The Steam Deck is an incredible device. And Alyx is one of the truly great games made for VR (which they pioneered generally). It might not be much but I'm not writing off Valve entirely.
Now if they do Half Life 3 - that’ll be a mainstream blockbuster, but they won’t, as they’re not the company that can pull that off anymore.
I'd happily place a bet today on there being a family of Steam Deck devices forming a material part of the PC games industry in 5 years or earlier. Much of the implementation such as the store experience is already leagues ahead of the garbage Nintendo get away with on the Switch.
When they inevitably release a second one with an OLED display and more performance and battery life, its going to be massively compelling. Sure we can all point to failures like the Steam Boxes, but from those failures came Proton which has been directly responsible for the Deck concept working so successfully.
On the other hand, I know that a bunch of people are unhappy that the Steam Controller has been discontinued. Secondhand prices are through the roof.
> https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/07/26/windows-8-i...
Obviously none of that came to pass, we are two more Windows releases on and much has changed since. It is serendipitous the tech built is so great for delivering a portable experience - I think Valve's actions and words demonstrate it to be far more committed to the Deck than prior efforts, I don't see this as hedging bets. And why wouldn't they? At this stage they appear to have a hit product on their hands.
In 2022, Microsoft and Valve have strategic partnerships too, which certainly wasn't the case in 2012:
> https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18645250/microsoft-xbox-g...
> https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/26/22952086/valve-microsoft-...
> https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/25/22550103/microsoft-new-wi...
I'm not sure what the impetus was for the Steam Deck. I could see it as a hedge against anticipated future, dwindling laptop sales. I could also see it as an attempt to expand into the same space that the Switch occupies. After all, with the exodus of Sony from portable gaming, Nintendo's only competition is cell phones.
AMD finally delivered a chip that can make the dream of desktop-ish performance in a handheld work. That simply wasn’t all that possible until very recently.
I've never used the original Steam Controller and I still think the dual analog stick setup is better for some games but having the trackpads is good for many others.
The 5200 joystick didn't self-center, though. The only centering force was from the rubber boot. This ended up being advantageous in a game like missile command, but is widely seen as the Achilles heel of the controller.
Really? I never use mine - guess I'll have to look at selling it!
First, Half-Life Alyx, from the technical standpoint, is a more complex project than a regular AAA fps due to the sheer amount of innovation that was required to make it work. They also developed their own VR set alongside it.
Second, measuring a company's capabilities by how popular their products are is not fair, imo. Activision, Ubisoft and the like have been churning out "blockbusters" for years at this point, essentially packaging the same game under a new title. Are they really more capable than Valve, which has released an innovative product in a completely new field?
Third, the reason Valve does not release HL3 (and this is me speculating) is not because they are unable to "pull it off" - technically, they are, they just did it with Alyx. The real issue is that the amount of hype generated behind the title is so immense almost anything they make would be underwhelming. Their decision to venture into VR complicated matters even further. VR, still being niche, would essentially make the game inaccessible to most of the fans. With valve having developed their own set, it would have looked like an intentional rip-off.
No company could ever pull off Half Life 3. This game is hyped to death before it's even announced and everyone would come in with sky-high expectations. To make matters worse, everyone would expect that game to be something different and it would be impossible to make even just half of the players happy. There's no point in creating a Half Life 3, it's a guaranteed disappointment.
they may not really be in the AAA game business as much but I'm not sure that's a bad thing
I agree with you on VR though, that's very nice atm.
For example if you want to play Batman Arkham Asylum, you need to go into desktop mode, download a different Proton version then go back to the console mode, switch the used Proton version and then you can play. There's a whole bunch of other games where you have to tweak settings, maybe use the CLI to tweak things. And then add on top of that of managing settings to get optimal FPS and battery life.
That's a lot to throw at kids or non-technical people. It's quite a different experience than a Switch where you just download it and it works at optimal for the device resolution/fps.
[0] Earthbound inspired platformers about how it’s okay to feel sad sometimes
They have less to fear about "professional executives" worming their way in because Valve is not a publicly traded company, unlike the other examples you mentioned. It's private, Gabe Newell calls the shots at the end of the day. There's no real avenue for people to buy their way onto a board of directors and exert influence on the company from on high, or oust its historic leadership. Valve's pretty well protected from that. But it can't protect itself from sloth induced by a lack of competition.
Does it just become a bozo filled public-company at that point, chasing quarterly numbers? I think it's the biggest risk to Valve, speaking as a customer who loves their products/services today.
I would not at all be surprised to see it end in a Microsoft acquisition or joint venture of some kind, given their current appetites.
This is absolutely what will happen.
Ah, this is what Valve is working on...
Who knows, this could be how the Machine God is made.
Passing to “people you really trust” is not an ideal foundation for an entity which has the potential to exist for many decades.
Being private, we also don't really know how much of Valve Gabe actually owns - there may be other sizeable stakeholders with a say too.
But it's difficult to set up a business when your baseline is "Google Ads".
I thought they have it with Cloud. I'm still puzzled how it went wrong.
People at companies like this are only provoked to action by what affects company revenue, whether increasing it or preventing loss. And hardly anything can be demonstrated to have direct effect on revenue. (Certainly, unhappy users don't, as Microsoft was first to discover.)
... you do realize that goes for 99% of people posting here? In my biased experience in consulting for ~4 years, the distribution is more like 80/10/10 for AWS/GCP/Azure.
gcp has a lot of business continuity guarantees.
still, I don't recommend them. because google acts like a dangerous savant at this point.
If you look at stadia, they built the cool streaming platform, but failed to actually sell it.
$15 x 6 million players is good money but it's peanuts to something like Google. I wouldn't be surprised if Google spent that much just on Stadia itself in some years.
This fact reminds me of the resource curse.
I've long struggled to find a way of expressing this sentiment in a few words, but this approaches perfect. Thank you!
These companies become victims of their own successes and eventually become hollow money machines that are preyed upon by professional executives. The culture dies and all the good people leave except a small cadre of highly paid early employees who have worked on core services for decades.
Google's problems are so pervasive and famous because they don't care. Why fix hiring? That requires effort and time for a questionable payoff. Why fix promotions? Same problem. Why fix customer service? That's just a cost. Why enforce stable APIs that are well documented for cloud services? Not my problem. At the end of the day, a small core of people will keep ads going and everyone else will decorate their resumes for their next jobs.