this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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Valve really only releases things that shake the industry up. I've been playing through Alyx for the first time this weekend and oh my god is it good.
Valve buys up dev teams that are about to shake the industry up. Valve haven't actually been the ones to make something new in a long time. TFC, CS, Portal, DoD, L4D, Alien Swarm, Dota 2... were all made by outside dev teams that Valve absorbed and put their name on. The only things Valve have actually made, themselves, in the last 5 years are Alyx and CS2, neither of which brought anything new to the industry (although they are wonderfully-executed games) and are both sequels of existing franchises.
Personally, I'm not a fan of this practice, because I feel like Valve inadvertently stifles these studios after they bring them onboard. For instance, the team from DigiPen that Valve bought for their Portal tech? Imagine if they were still able to make games. Imagine if they were still able to stretch their creativity and create new tech and ideas. Instead, their intellectual properties are all tied up at Valve and they got to release two whole games in the last 20 years. Who knows what we could be missing out on from these guys if they were able to actually still make stuff.
They're still at it, they bought Campo Santo (Firewatch Devs) in 2018 and now their game In The Valley of Gods is never gonna happen, they worked on Alyx instead.
They poached a bunch of folks from Hopoo Games recently too.
You speak of developers as if they have no agency.
The Hopoo folk left because they didn't want to work on RoR anymore.
Well yeah, Hopoo sold the RoR franchise to gearbox 2 years ago.
Moving from a small indie studio to Valve they are giving up a lot of agency.
Isn't valve's structure essentially that they allow any dev to work on any project they want?
That's the fantasy. It's full of politics and informal power structures though.