valve
By Unknown
Seriously, Valve, you're beginning to make Steam look more and more like Origin every day.
Valve rolled out its pay-for-mods service on Thursday to universal ire from the PC gaming community. In theory, the system is less dubious, if it weren't for the fact that Valve will pocket a massive percentage of the mod charge, leaving the actual modders with precious little profit to their name.
Let's say a modder makes a Skyrim mod that they want to charge $4.99 for. Setting aside the fact that DLC microtransactions are already a plague on the gaming industry, the maker of said Skyrim will only ever get $1.25 for their efforts, while the remaining $3.74 goes straight to Valve for doing no work whatsoever.
This system also introduces an endless quagmire of problems for modders who use elements of other people's mods to make their own. Case in point: the Skyrim fishing mod made by Chesko. As it turns out, Chesko used elements of an idle character animations mod made by Fore. So, that means that Fore is entitled to a percentage of the profits from Chesko's mod on top of Valve's already egregious 75% cut, right? If so, what percentage does Fore get?
As you can see, the whole system quickly becomes a mess, seriously curtailing the resources of modders like Chesko, and infringing on the intellectual property rights of Fore. No matter what happens though, Valve wins and we lose. Such a sleazy cash grab is uncharacteristic of our lord Gaben, but some say it was bound to happen eventually. As Harvey Dent once said, "something something die a hero, something something the villain."
By Unknown
Steam recently passed 65 million active accounts (Xbox Live has 48 million), and the Fall sale has pushed their concurrent user count over 7 million. DOTA 2 is still holding out as the most popular game on Steam, with over 500,000 concurrent players. The PC Master Race is going strong!
Via Washington Post
In an interview on what makes Valve tick, Gabe Newell had this to say about Steam and the company's direction:
When we started out we were a single-player video game company that could have been really successful just doing Half-Life sequel after Half-Life sequel, but we collectively said let's try to make multi-player games even though there's never been a commercial successful multi-player game.
Then we tried to do Steam. There were a bunch of people internally who thought Steam was a really bad idea, but what they didn't think was that they would tell the people who were working on Steam what to do with their time. They were like "that's what you want to do with your time, that's fine, but we're going to spend our time working on Half-Life 2. We think you're kind of wasting your time, but it's your time to waste."
In retrospect, it was a great idea, right?
I don't know Gabe, as much as I appreciate what Valve has done for gaming, I for one would really like you to waste some time on Half Life 3.
Washington Post via NeoGAF
Via IGN
In an interview with IGN, product designer Greg Coomer said, "you won't see an exclusive killer app for SteamOS from us. We're not going to be doing that kind of thing." Business developer Anna Sweet also explains Valve's philosophy on third party exclusives, saying, "Whenever we talk to third-party partners, we encourage them to put their games in as many places as possible, including not on our platforms."
By Unknown
FREE TO PLAY is a feature-length documentary that follows three professional gamers from around the world as they compete for a million dollar prize in the first Dota 2 International Tournament. In recent years, E Sports has surged in popularity to become one of the most widely-practiced forms of competitive sport today. A million dollar tournament changed the landscape of the gaming world and for those elite players at the top of their craft, nothing would ever be the same again. Produced by Valve, the film documents the challenges and sacrifices required of players to compete at the highest level.
