people be impartial".

Great input, thanks for that. I'm not bitching, merely pointing out that you aren't allowed to say anything about Valve without people literally falling over each other to defend them. Daft really.