14 DAY TRIAL // Valve is covering its organizational problems with the success of Steam, and since they get a lot of money from the digital distribution platform, the issues stemming from the company are not showing.
It’s difficult to pinpoint a precise problem with Valve, but the lack of new game releases from a company that started its life as a studio is worrying. Even the games that did land in the past decade were not actually from Valve per-say and more from adjacent studios. The company is now pretty much just a shell of its former self that makes money from the work of other people and studios.
The company has a number of projects in the works, but there is no clear marketing strategy to promote them. With the exception of the Steam distribution platform, all of the other initiatives are not even mentioned. The only exception might be the various sales throughout the year.
"Original" games inspired by previous work
As far as we can tell, the last game developed by Valve is Left 4 Dead 2 all the way back in 2010. It’s difficult to consider this original work because it’s based on the work of Turtle Rock Studios for the first Left 4 Dead title that launched in 2008. It’s hardly original work, even if Valve improved upon almost all of the aspects of the initial game in the series.
It’s now 2017, and Valve hasn’t released a proper new game or IP in a very long time. You’re going to say that they had some original titles, but that’s not the case. The first Portal was done by developers from another studio, which was brought into Valve. The same devs worked on the sequel.
Arguably, Portal 2 is one of the best games ever made, and no one is disputing that, but it’s more or less the same recipe as in the Left 4 Dead case. They took an idea and refined it. The same can be said about all of their other titles.
Some of you might way that DOTA 2 is original work, but the game is spearheaded by the same developer that worked on the original Defense of the Ancients, namely IceFrog. Valve hired him, and the company significantly improved the original idea and gameplay. It’s difficult to call this one original as well.
The same can be said about Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which is developed in collaboration with another studio, Hidden Path Entertainment. There are a few Counter-Strike variations built in cooperation with Nexon, and they are aimed at the Asian market.
To be fair, Valve did make a full game by themselves, or at least this is the official record. The company released The Lab, which is built for the HTC VIVE virtual reality headset. And, even so, The Lab is part of the greater Portal universe.
Great hardware with no marketing
When Microsoft was pushing its new Windows 8 concept onto the market, Valve’s founder Gabe Newell was really critical, especially since Microsoft also wanted a store that could also feature games. As you can imagine, this didn’t go well with Valve since it interfered with Steam’s plans for the future.
Right about that time, Valve started to concoct this idea of fighting for the living room with the existing consoles, Xbox and PlayStation. Another battlefront was to be opened on the OS front, with Valve launching a new operating system based on Linux that would take on Windows, at least in the gaming department.
After the initial surge of support for the idea, and after Valve had a few years to refine the OS and its plans, most of their work seems to be dead in the water. They managed to convince quite a few companies to release Steam Machines, which were PCs powered by SteamOS, but with no follow-up. Since there are a lot fewer Linux –compatible games on the market, and they didn’t do well in terms of performance and support, that idea was pretty much buried.
Valve also works on the Steam Controller, that promises to allow people that like controllers to play games that are not usually built for this type of input, such as strategies or shooters. Make no mistake about it, the Steam Controller is a great piece of technology and much more advanced than anything produced by Microsoft or Sony, but with the exception of Steam sales, it’s not advertised in any way.
Valve also promised to put a lot of money in the development of OpenGL and Vulkan, so that Linux could feature the same type of performance with games running on Direct3D, on Windows. That is also a really quiet front, and after some initial success, developers are not heard anymore.
This takes us to Steam Link, which is another piece of great technology. You plug this device into any TV that comes with an HDMI port, link it to the LAN network and your computer, and you’re suddenly able to play your PC or Linux games in your living room. It even comes with direct support for controllers. Just guess how well it’s doing.
Starting and abandoning projects
Valve is becoming famous for two things. One is the easiness of which they make money from their Steam Platform, and the other is their started and failed projects. The most famous of them is the Half-Life series, which ended abruptly and it feels abandoned. It’s quite likely that SteamOS, Steam Controller, and Steam Link are following the same path.
This entire complacency might have something to do with the flat organizational scheme inside Valve that basically lets developers work on anything they want. With no clear future direction imposed for the company, Valve looks more and more like a rudderless ship, going each way and not finishing any of the projects.
And it’s very likely that the company doesn’t have a comprehensive marketing department. For example, Doug Lombardi has the position of “VP of Marketing” at Valve, but he joked that the position doesn’t really exist and that he’s using that title because other people have a problem in relating to him as a representative.
Perhaps the most interesting example and exponent of Valve's weird business plan is SteamOS. As it stands right now, the project is not going anywhere interesting, for multiple reasons. Not all of the problems come from Valve, that a certainty.
The development of Vulkan, an open source alternative to Direct3D, has slowed down considerably. Games are still being developed for Windows systems and ported to Linux with the help of integrated VM solutions, which greatly decrease performance.
Even if Valve put a lot of money into development for Vulkan and managed to convince a lot of companies to work together, the initial drive has dissipated. Slowly, but surely, SteamOS is fading away. It's still being updated, but Valve has completely stopped promoting it on official channels.
Maybe Valve has a grand design that spans for decades, who knows? But at this particular time, I no longer have any expectations from them. I don’t expect to see anything original that bears the Valve seal of quality anytime soon, and I think that people should start to forget that Valve is a studio and realize that they care about one thing only, money.