That's kind of a sink or swim thing. People have to take it seriously, right? It's an engineering problem in the sense of, you have to make decisions, measure outcomes, and make changes as a result of it. I would have trouble working any other way now, I think most people at Valve would have trouble. The worst are people from the feature film industry, where they've been taught that any time they show initiative, that somebody's going to leap out and smite them for doing that.
It usually takes about six to nine months for people to really sort of internalize the working model of the company. Some of the most unique advances in Valve's single-player games were discovered by the outside-the-box interpretation of simple heuristics — how players were immersed in Half-Life 1 because bullets left a permanent mark on the environment, or how Half-Life 2 's characters were considered to be more relatable, simply because they were able to make eye contact with the player.
That kind of innovation, Newell said, becomes much more difficult when additional players are added to the mix. An example would be in Counter-Strike , we put the riot shield in, and our player number go up. We take the riot shield out, and our player numbers go How do you explain that? They kind of look more like operating systems, or a sport. In terms of how they behave, they behave a lot more, and value is created a lot more like a spectator sport than a feature film.
Measuring success through metrics becomes tricky when dealing with a body of interconnected players, Newell explained. However, it also opened up opportunities for Valve to incorporate newfound productivity into their corporate architecture: It allowed them to democratize content creation among Steam users, and it allowed them to create robust economic systems within Steam itself.
The only company we've ever met that kind of kicks our ass is our customers. We'll go up against Bungie, or Blizzard, or anybody but we won't try to compete with our own user base, because we already know we're going to lose. Those "surprising things" are all microcosms of phenomena usually found on a macroeconomic scale. User-made currencies appeared, inflated and collapsed.
The service was no stranger to economic crises, but it also hosted economic boon, as well; so much so, that Paypal began to question their motives. Speaking to IGN in an interview about his company's new console , the Valve co-founder was asked his thoughts about effectively creating a handheld that other platform holders — even those without handhelds like Microsoft — could feasibly make use of freely.
Rather than being coy, Newell made clear that this was part of the Deck's philosophy:. So if you want to install the Epic Games Store on here, if you want to, run an Oculus Quest on it, those things are, those are all great. Those are features, right?
That's what I want to hear as a gamer. Newell continued by comparing that to the closed platforms found on Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation: "I don't want to hear that somebody's got some Trojan Horse that's going to try to lock me down. I want to hear whatever I want to do.
If there's hardware, I want to attach to it. If there's software, I want to install. I can just go and do it. Also, gaze tracking. We think gaze tracking is going to turn out to be super important. The hardware side of Valve is new, but you've obviously got a huge platform with Steam. What's the future of Steam like? Will it change as you begin to release Steam-based hardware? We tend to think of Steam as tools for content developers and tools for producers.
We think that the store should actually be more like user generated content. So, anybody should be able to create a store, and it should be about extra entertainment value. Our view has always been that we should build tools for customers and tools for partners.
An editorial filter is fine, but there should be a bunch of editorial filters. The backend services should be network APIs that anybody can use. On the consumer side, anybody should be able to put up a store that hooks into those services. Our view is that, in the same way users are critical in a multiplayer experience, like the fellow next to you is critical to your enjoyment, we should figure out how we can help users find people that are going to make their game experiences better.
Some people will create team stores, some people will create Sony stores, some people will create stores with only games that they think meet their quality bar. Somebody is going to create a store that says "these are the worst games on Steam.
That's different than Apple on the mobile side, and Microsoft. And you've come out against Windows 8. Windows 8 was like this giant sadness.
It just hurts everybody in the PC business. When I started using it I was like "oh my god What about Xbox and Apple TV? How are you going to compete on the multimedia side?
I spent a bunch of time when [ OnLive ] first started coming out, saying at the end of the day that trying to do that over [the internet] is the wrong idea. What do you think about Shield? Valve may struggle to keep up with demand, after all we are in the middle of a chip supply crisis right now, and there are a lot of AMD APUs that Microsoft and Sony want TSMC to make for their own consoles, but I'd wager there's going to be a huge backlog on that pre-order queue.
Asus has already gone all-in on gaming phones, so this doesn't feel like much of a step for it to take. But the likelihood is that both of those companies will see the limitations of the Steam Deck and want more. We've already seen Dell and Alienware has its own ideas about handheld gaming with the UFO prototype , so I can also see that given a lick of paint, SteamOS installed onto it, and it shoved out the door, again for a premium price.
Whether any other PC manufacturer is willing to go for the same sort of "painful" pricing Valve was willing to stick to the Deck is up for debate.
I'd suggest it's unlikely, and it also feels like that could quickly dull the enthusiasm for the handheld PC ecosystem.
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