The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Average Manatee]

You can expect the industry to start catering to the Chinese fleshdrones in the future. It's a huge new market full of very good (read: clueless) consumers.

Already a thing in movies. I watched the latest Kong movie and it had a character that was Chinese. She contributed absolutely nothing to the movie, except of course being Chinese.

Doesn't China refuse to allow western movies that don't have at least one Chinese actor or actress in them?

 

[Alienman]

Sounds weird, but then again... China.

 

[Average Manatee]

Can't remember where I heard it, but it sounded reasonable to me. It's similar to other things they do, like preventing western companies from operating in China unless a certain percent is owned by Chinese nationals (usually leading to a subsidiary or cooperation relationship). But Google isn't turning up any hard evidence (not that I know of good specific search terms), so it might be the usual informal "we'd really prefer if you did this and it would help speed your movie's approval wink wink" thing rather than anything in law.

 

[J_C]

I'm not sure all the new asset flippers he mentions came through Direct. Maybe they are part of the remaining 3,400 titles Valve greenlit recently. At least one of them is.

This one also:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=923520286&searchtext=clickey

 

[LESS T_T]

http://www.valvetime.net/threads/steam-news-from-indigo-2017.257832/

Valve's Alden Kroll was at Indigo 2017 to talk about Steam and the changes they're working on. The talk covered the business side of Steam as well as some specific features available for game makers. The company wanted to meet developers face to face, answer questions, and hear feedback and suggestions as well.

Upcoming client & website update:

Some other highlights:

Spoiler

 

[vonAchdorf]

With all the curator changes, Infinitron 's Kodex Kurator job will grow in power and influence. And he'll receive boatloads of free games he cannot give away (no keys).

It will be interesting to see how they achieve a "faster" UI experience with all the rich media stuff (streams, videos, screenshots) they want to include into the games' launch pages.

 

[Fedora Master]

It took Valve how many years to implement download speed throttling and downloading while playing? Can't wait to find out how they bungled the update.

 

[gaussgunner]

Doubling down on social network crap, ratings, and discovery algorithms. Same as the past 10 years.

Steam key beggars are hereby advised to create Curator accounts at this time.

"Better support for niches and subgenres" = crowdsourcing steam key beggars and review shills.

"Localization is important". The pie chart is a lie.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

With all the curator changes, Infinitron 's Kodex Kurator job will grow in power and influence. And he'll receive boatloads of free games he cannot give away (no keys).

Best solution for the Codex then would be to find a seperate person from the normall staff to handle the Steam Curator page, and do nothing else.

I don't volunteer for this job, but I'm sure the staff can find someone's who's both trusted and willing to review the games.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.pcgamer.com/what-happened-to-steam-machines/

What happened to Steam Machines?
Three PC builders on why they're not gambling on SteamOS.

On September 23rd, 2013, Valve announced SteamOS: A Linux-based operating system just for PC gaming. Two days later, it hit us with another surprise: Steam Machines, a line of pre-built PCs from multiple manufacturers that would sit under our TVs like consoles and run this new OS. Forget PlayStations and Xboxes and especially Windows 8, which Valve boss Gabe Newell called “a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space.” Valve was going to invade the living room with an open-source island that Microsoft couldn’t control.

The announcement was received well, but just under four years later, Steam Machines have hardly taken off. Alienware still has one starting at $450, Syber is selling them with GTX 1060s, and 3XS offers custom SteamOS builds. But Materiel.net’s Steam Machine is no longer for sale. The Maingear Drift now defaults to Windows, with SteamOS as a secondary option. The Zotac NEN is out of stock on Newegg, with a few available on Amazon for nearly a grand a piece. The Digital Storm Eclipse is listed as 'coming soon' on Steam, but has already come and gone.

“Nobody was buying it with SteamOS,” Digital Storm marketing manager Rajeev Kuruppu tells me over the phone. The manufacturer had already been building the Eclipse—which is still available with Windows—when Valve pitched SteamOS, and added a Steam Machine build mid-project. That version has since been axed, and Digital Storm no longer has an active relationship with Valve.

“I think over time as the demand from customers wasn’t there we basically had no reason to speak with Valve,” says Kuruppu. Digital Storm is still open to working with Valve, so long as its customers want what Valve is putting out. Right now, they don’t.

The timeline
SteamOS isn’t dead. Its most recent update came just last month, and a few newer games such as XCOM 2, Stardew Valley, and Hollow Knight support it. But the Steam Machine revolution never came to pass. After speaking to three PC builders and collecting news stories from the past four years, I’ve put together a brief timeline to illuminate what happened to the project that was going to put Steam at the center of PC gaming.

September 2013: SteamOS, Steam Machines, and the Steam Controller are announced.
December 2013: SteamOS 1.0 ‘alchemist’ releases. It’s buggy and missing features, essentially offering a hard-to-install Steam Big Picture Mode over a generic Debian desktop, with some third-party drivers. It also doesn’t support AMD graphics cards.
January 2014: An update to SteamOS alchemist adds AMD graphics support.
May 2014: The Steam Controller is delayed to 2015.
June 2014: The Alienware Steam Machine is ready to go, but SteamOS and the controller still aren’t. Dell decides to ship it as the Alienware Alpha with Windows.
March 2015: Valve announces the HTC Vive and Steam Link.
June 2015: A preview of SteamOS ‘brewmaster’ is released.
July 2015: Windows 10 releases.
November 2015: The first Steam Machines from Alienware, Zotac, and Cyberpower are shipped. Ars Technica reports that games suffer a framerate loss on SteamOS vs Windows 10. Tom’s Guide writes: “Steam Machines were an interesting idea... three years ago.”
June 2016: Fewer than 500,000 Steam Machines have been sold.

The first fumble is clear: SteamOS wasn’t nearly ready when it was announced, and installing early preview builds inspired little confidence. Then, after lukewarm reception of the first Steam Controller—billed as a major part of the ‘Steam Universe’ that would make mouse and keyboard-optimized games easy to play from the couch—Valve pushed the release to 2015. Alienware went ahead with a Windows 10 build of what would later be its Steam Machine, and by the time SteamOS shipped in late 2015, the hype had subsided. More than one partner abandoned the project before ever releasing a Steam Machine.

“We didn’t want to offer customers an experience of only the SteamOS and therefore only a small percentage of games that they can play,” Origin CEO Kevin Wasielewski tells me in an email. The company had previously announced a system that dual-booted Windows 10 and SteamOS. “I don’t recall when it happened, but at some point we decided to offer a living room PC with Windows only. SteamOS didn’t have the hardware support to be a fully customizable high end PC. SteamOS didn’t have a performance increase on any or many games. SteamOS didn’t have a growing library of games.”

It also didn’t help that tension around Windows 8 was somewhat alleviated by free upgrades to Windows 10, despite criticism of the Universal Windows Platform and the state of the Windows Store. In November of 2016, Alienware co-founder Frank Azer told PC Gamer: “We still offer SteamOS and the Steam Machine platform with the new version of the Alpha—the new Steam Machine R2—and we still sell hundreds of units, thousands of units every month. But it’s not a major initiative for us like it was two years ago because it’s not necessary right now. We’re in a good place with Windows.”

Valve’s own Steam Link may have also worked against the Steam Machines initiative, according to PC builder iBuyPower.

“While everyone’s ramping up in the middle [of the development of Steam Machines], Valve announces that they’re going to have their Steam Link, which is essentially what we’re building but now at this very low cost, very small unit that just connects to your PC,” says iBuyPower marketing manager Michael Hoang. “And then you can just play your games through your television instead of buying a whole new unit, which is what they originally pitched for SteamOS and for all the OEMs. So, in a way, it was almost kind of like Valve pitched us this new great idea, that ‘Hey, you guys can do all this,’ but then at the same time they were working on their own technology to say, ‘Hey, maybe buying a whole separate machine wasn’t a good idea, let’s just buy a small little stream unit that you can stream directly from your PC to your TV and buy our controller.’”

(Disclosure: PC Gamer hardware editor Tuan Nguyen previously worked at iBuyPower.)

Losing touch
Hoang’s timeline of events, while the dates are fuzzy, charts a burst of excitement followed by slow development, lack of communication from Valve, and an overall failure that iBuyPower doesn’t intend to repeat.

“We even sent Gabe [Newell] a Revolt 1, just out of the blue,” says Hoang about the beginning of the project. “We sent him a system, did custom packaging and everything, and he was really happy and very impressed with what we were doing. And it looked like we were kind of the forerunners for the Steam Machine, and we were, because we launched it first, and they also helped announce it with us. So we were very excited. We got that press, we got that recognition from Valve, and their promise that they were going to continue making SteamOS, making sure that all the games were getting ported over to Linux. So everyone had high hopes, the whole community had high hopes.”

But Valve grew quieter throughout the project, according to Hoang, though he was unable to find email records from the time. “We were heavily reliant on [Valve’s] updates to make sure the SBX was successful,” he said. “But, yeah, they would say, ‘OK, we’re still working on the updates,’ and that’s it. That’s the end of the email. Or [they would] just be unresponsive ... And we knew at that point, ‘OK, they’re not doing anything, they don’t plan on updating SteamOS ever.’”

Valve did update SteamOS, and continues to, but over two years passed between the announcement and the release, and even then it wasn’t ready. Ars Technica’s November 2015 reportthat games suffered performance losses on SteamOS compared to Windows 10 was especially damaging—why would savvy PC gamers switch? And why would console gamers choose a Steam Machine rather than buying a desktop gaming PC, or even a Windows laptop? Origin’s Wasielewski points out that nearly any PC is just an HDMI cable short of being a living room PC. “Laptops are so powerful now that I use my laptop all the time to hook up to my TV and play some local co-op games,” he says.

And while iBuyPower initially thought a Steam Machine could expand its customer base to include console gamers, Huong discovered they were actually inventing an entirely new demographic target.

“We started thinking, ‘Hey, you know, we’re actually creating a middle-tier niche for this at this point,’” says Hoang. “You have your console, you have your PC gamers, we’re right in between. We’re right in the middle where no one can really claim which one this is. So now we’re creating a new demographic that has never been created, so we have to do everything from the ground up at this point. And it was very, very hard to convince people, well, do I want to be a PC gamer? Do I want to stick with just being console? Or this new thing in the middle.”

What’s the best thing to come of iBuyPower’s SBX? The LED strip, says Hoang, which looked really nice. Otherwise, it was “learning what not to do,” because even when iBuyPower pivoted from SteamOS to Windows 8 in 2014, it still wasn’t satisfied with the SBX: they’d built something counter to their ethos, a box with a custom motherboard that was hard for customers to upgrade. The SBX was a misstep in Hoang’s eyes, who’s now more excited about tempered glass LED side panels. And he feels Valve benefited from that misstep.

“They pretty much took all the things they learned from us, all the things they learned from all system integrators and OEMs, and just kind of cherry picked what they wanted to do,” says Hoang after noting that, aside from the Steam Link, adding Big Picture Mode to Steam on Windows also cut into the appeal of SteamOS.

The future of SteamOS
iBuyPower has no plans to build another PC that its customers can’t easily upgrade, and if it were to build an SBX2, Hoang says they’d do it on their own terms. Unless PC gamers start demanding SteamOS, it’s clear they’ll stick with Windows. That also goes for Wasielewski and Kuruppu. If Valve wants its revolution, it’ll have to create demand for SteamOS on its own.

“The fundamental reasons that Valve cares about SteamOS haven’t gone away, and we continue our work to expand it,” Valve said in a statement to PC Gamer. I had asked if SteamOS was still a priority, how many people were working on it, and if Windows 10 changed Valve’s approach. “The launch of Steam Machines taught us a lot about what Steam customers value in hardware. Right now we’re continuing to work on SteamOS as a product, with over 96 updates and 3,525 games released. We have many incentives for those making SteamOS titles and we see a bright future for SteamOS, especially in VR.”

The comment about VR is interesting, as the new tech is clearly Valve's present focus. If SteamOS can provide a better VR experience than Windows, and VR technology proves itself more popular in the future, perhaps the OS has a shot of resurging with a new round of ‘SteamVR Machines.’ But the success of SteamVR isn’t a sure thing, either.

"We're optimistic. We think VR is going great. It's going in a way that's consistent with our expectations," said Newell in a February roundtable interview, as reported by Polygon. "We're also pretty comfortable with the idea that it will turn out to be a complete failure.”

Is HTC, maker of the Vive headset which works with SteamVR, comfortable with that idea, even after setting up a $1.5 billion investment fund for VR development with the Shenzhen Municipal Government? I doubt it. But in the case of VR, at least, Valve seems more passionate about the project, and is developing its own VR games—something it hasn’t done in support of SteamOS, except to bring Dota 2 and CS:GO to Linux. (Though presumably all future Valve games will come to Linux.)

For now, SteamOS hasn’t broken out of the small—though growing—niche of Linux gaming to become an actual competitor to Windows. It may get updates, and may have 3,525 games, but PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds isn’t one of them, and neither are Nier: Automata, Black Desert Online, Prey, nor The Witcher 3—these are all current Steam top sellers. With any new platform comes the same contradiction: why go through the trouble of supporting SteamOS if few use it, and why use it if few games support it?

Microsoft and Sony know how to solve that contradiction—with money—but SteamOS is supposed to be the antithesis of platform exclusivity: it’s open-source, it doesn’t run on hardware made by Valve or sold at a loss, and as of now it has no major exclusives. Without using console sales techniques, it has to rely on organic adoption.

While I was excited at the prospect of SteamOS back in 2013, breaking Microsoft’s grip on both console and PC gaming (especially now with its whole Xbox One lineup coming to Windows 10) seems more and more like a fantasy. And doing so by hacking away at Ubuntu while hardware partners take on the burden of selling Linux PCs to average consumers seems, in hindsight, doomed to fail.

Yet if public opinion again turns against Microsoft—more than usual, that is—perhaps Valve will get a second window of opportunity. If it does, I wonder if it will have to take on more of the risk to convince PC builders and game developers to come along for a second ride, and if it’s equipped to do that. Valve is seen as a small giant, but we’re talking a private company probably worth a few billion dollars compared to Microsoft, which earned $85.32 billion in revenue in 2016 alone. When it comes to the future of PC gaming, it’s still clear who the Goliath is.

 

[racofer]

What happened to Steam machines is simple:

 

[BlackAdderBG]

People that play on PCs don't want consoles, news at 11 lol

 

[torpid]

Also a case of Valve in an interaction with groups not utterly dependent on them (unlike devs and consumers), where their "quirky" business practices like "Valve Time" and "we'll communicate when we want to" won't cut it.

 

[gaussgunner]

Let's see.... it takes 20 minutes to install regular Linux on a real PC, it runs Steam, it even runs some Windows games. Who needs SteamOS.

 

[Latelistener]

It seems like Valve need a good slap to stop wasting their time on VR, and start pushing SteamOS and Source 2 forward, along with Vulkan.
Linux can be much more interesting if more games will be using Vulkan, instead of OpenGL.
I don't see Windows 10 as a "savior" or "improvement". It's a fucking spyware that even more restrictive and invasive than Windows 8. No way I'm going to install it on my PC, and work or play on it.

 

[Infinitron]

The Summer 2017 Massacre: https://dotesports.com/counter-strike/biggest-vac-ban-wave-in-history-15710

The biggest VAC ban wave in history happened right after the Steam Summer Sale

Over 40,000 Steam accounts met the almighty VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) banhammer yesterday, as the 2017 Steam Summer Sale met its conclusion.

The Steam Database picked up an unprecedented spike in VAC ban numbers, and about 30,000 bans were given before 12pm ET. Normally, about 3,000 to 4,000 VAC bans are handed out per day, but Valve Anti-Cheat detected a monumental number of 40,411 cheating accounts by the end of June 6. The last historic VAC wave was in October 2016, when 15,227 bans took place, according to the Steam Database.

July 5 was the last day of the Steam Summer Sale; subsequently, Valve cracked down on cheaters the next morning, knowing that they’d want to get their game on another account at a discount. Cheaters have been an unrelenting force, especially during the summer, in Dota 2 and even more prominently in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive because of this cheap workaround.

Exactly $8,674 in weapon skin cosmetics were lost to the VAC graveyard, according to the site vac-ban.com. When a player receives a VAC ban, they’re restricted from joining Valve servers, essentially rendering their skins useless. Endless examples of “dead” inventories can be found on Reddit’s /r/VAC_Porn subreddit.

Image via [Steam Database](steamdb.info)

Additionally, 4,972 accounts were banned in-game, meaning that the CS:GO overwatch report system also went to work yesterday. Griefers, or players who throw games, and suspected cheaters (not detected by VAC) subsequently met their doom.

These bans beg the question: Will this historic spike detract players from cheating? Probably not. But it’s good to know that karma caught up with the right people in the video game world.

 

[LESS T_T]

Full talk about upcoming changes if you're interested:

 

[Gerrard]

Ein Volk
Ein Reich
Ein Gaben

 

[LESS T_T]

Last week's top sellers (by revenues, not counting microtransactions) are a bit different, not the #1 of course:

#10 - GOD EATER 2 Rage Burst
#9 - Friday the 13th: The Game
#8 - Stardew Valley
#7 - Fire Pro Wrestling World
#6 - Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Game of the Year Edition
#5 - Grand Theft Auto V
#4 - PGL 2017 Krakow CS:GO Major Championship Mega Bundle
#3 - H1Z1: King of the Kill
#2 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS

 

[LESS T_T]

Post-Valve interview with Half-life writer Marc Laidlaw: http://www.arcadeattack.co.uk/marc-laidlaw/

Mostly about his work at Valve (what else?), how he had joined Valve, how HL1's train ride intro was born, how technological advancement of HL2 influenced its narrative, his favorite HL characters...and...

- He either has no idea if HL3 or EP3 happens (and he has no interest in going back), and if that happens it would end without resolution, with cliffhanger like previous games
- He wish he would had a chance to work on Thief
- His favorite game is Dark Souls
- He just started playing Tides of Numenera

Half-Life is one of our favourite games. In fact, I’ve got Half Life2 running in a window somewhere right now… The guy who helped bring this amazing story to life? Retro gaming legend Marc Laidlaw himself dropped by the AA “offices” to tell us about the glory days and why collaboration is always the best way forward…


***Check back Monday 24th July for our Half-Life/Counter Strike special podcast!***

***You can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes here, Stitcher here and Podbean here***


How did you get the opportunity to work for Valve?

I was working as a legal secretary, writing books and stories on the side, and stumbled into writing video game reviews for Wired Magazine, where my friend Mark Frauenfelder (better known for founding boing-boing) was working as an editor. That led to me being considered “the video game guy” at Wired, which led to them assigning me a feature article about id Software, which was known at that point for making Doom. As I started talking to the guys at id, it made more sense to focus the article on the creation of Quake. I started making Quake maps, using the WorldCraft editor (which eventually turned into Hammer), and right around this time Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington were trying to hire WorldCraft’s creator to do tools programming at Valve. In my journalistic capacity, I came up to meet him and wrote a recommendation letter for INS. I saw what Valve were working on and immediately wanted to be part of it. I’d made quite a few contacts in the FPS game community by that time, but nothing was really leading to creative work until I struck up connections with the people at Valve who would become my closest collaborators and friends for the next couple decades.


Half-Life is one of the most important PC games ever made. What was it like working on it and can you explain the atmosphere at Valve when this game was being developed?

It was thrilling, seat-of-the-pants, every day a day of discovery. There was lots of dread and anxiety and doubt, of course. Everything seemed to take forever, although in retrospect the game shipped just over a year after I joined the company. Other game companies were rising and falling all around us, groundbreaking games appearing and disappearing almost overnight. The specter of failure was always looming over us.


It’s also, arguably, the first ever first person shooter with a deep and complex story-line. How does it feel that you helped change a whole genre of games?

It doesn’t seem that deep or complex in retrospect; we were just careful to create an illusion of depth, I think. I knew when I joined Valve that nobody was really using the FPS tools for storytelling and this was something the whole team wanted to do, even if they didn’t quite know how. So I helped bring a grab-bag of old storytelling tricks to the new game and level design tricks that the others were pulling out of nowhere. I was in awe of them. It felt to me like I was just borrowing from old standards while they were the ones doing something truly new. But that was fine. The purpose of the story was to melt into the background and give the whole thing a sense of coherence. It was always meant to be almost invisible. As we gained confidence, in Half-Life 2, we started to push it a bit…while at the same time, we could see others getting much bolder with their narratives. It was a very exciting time to be working in that extremely narrow FPS niche. I’m not sure I could have contributed much of use outside of it. Right person, right place, right time, etc., etc. I owe a lot to luck.


What were your main inspirations and ideas when coming up with the story-line for Half-Life?

A lot of the story was in place when I got to Valve. I was mostly an enabler. I didn’t have a lot of original ideas, I mostly tried to come up with ways to make all the crazy elements work together and even occasionally dovetail. Most of our ambitious narrative ideas got put off for HL2. I would say the most effective narrative idea is right at the beginning, from the train-ride up through the escape from the test chamber. It wasn’t inspired by anything except the level design itself. I sat with the designer who built that section, Brett Johnson, and we ran through endless corridors and labs, all of them broken up and wrecked…clearly something had happened, but what? Seeing Brett’s busted levels, I asked what would happen if he could clean them all up and we could see the level before…and then the disaster that was supposed to happen would serve as a transition to the stuff he’d already built. Brett got excited by the idea and built a pre-disaster version overnight, and as soon as we saw it, we realized that it was going to work. So, it was a matter of improvising right there in the level design tools, not some kind of ivory tower authorial inspiration. Likewise, the opening train ride came out of a discussion with coder Jay Stelly, who had added a “train” entity to the tools for reasons I didn’t understand; I just assumed they were for making a train ride, not realizing no one had designed one, except maybe for a combat sequence. So that led to the idea of deliberately doing a show-case amusement park style train ride that would initially look like a prerecorded cut-scene, which is what other games were doing at the time by way of exposition. So inspiration, for me, came from the examples and incomplete work of my co-workers. The things they did continually inspired me to come up with ideas worthy of them.


Half-Life 2 seemed to do the impossible and improve on every aspect of the original. What are your views on the (critically acclaimed) sequel?

Technical iteration and improvement led us to want to improve our storytelling tools, and specifically our characters. I don’t think much radical improvement happened in the scripting itself, but there was now a level of fidelity we hadn’t expected. This meant we started thinking in terms of better performances, more convincing characters, and real emotions instead of just broadly comic slapstick violence. Spending more time with believable characters led to more thinking about a richer, deeper story. This informed everything. In a way, it too was driven by the tools. Would we have attempted a more ambitious story if we’d been stuck with Half-Life 1 fidelity, characters whose mouths were inflexible puppet mouths? I don’t know.


Who are your favourite characters from the Half-Life universe and can you explain why?

Dr. Kleiner was the first character I brought to the series. Hal Robins was an old friend, and as soon as I saw the Black Mesa scientists, I thought of Hal for their voices. So Dr. Kleiner is probably my favorite of them all. Next would be Alyx Vance, a strong character in her own right, but especially so because of the work Merle Dandridge brought to her performance. I think Merle’s reaction at the end of Episode 2 is the main reason anyone gave a crap about the cliffhanger. If she hadn’t pulled it off, nobody would have cared if we continued the series or not. Then there’s Dr. Breen, who was so much fun to write for; as a kid, I worshiped Robert Culp, so working with him was incredible, and his death incredibly tragic…I wanted to do more Dr. Breen somehow, even if it meant bringing him back in an alien grub (ohhhh, do it! – Ed). But how can I not speak of the G-Man, whose lines Mike Shapiro always found some way of delivering unexpectedly. Or Barney or…or… I guess the thing I’m proudest of is having brought these characters into being. Dr. Magnusson! The vorts! I’m getting all melty.


You also worked on other classic Valve titles such as the Portal and Left for Dead series of games. Were you in charge of writing stories for these games and which title did you have the most fun working on while at Valve?

I didn’t work on those at all. But I went on to get the ball rolling writing all the characters for Dota 2. With the help of a couple other writers (Ted Kosmatka and Kristopher Katz), we wrote and oversaw recording of over a hundred heroes in the space of a few years. It was fun but there was no narrative in it, and therefore not much for an author to revel in. I took to Half-Life like a duck to water. I took to Dota like a duck to a petting zoo with a tub of water in one corner. Still…fun!


Do you have any idea whether Half-Life 3 will ever be released and would you be willing to work on this title?

No idea. And I have no interest in going back. I had ideas for Episode 3. They were all supposed to take the series to a point where I could step away from it and leave it to the next generation. I had hoped for a reset between HL2 and HL3 that was as dramatic as the shift between HL1 and HL2. I honestly don’t know if anyone else shared this goal, but it seemed important to me to give ultimate freedom to whoever inherited the series, with my own personal set of loose ends tied up to my satisfaction. Unfortunately, I was not able to do that. But I never thought as far ahead as HL3, unless you were to say that HL3 and Episode 3 were the same thing. I will say that I expected every installment would end without resolution, forever and ever…there was some rumor going around that Ep3 or HL3 would end Gordon Freeman’s story, and I don’t think that was accurate. My intention was that Ep3 would simply tie up the plot threads that were particular to HL2. But it would still end like HL1 and HL2, with Gordon in an indeterminate space, on hold, waiting for the next game to begin. So one cliffhanger after another.


How different is it to write a story for a video game as opposed to a novel and which gives you more pleasure?

I haven’t written a novel in over twenty years and the thought of it exhausts me. It’s a solitary pursuit. I loved writing for games, the collaborative energy, the way every idea I had was improved by others. But I do think I’ll return to novels to rediscover the process of thinking for myself. That seems important to me now. I had a lot of stuff to share when I went to Valve. Hopefully I can now share what I learned from games with my novel-writing self, when I settle down to that task again.


You’re obviously a huge gamer. What is your favourite game of all time and what game do you think has the best storyline?

I like to play games that are very different form my work but I still wish I’d had a chance to work on Thief. I couldn’t have done that and been at Valve, so I will have to live with this. I’m a big Zelda fan. I suppose my single favorite game is probably, at this point, Dark Souls…but I have never delved into the lore or cared much about it, although I do love that it feels like a world complete and original unto itself. I did spend a fair bit of time reading up on Bloodborne lore, which I loved. But this is not to say these games have great stories. Maybe after I’ve been away from games for a while, I will start to seek out the story-heavy games again for their own sake. I did just pick up Tides of Numenera. At the time I played Torment, I was not a fan of text in games…but maybe I’ve come around.


If you could share a few drinks with a video game character who would you choose and why?

Garrett, from Thief. I’d probably wake up with my wallet empty, and the secret panel behind my self-portrait looted of some prized magic journal, but it’d be worth it.

 

[LESS T_T]

Last week's top sellers (by revenues, not counting microtransactions) are a bit different, not the #1 of course:

#10 - GOD EATER 2 Rage Burst
#9 - Friday the 13th: The Game
#8 - Stardew Valley
#7 - Fire Pro Wrestling World
#6 - Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Game of the Year Edition
#5 - Grand Theft Auto V
#4 - PGL 2017 Krakow CS:GO Major Championship Mega Bundle
#3 - H1Z1: King of the Kill
#2 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS

Last week's top sellers (by revenues, not counting microtransactions) are a bit more fabulous, not the #1 of course:

#10 - Kingdoms and Castles
#9 - H1Z1: King of the Kill
#8 - Grand Theft Auto V
#7 - PGL 2017 Krakow CS:GO Major Championship Mega Bundle
#6 - DOOM
#5 - Total War: WARHAMMER II
#4 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
#3 - Dark and Light
#2 - Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator
#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS

 

[LESS T_T]

Half-life fan web series The Freeman Chronicles is now on Steam:



On Youtube if you're interested:

 

[Jigawatt]

Doesn't hold a candle to

 

[LESS T_T]

Current Top Sellers chart makes me think (while most of them are not Codex-inclined) PC gaming is still its own thing, quite different with consoles and mobile, and is alive and kicking.

Well, for better or worse. I'm glad the one who made the first dominant digital PC gaming platform is Valve, not big publishers like EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and Take Two.

Foxhole seems interesting though. Pity I'm not that into persistent online games.

 

[Alienman]

Foxhole has a lot of potential. I have played it off and on from the first alpha release. The combat and so on is fun, and there is now a lot of different weapons and vehicles. The problem is that the game is treated as a Sim City of sorts by a lot of players. So instead of big WW1 battles and skirmishes the game is stuck in some kind of building-limbo. The frontlines are peppered with auto-turrets, walls and stuff like that which means having fun engagement with the enemy is rare. You often just fight AI gun-turrets or get stuck in front of some walls when trying to advance.