dwgill

@TopFloor said:

@ThePickle said:

The fee makes sense. They got to keep the riff-raff out somehow.

X( That's exactly what I don't want. I thought the point of Greenlight was for the community to decide what were the good games, not to have a entry fee determine it for us.

If a developer lets such a fee stop him then he is deciding the matter more than anyone else. There do not exist any particularly good games that did not have some sort of substantial financial or temporal investment. Given the amount of investment most every indie developer will have already given to insure his game is good, what is $100 to him?

@mlarrabee said:

@HappyCheeze said:

Heres a suggestion to Valve. If the indie game puts down 100 bucks, but doesn't make it into the system, valve refunds them. If the indie game company makes it into the system and sell enough to make 100 dollars, valve gives them 200 as a bonus and a "Thank you" message for choosing steam.

Valve doesn't need indie developers, the developers need Steam.

I agree with the overall point of your message but it's at least worth noting here that Valve does care about indie developers to some extent, else they wouldn't have made Greenlight in the first place. Barring some exceptions (the officially licensed Dr. Who game springs to mind) Greenlight very much does seem made to specifically cater to indie developers and their would-be fans.

There seems to be some sort of weird governmental policies over in Australia which force at least some companies' hands in the matter. As I recall GOG.com—which proudly boasts of maintaining a consistent price on all their games worldwide—still nonetheless found itself having to sell The Witcher 2 at an inflated price for Australian customers. I believe they opted to split the difference for such customers with store credit (i.e. upon purchase Australian customers received a GOG.com gift card equivalent to how much more they payed compared to international customers), but the fact that it was both their game and their store (GOG.com is owned by CD Projekt) leads me to think there's more elements involved in the issue than taxes and straightforward exploitation on the part of the publishers.

I distinctly recall I was given Counter Strike: Source for Christmas one year, and that is what got me to install Steam. My first purchase through the service was TF2 a year or so later after I participated in the free weekend held after the goldrush update.

I've always appreciated this following site. There's a lot of resources out there for learning programming, and this one does the best job of aggregating them all I've yet seen.

http://noexcuselist.com/

@Oldirtybearon said:

Half-Life 3 (or Episode 3) doesn't exist. Valve isn't going to make it, have never made it, and probably will never make it. Seriously, it's been five years since Episode 2. If Valve were serious about that series, they'd have finished it by now. Or at the very least, told everyone what the hell is holding up development.

My guess is that they quietly cancelled it sometime in 2008, and have been hoping the world will forget Half-Life ever happened.

I don't think Valve works that way. The reason Half-Life 3 hasn't happened is likely because there's simply not enough interest in Valve to actually make it. If you're familiar with their employee handbook then it becomes clear that things get made at Valve because the people there are significantly motivated to make them. Half-Life 3 could still easily happen, but it'll take someone over there getting particularly inspired to do it first.

@Nightriff:

All I can say concerning Half-Life 2—which I played for the first time around 3 years ago, as far as I can remember—is that when I sat down and started playing it, I was immensely engrossed with the game to a degree I don't think any other work has ever managed to pull of.

I played that game from start to finish in one sitting, and only after I finished it did I realize the game had captivated me for over 11 hours. No other game before or since has so thoroughly obliterated my perception of the passage of time and my awareness of the outside world.

It is an experience well worth pursuing.

I am supremely confident that if Valve cannot make a Half-Life 3 as mind-blowing as first two were at their release, then they will simply never release the game. As I recall, they said with Portal 2 that they wanted "surprise" players again, and I think they largely succeeded with that. Likewise, unless they feel the game is going to live up to expectations, they won't put it out.

Since Valve funds all of their own development now, it's not like they're going to be forced to put the game out sooner or later. They'll take all the time they need to make it as amazing as everyone wants it to be, and if it turns out that's impossible then the game is never coming out.

If they can't make it live up to the hype, then they won't try.

When it comes to business and commercial adventures I always find myself having a profound respect for the people handling the administrative and managerial side of things. An individual McDonalds in itself is not a particularly impressive thing to behold, but when I consider just how many variables there likely are that have to be accounted for, and how many different resources probably need to be secured at the executive level in order for my local franchise to be able to sell me a burger at the drop of a hat, I'm awestruck.

So that's what impresses me most concerning independent ventures: the crazy thing to me is not that they are trying to develop a game without any sort of official financial support from a publisher, but rather that they are now themselves responsible for all of the elements those executives & suits once handled for them. So I'm not surprised fiascoes like this should happen. I sincerely doubt I would have handled the situation any better were I in charge, considering my profound lack of anything resembling business savvy. If anything, I'm surprised there aren't more such examples of company mismanagement in the indie scene.

People keep looking to iOS as a model for the emerging Windows 8 ecosystem, and while I can see the reasoning behind that (the iPhone app store being far and away the most successful walled garden as of yet) I think the better comparison is with the Mac App Store. No mac user is obligated to participate in that ecosystem just by using a mac, but nonetheless it's proven so successful an ecosystem that I hear of people freely buying the same application a second time or more just to insure that they may access that software through that environment. At no point is a developer "forced" to put their software on the mac app store, but it's fast becoming financial suicide for him not to do so regardless. Yet at the same time, I see developers getting increasingly frustrated at the restrictions that environment places upon them—your app's never going to be featured or significantly promoted if it's too expensive for apple's tastes, your app has to be sandboxed, and so on and so forth. There's better literature on that subject freely available elsewhere online that discusses the matter more thoroughly.

This is the pattern I see the Windows Store fitting into more appropriately. At best, it remains like the Mac App Store, and at worse it only moves even more towards a walled garden approach. It's true that with Windows 8 itself Microsoft is allowing people to still "live" on the desktop, but I sincerely doubt that is the final step of their ambitions concerning this new ecosystem. In fact, I'd rather think it only the first.

The desktop continues to persist on Windows 8 because Microsoft is able to recognize that would be a catastrophe and would stop anyone from actually embracing the system. No one is going to embrace an entirely new ecosystem overnight, so Microsoft has already accepted that: they're not forcing anyone to fully embrace (not)Metro right out of the gate. But one has to be utterly delusional to not think their ultimate ambition is for Metro to eventually supplant the desktop. The simple fact of the matter is that they have no financial incentive (and that is the only incentive a company like Microsoft deals with) to deliberately preserve the desktop if there is any possible chance they can replace it with their own environment where they make the rules and get a cut of every transaction. It doesn't need to happen immediately—Microsoft is a patient company. It only needs happen eventually. Maybe not 8 or 9, but possibly 10 or 11 or even beyond that.

Gabe is just being a shrewd businessman and company owner in realizing that Windows is only going to grow more hostile to Valve and Steam as time goes on, and before that ship sinks, he better have another one to jump to. Even if he has to build it himself.

i.e.

@august said:

Bring me SteamOS.