Valve has a noticeably uncreative corporate culture

EA games tend to be pretty solid.

The main complaints against them are the fact that the majority of their profits comes from the sale of Sports games, many of which they hold exclusive licenses for.

The funny thing is that whenever they try something different, people tend to complain or not buy it.

My only complaint towards EA is the fact that they're sitting on the Road Rash and Mutant League Football IPs and aren't doing anything with them.
 
Again, this is a thread that got split off from a joke post of mine when it turned into a discussion. I did not start a thread saying nothing more than it says in the OP.
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Oh, OK, I didn't realize that.
 
Brother None said:
Yeah, I'm sure EA became the biggest publisher in the world (not anymore though) by making games no one wants to play. This little side-theory of yours is pretty ludicrous I'm afraid. Not that it doesn't hold a grain of truth, but it doesn't correlate directly as you imply.
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They want to play it, until they've played it.

I'm talking about the "Internet" though; the big complainers; they care a lot less about deriative sports games and more about deriative action games. And the camp is split on the deriative part (see CoD).
 
I have always been critical of Valve, even on these forums in the past actually. As with all places that PC elitist seem to congregate (as in here) you will find no short supply of hypocritical fanboys who are willing and eager to blindly suck Gabes collective cock.


This thread just proves it once again.
 
"According to the Steam Subscriber Agreement, Steam's availability is not guaranteed and Valve is under no legal obligation to release an update disabling the authentication system in the event that Steam becomes permanently unavailable."

Isn't this stealing ?
 
well that is one of those things I ALWAYS feared when they started to invent those "internet" account stuff. That we will face once the harsh reality when those companies bite the dust. And for those which believe that is no possibility ... you might think again.
 
well...

the first one of these digital distributors ( gog, steam, d2d, etc ) that goes tits up and people realize they are losing all of their games library... its going to get ugly.

especially if there isnt an opportunity to dload their games before their service goes offline.

but then again every game you purchase helps to make sure they dont go tits up.
 
Why so angry at Valve out of the blue? Gabe hasn't eaten Fallout... yet.

V
There had to be a trigger.
 
Noone's angry at Valve.

It's just being pointed out that they're doing exactly the same thing EA does, but noone minds, cause it's Valve, whereas EA are the ones everyone on the tubes loves to hate.
 
TheWesDude said:
well...

the first one of these digital distributors ( gog, steam, d2d, etc ) that goes tits up and people realize they are losing all of their games library... its going to get ugly.
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You can bet. And the problem is even much bigger then downloading games. But consider how many games are distributed over Steam. Good luck finding in 10 or 15 years a patch that might help you to get that game you have working. Particularly when it is from some smaller developer.

Black said:
Why so angry at Valve out of the blue? Gabe hasn't eaten Fallout... yet.

V
There had to be a trigger.
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I suggest read the thread carefully. Particularly the part about marketing. No offense meant of course.
 
Crni Vuk said:
You can bet. And the problem is even much bigger then downloading games. But consider how many games are distributed over Steam. Good luck finding in 10 or 15 years a patch that might help you to get that game you have working. Particularly when it is from some smaller developer.
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Steam doesn't have exclusivity to patches so I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Unless you mean Steamworks games that require a Steam account. They'll just be cracked if no one issues a patch.

TheWesDude said:
the first one of these digital distributors ( gog, steam, d2d, etc ) that goes tits up and people realize they are losing all of their games library... its going to get ugly.
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It's a growth industry right now so this isn't likely to become a problem soon unless one of their parent companies goes bottom-up (CD Projekt was facing some problems a while back but that seems to be over).

Also, it's not like boxes are permanent in any meaningful way. I've had to replace my old Fallout 1/2 CDs (and lost the boxes, sadly) due to scratches. I own an old Ultima VI box with 3.5 and 4.25 floppies. What good are those?

But yes, it's an issue. It'll depend on how it's handled. If people get the opportunity to download and back them up, no problem. For services like GOG or GamersGate I wouldn't expect that to be a problem, nor necessarily for D2D. If anyone would be an asshole about it, I suspect it'd be Steam. But who knows.

LP said:
"According to the Steam Subscriber Agreement, Steam's availability is not guaranteed and Valve is under no legal obligation to release an update disabling the authentication system in the event that Steam becomes permanently unavailable."

Isn't this stealing ?
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What would they be stealing? It's not like they get to keep the games.

I think every DD service has this kind of disclaimer. They have to or they'd become legally liable in case of even temporary loss of service.
 
Brother None said:
Steam doesn't have exclusivity to patches so I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Unless you mean Steamworks games that require a Steam account. They'll just be cracked if no one issues a patch.
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Maybe I used the wrong words. I am talking about to get games working once steam is down. Good luck finding in 10 years a "crack" for that particular game by a small indie-group of developers. Try finding a "patch" for Baldurs Gate 2 which corrects some issues so you can play the game. (it took me quite some time till I found it). Though I guess that is not only a Steam related issue. But I think Steam might make it worse. For the case it really stops to exist one day. Time and data-management are a serious problem. Not only since games exist heh. You never had that kind of problems with a Stone plate I guess when you want to preserve informations. :P
 
Crni Vuk said:
Brother None said:
Steam doesn't have exclusivity to patches so I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Unless you mean Steamworks games that require a Steam account. They'll just be cracked if no one issues a patch.
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Maybe I used the wrong words. I am talking about to get games working once steam is down. Good luck finding in 10 years a "crack" for that particular game by a small indie-group of developers. Try finding a "patch" for Baldurs Gate 2 which corrects some issues so you can play the game. (it took me quite some time till I found it). Though I guess that is not only a Steam related issue. But I think Steam might make it worse. For the case it really stops to exist one day. Time and data-management are a serious problem. Not only since games exist heh. You never had that kind of problems with a Stone plate I guess when you want to preserve informations. :P
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Finding patches/cracks for games will be easy, because all someone has to do is create a generic Steam crack that fools games into thinking Steam is running. Besides, things don't disappear on the internet.
 
Sander said:
Besides, things don't disappear on the internet.
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uhm yes they do ? Give it enough time and you will find less servers which host it or hold a source. Links get broken after time. Sites given up/disappear/lost. That is just natural. Nothing is kept for ever. Sure certain stuff with a high popularity will be there for quite some time as more users and servers host it. But I have a few very old games and finding patches for it was a bitch and very hard work (90% of the links dead, old fansites given up). I mean "yeah" it might not disappear completely. Who knows ? But almost. One can't expect things to last for ever.

Tough you're right about Steam. haven't thought about ways to "simulate" a Steam environment. That trick might work pretty well.
 
For pirates it's not a problem to find anything, but for paying customers it will be.
Which is funny however you look at it, even if companies get much bigger funds than pirates, these guys do a much better work and at the faster pace.
Now, I'm not implying that anything is better, just the difference which is noticeable for us all.
Also there is a problem with license, like Fallout1 or 2 now so imagine if in that time when they published them it was like today, most data stored online. Company goes out of work, the only thing they could do is place another company sticker but never get the game to run normally as it should. In the end, they will invent some expiration date or something.
 
LinkPain said:
For pirates it's not a problem to find anything, but for paying customers it will be.
Which is funny however you look at it, even if companies get much bigger funds than pirates, these guys do a much better work and at the faster pace.
Now, I'm not implying that anything is better, just the difference which is noticeable for us all.
Also there is a problem with license, like Fallout1 or 2 now so imagine if in that time when they published them it was like today, most data stored online. Company goes out of work, the only thing they could do is place another company sticker but never get the game to run normally as it should. In the end, they will invent some expiration date or something.
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I disagree about the pirates comment. The companies are doing a lot more work than the pirates. A crack might be as little as a handful of lines of code. Sometimes just simply breaking part of the security without having to write your own code is enough on shoddier anti piracy stuff.

If you go by the amount of work per person per day then pirates are actually doing probably less work cracking the games than the coders are doing trying to prevent the cracks. Which is part of the reason that a small number of crack groups are able to keep up with the plethora of games that are released.

This doesn't mean that they don't do good work, heck wasn't there a game not long ago that included a pirate cracked .exe in an official patch that was trying to fix some errors with the game? I can't remember what game it was but there was a bunch of hubub about it when the hackers found out that their hack was being distributed by the actual company in the guise of a "patch"
 
you're probably right. But I think he meant it more in relation with Steam going down (if that ever happens). So you can bet that many "pirates" or just skilled coders/programmers might come up with a solution to simulate steam on your machine so you might still able to play those games that you have on your computer but require steam to play.
 
well curating, incorporating and supporting the proper talent is just as important as starting your own original IP's - bottom line is the end result is less of a compromise then other current developers outputs save for a few...

... would these IP's and concepts be as successful without Valve .. i'm not so sure that they would all be so lucky.

now that was the positive bit...

Steam is a two edged sword and while it has banked a lot of trust .. its still governed by a company responsible to profits and share holders... who knows what a future EULA brings :)

and DotA2 feels like a dirty move since one could hardly say the concept needed more attention with 3 succesful games (War3dota, Lol, HoN) and blizzard making a more justified move for the uh genre ?
 
I didn't know this until not long ago, but Valve is actually Privately owned. It is not a public company. Thus; no shareholders.

The DoTA2 thing is kinda douchey, but to be fair. The guy that they hired to helm the project is kind of a douche lol. I've read almost NOTHING but bad things about IceFrog, and while people I know at Valve haven't spoken against him, they certainly haven't seemed particularly warm about him.
 
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