How did Gabe Newell offend you?

The dude has been a bastion of how to run a company that delights its end-users and doing their best to run a company ethically. A staunch group of people that believe in right-to-repair as well as believing in modding and community growth of games.

Yes there’s issues on the publisher/developmer side of things, however Valve constantly works with studios to help mitigate these pain points and on-board to their platform.

I think it becomes a mixture of too early and delaying.

Some games clearly need another year to finish but they delay it for half a year and wont allow more for themselves

Half life 3 had never been announced to be in development. It’s not delayed, late, on-time, or anything else for us except a hope it might eventually come out.

Half-life alyx was as good as any other half life content they’ve produced

I’m looking forward to the ward between factions posting the two quotes in comments sections every time a game gets delayed for the next several decades

Eh, gaming journalism just wants clicks to get ad-revenue. They would write an article about anything. Gabe waking up in the morning is news worthy to them.

Cyberpunk and NMS did exceptionally decent first day numbers…and then they didn’t do exceptionally decent numbers due to the well-deserved backlash. They would have sold even more copies over the last 5 years if they didn’t scare half of the gaming industry away initially. You have to work really damn hard to save your game from death. Case in point: Bethesda isn’t working to save Redfall and it shows.

There’s also a recent trend of “forever games”, where it’s clear that the goal is to keep you playing it perpetually. It has both upsides and downsides. These games tend to change intensely over the years. Minecraft is such an example.

I don’t have a problem when small studios do it for games like Terraria and No Man’s Sky. It keeps them solvent without having to attach themselves to a big publisher.

I do have a problem when a giant, established company does it, as is the case for Cyberpunk 2077.

Whenever I hear this quote I also think of the developers/publishers. They need to have a good reputation so people buy their games.

I think that’s why EA, Blizzard, Ubisoft, Activision, etc sales have gone down. I will not say that gamers react fairly when it comes to unfinished game releases, but it takes one bad game to ruin a developer. Especially when you consider how small the margins are or if they are publicly traded. Even developers with good games have recently been going out of business because it’s not sustainable.

I also think of their legacies. Especially in a post-steam world, a game with a good legacy will continue to sell for much longer. I don’t think a game like Watch Dogs ever got rid of the stink surrounding it, even though it isn’t a bad game to go back to nowadays.

Still better than if they released the same game earlier. Unless of course they kept adding features or content.

Didn’t colonial marine turn out to actually have really good AI that totally changed the game feel that had been broken by a single misplaced semi-colon or something?

Nah star citizen was a scam first, game second. If it ever produces a game it will have been purely incidental to continuing to run the scam and milk those whales

Yes, landing is difficult.

There is delaying to release a higher quality product and delaying while having features creep… Not the same thing.

I kind of believe Chris Roberts himself is just an overambitious perfectionist. He pulled the same kind of bullshit with Freelancer, which only released because Microsoft put its foot down.

I can also believe that a lot of the top people around him are grifters feeding his ambition and perfectionism to keep the gravy train running.

Either way, they got my Kickstarter money so the only entertainment I’ll ever get from that game is opining about it like I know anything.

• The alternative to current model of game launch + DLCs/features added over the year is that the game is not launched at all until ready and full featured.

I haven’t seen significant numbers of people complaining that their drip feed of content isn’t coming fast enough. I’ve seen people complaining about spending a non-trivial amount of money on a visibly broken game that clearly had plenty of developer resources for microtransactions and loot boxes.

Gamer audience is privileged, consumerist and impatient. And most of the audience is either autistic or neurodivergent with impulsive and/or compulsive disorders, and have unstable hyperfocus and obsession issues.

Being a game developer had its moments but was still easily the worst job I’ve ever had, predominantly due to the community.

That said, I still wouldn’t go diagnosing millions of people with some bullshit I just made up.

And most of the audience is either autistic or neurodivergent with impulsive and/or compulsive disorders, and have unstable hyperfocus and obsession issues.

Really? Most of the audience?

Depends on the circumstances. Small self funded team, part time? Can probably delay indefinitely.

Yes. If I can wait for the Dune movie in February, video game nerds can also wait.

It’s up to the companies to coast and ration their resources accordingly.

Generally they would fare better than AAA studios who are beholden to their publisher to release no matter what.

Valve was a completely new company then. They weren’t going indie, but Sierra didn’t pay them for the remake of Half-Life. In the documentary they talk about financing it by creating Half-Life: Day One.

Chet Falizek, a dev who led L4D and a couple other games at valve talks about this a lot on TikTok, now that he’s running an indie studio. He’s a cool guy, would fit in on .ml or something for sure.

Usually publishers have multiple products in development simultaneously with varying degrees of investment, the more money invested into a studio to develop a game the more urgent they want it finished.

Implying they’re not passing on whatever that “costs” them to the studio…

“Suck is forever”

-GabeN

Why is the consumer just expected to roll over and take it

They’re expected to do it because that’s exactly what they do, every time.

CP2077 had a bunch of issues on release as well. Much better now. I feel like they(developers) need to bring in different testers near release. If you have the same testers whom have been testing builds for years it can probably be hard to see the issues with the same clarity.

Also stop having release dates. Just use vague terms like 2nd half 2024. When you get the release build, anounce a date, like a month later, give your devs a couple weeks off as there will be missed bugs after release. Hard release dates aren’t helping these situations.

Because people will pre-order games to the point that it’s made a healthy profit even before it’s even released. Consumers vote with their wallet and for some reason gamers just constantly choose to show publishers that shoddy, half-assed products are good enough for them.

No Man’s Sky is a great redemption arc, but it would have been better if the game hadn’t sucked at launch

Gabe was talking about the making of Half Life, back when you shipped your disc and that was that. And the game was, apparently, crapola.

Same kind of deal with the original Deus Ex. It was a spaghetti of poorly interacting systems until the devs were able to make it all click together.

It’s because that’s how capitalism works. If you keep buying stuff from the same source without due diligence, you can’t be surprised when you get stuck with another sucky game.

The only incentive to spend resources on fixing a game is to preserve reputation for future games.