Featured Discussion: Valve and Changing the World

Featured Discussion: Valve and Changing the World

I have said many times that I am a PC gamer but really, I should be saying I am now a Valve gamer, and the definitive versions of their games happen to be on the PC; everything else is just overlap. One might even go so far to say that I’m a fanboy, but an absolutely necessary part of being a Valve devotee is complaining very loudly when they make any sort of misstep, they listen to and even encourage such behavior, such feedback from the community strongly influences updates for their games. Valve also freely gives away their SDK (to anyone that buys one of their Source based games) and portions of their games’ source code so that if someone has a great idea for a mod, they can make it; if Valve particularly likes your mod (Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, Garry’s Mod) they will hire you and make your mod into a retail game. This does have actual bearing on consoles as Valve has fully supported the Xbox 360 with their last two games, Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 step for step with the PC version so they seem to be a genuine console developer now. The reason I am talking about Valve so much is not just because I adore their games and how they support them post-release (I do) but because they are one of the few (only, as far as I can tell) developers that are expanding their games and services onto more platforms, and those platforms are equal in their eyes, you don’t own TF2 for PC, you own TF2. What brought this thought was this piece of news:
[Link], shocking, no?



[This whole discussion starter will be about Valve and what they’re doing, other developers
like Epic and Blizzard are sort of heading in this direction but to go into detail about all of them
would be tiresome and boring, so I’ll stick with Valve.]
Now, what makes Valve so special in this regard? The difference is a matter of philosophy. A
direct counter example to Valve would be Nintendo, they are wildly successful but go about making
their games in a different manner, they, the company itself, and no one else, has complete control
over their products. Such a complete handle on how the game is being made is why many of their
games are considered masterpieces of game design; you would never see something like Super
Mario Bros. 3 or Super Metroid out of Valve they don’t make game with such tight authorship Valve
has come to realize that they can’t really compete with someone like Nintendo at Nintendo’s game.
Compare the two developer’s seminal titles, Super Mario Bros. and Hλlf- Life (to be extra proper),
one more or less perfected how to jump and go right in a video game while the other was a sort of
nebulous experiment in what could be done with a totally uninterrupted first person viewpoint and
atmosphere; both games were very well made and influential, but for different reasons. The
difference in background of the two companies should be noted, Nintendo grew out of a toy
company while Valve was born out of bored former Microsoft developers. It is also important to
notice how the companies treat their games after release, once a Nintendo game hits the shelf,
unless there is a fatal error in the game code, the game is done with, while Valve games are never
really done being developed, they are continually updated. Both ways of making games are valid but
there is so far Nintendo’s way can go, they will still make great games that will expound on what a
game can be but I think that they will still be isolated games for a specific piece of hardware or
system. The way Valve is developing their games, as total entertainment experiences, I think has
more potential in the future.

Team Fortress 2 is the game furthest along in this development of their games as
experiences, it has the Meet the Team videos, comics, and regular free content updates, it isn’t just
a game anymore, the community has embraced it so much that they more or less run the game
now, a good portion of the now official maps were made by the community, many of the ideas for
items came from the community as well. This just goes to show that multilayer games live and die
by the communities built around them. The reason why the Xbox 360 version is nowhere near as
developed as the PC version (Valve didn’t handle the PS3 one) is the limits of the hardware and the
form they released the game in. Per Microsoft’s rules, a company can only do so much for freely for
their games before they have to start charging for it, and Valve does not want to do that,
compounded with the fact that the PC version is well over the memory limit for 360 games. It is the
system and infrastructure that is holding them back in that case and they have to abide by those
rules for the game to be on the console. You can see the planning that went into Left 4 Dead 1 and
2 to make them more compatible with the 360, TF2 was not like that from the very beginning; it is
and always has been a PC game at heart.

The Mac just seems like a natural extension to that idea, of selling the consumers the game
once and then continually supporting them across all platforms (all updates for Left 4 Dead 1 and 2
have hit simultaneously on PC and 360) equally. It is probably a similar amount of effort to port a
game from PC to Mac as it is to the 360, the games even have an OpenGL mode already in them. In
fact, Valve seems to be turning away from Microsoft, the UI beta for Steam that they’re running
(what it will look like on Mac OS) now runs on Webkit (Google Chrome and Safari); the old one was
based on Internet Explorer. It also seems like Valve is just doing what Microsoft wants to do but
better, and with less money spent. The Games for Windows Live service has promised essentially
what Steam is doing, but has not delivered and includes many niggling issues that Steam does not.
It makes sense then that Steam is far and away the most popular avenue for digital distribution of
PC games and perhaps in the near future, Mac games. Valve only seems to have bigger and bigger
plans for their service; they may take it to some very exciting places.

The previous 1000 words of text serve as background for the real issue up for discussion
here, the idea that the developers and manufacturers of the video game industry will tend towards a
more interconnected idea of gaming, that your save data will be stored in a remote sever and you
can access it and all of you preferences (Steam cloud) from any device that can play the game. All of
this is hypothetical, really only Valve is taking any serious strides towards this idea, everyone else is
making baby steps, and a whole industry does not Valve make. It remains to be seen if at all
something like this will occur. I could be wrong. I hope I’m not, but I could be, such a prospect is
very exciting regardless. I just hope that progress doesn’t get mired in misguided corporate policy.
Here’s another article about this topic: [Link]. The fake Apple ads Valve sent out are great too.
So to sum it up, what do you think about games being interconnected across all platforms?

-Timothy Roy Sundberg