SoulUnison
Banned
They used to be one of my favorite gaming companies, and definitely my favorite in the arena of PC gaming, but over the last couple years I've started to become intensely disillusioned with them.
It feels like they don't even make games anymore, which is tough, since it already used to feel like 90% of their games were acquisitions and not original properties. Likely their biggest titles out currently are Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2, and both are juggernauts of micropayments, cosmetic content and in-game economies. Valve doesn't even make a lot of the content that these games get, anymore - they've outsourced themselves to the Steam Community and are happy to just be the curators and cash the checks.
Steam Sales and Events used to involve playing games, exploring your back catalog, and watching fun events like ARGs unfold. Now they're sadistic and cynical Skinner Boxes where you buy more so that you can spend more and (maybe) end up with something for your time, trouble and money. And if you do get anything, there's a good chance it'll be some "currency" that only exists in the Steam ecosystem so that you're trapped in an endless cycle of trying to balance out or just cutting your losses and accepting that you have money you can't spend. The recent "Holiday Auction" event felt like it was *just* this side of online gambling.
It's like how Nintendo eShop games are generally $40 for 3DS and $60 for Wii U, but gift cards come in $35 and $50 varieties.
So if Valve's barely even a game developer at this point, then what's left? You'd think if their only duties were to be glorified shopkeepers and maintenance on the Steam Servers that they'd at least manage to do a good job of those, but Steam goes down *constantly* and randomly. It's 10:30 AM on a Saturday during a holiday break *and* one of their big sales, and I haven't been able to log into my account for the last couple hours. Forget that time I can't get on Steam is time I can't be buying anything from their sale; How about the fact that I've got 282 games on my account representing an investment of thousands of dollars, and I can't play anything that uses Steam Matchmaking on a holiday weekend - the EXACT sort of extremely predictable free time that you'd think a massive service like Steam would be able to brace itself for.
What exactly does Valve spend the ludicrous amount of money it makes off the community on, anyway?
Because it sure as hell doesn't seem to be servers, maintenance or support staff.
The Steam client itself is hilariously behind the times. A ton of its functionality is based around slapped together WebKit framework and being a glorified browser. They throw (admittedly, fantastic in concept,) features like In-Home Streaming and Broadcast at us, but it's 2014 and Steam still doesn't recognize or utilize multi-core processors. Sometimes Steam will randomly freeze and hang until my external HDD spins up, despite me having never in any way used it in conjunction with Steam or as a Steam Library. But, hey, we've got Badges and Trading Cards! Spend money on Trading Cards so you can craft Badges and raise the cosmetic Level on your profile! Isn't that better than stability as a service?
I'm really starting to think that Valve is just throwing things at the wall and hoping something sticks. We've got SteamBoxes, Steam Controller, Community Workshop, Community Market, Community Greenlight, Steam Early-Access, In-Home Streaming Beta, Broadcast Beta, the new "discovery" Storefront, the Curator System... It's just a massive list of "halfway-there" features, and who's in charge of a lot of these, anyway? Valve always gets patted on the back for its unorthodox corporate culture. Nobody really works "under" anybody else, and people just work on what they're interested in. But this approach is giving us a ton of projects that get a bit off the ground and then just sort of hover, while nobody apparently wants to work on the important nuts-and-bolts stuff, and there's nobody above them to say "Hey, this needs to get done. Like, 6 years ago."
I used to absolutely adore Valve and almost unconditionally enjoy Steam, but now the more I use it the more it feels like a sunk cost.
I don't know if I'm using Steam because it's the best, or because nobody else has bothered to be better.
The GabeN meme feels so sarcastic, now.
I used to see an industry visionary - now I see a guy that got lucky 15 years ago and has been desperately hanging on ever since.
It feels like they don't even make games anymore, which is tough, since it already used to feel like 90% of their games were acquisitions and not original properties. Likely their biggest titles out currently are Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2, and both are juggernauts of micropayments, cosmetic content and in-game economies. Valve doesn't even make a lot of the content that these games get, anymore - they've outsourced themselves to the Steam Community and are happy to just be the curators and cash the checks.
Steam Sales and Events used to involve playing games, exploring your back catalog, and watching fun events like ARGs unfold. Now they're sadistic and cynical Skinner Boxes where you buy more so that you can spend more and (maybe) end up with something for your time, trouble and money. And if you do get anything, there's a good chance it'll be some "currency" that only exists in the Steam ecosystem so that you're trapped in an endless cycle of trying to balance out or just cutting your losses and accepting that you have money you can't spend. The recent "Holiday Auction" event felt like it was *just* this side of online gambling.
It's like how Nintendo eShop games are generally $40 for 3DS and $60 for Wii U, but gift cards come in $35 and $50 varieties.
So if Valve's barely even a game developer at this point, then what's left? You'd think if their only duties were to be glorified shopkeepers and maintenance on the Steam Servers that they'd at least manage to do a good job of those, but Steam goes down *constantly* and randomly. It's 10:30 AM on a Saturday during a holiday break *and* one of their big sales, and I haven't been able to log into my account for the last couple hours. Forget that time I can't get on Steam is time I can't be buying anything from their sale; How about the fact that I've got 282 games on my account representing an investment of thousands of dollars, and I can't play anything that uses Steam Matchmaking on a holiday weekend - the EXACT sort of extremely predictable free time that you'd think a massive service like Steam would be able to brace itself for.
What exactly does Valve spend the ludicrous amount of money it makes off the community on, anyway?
Because it sure as hell doesn't seem to be servers, maintenance or support staff.
The Steam client itself is hilariously behind the times. A ton of its functionality is based around slapped together WebKit framework and being a glorified browser. They throw (admittedly, fantastic in concept,) features like In-Home Streaming and Broadcast at us, but it's 2014 and Steam still doesn't recognize or utilize multi-core processors. Sometimes Steam will randomly freeze and hang until my external HDD spins up, despite me having never in any way used it in conjunction with Steam or as a Steam Library. But, hey, we've got Badges and Trading Cards! Spend money on Trading Cards so you can craft Badges and raise the cosmetic Level on your profile! Isn't that better than stability as a service?
I'm really starting to think that Valve is just throwing things at the wall and hoping something sticks. We've got SteamBoxes, Steam Controller, Community Workshop, Community Market, Community Greenlight, Steam Early-Access, In-Home Streaming Beta, Broadcast Beta, the new "discovery" Storefront, the Curator System... It's just a massive list of "halfway-there" features, and who's in charge of a lot of these, anyway? Valve always gets patted on the back for its unorthodox corporate culture. Nobody really works "under" anybody else, and people just work on what they're interested in. But this approach is giving us a ton of projects that get a bit off the ground and then just sort of hover, while nobody apparently wants to work on the important nuts-and-bolts stuff, and there's nobody above them to say "Hey, this needs to get done. Like, 6 years ago."
I used to absolutely adore Valve and almost unconditionally enjoy Steam, but now the more I use it the more it feels like a sunk cost.
I don't know if I'm using Steam because it's the best, or because nobody else has bothered to be better.
The GabeN meme feels so sarcastic, now.
I used to see an industry visionary - now I see a guy that got lucky 15 years ago and has been desperately hanging on ever since.
But well...
