What does Valve need to do to "get back in the game"?

[sYNTHwAVE]

10 hours ago, YoloSwag said:

On a side note, I think Cyberpunk 2077's world is - well, I think that was what the new Deus Ex games worlds were supposed to be like. AND I AM SAD ABOUT IT.

I'm looking forward to the next Deus Ex game tho, hopefully this is the one that connects Adam Jensen to becoming Icarus the AI as it was being alluded to.

I feel the same way. At first I was kind of intoxicated by the city hub in mankind divided,  but then i quickly learnt its limitations. Taking the subways felt bizzare because all the stations were just a short walking distance from each other lol and there wasn't much to do.. it wasn't dynamic at all, the day/night cycle and different events changed between missions instead of in real time. Just dissapointing. And the whole game was short, clearly they cut it short. Human Revolution is the better game in many ways.

[YoloSwag]

10 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

Suppose they build a modern engine fit for a modern AAA game, what's next? Sell it? That's not a really good business move lately, specially when you're competing with some pretty big names out there.

 

Use it for in house? We're back at the issue of creating tons of really expensive and hard to make assets to take advantage of the modern AAA engine: it takes guys in major publisher a damn battalion of people and usually multiple studios just to produce those assets. Valve has the money, but they're just not capable of getting down the logistics of a project of such magnitude: what in the past became Valve time a.k.a. "It will be out when it's done" would take so fucking long both the assets and the engine would be outdated by the time they're done. They've never been able to deliver in a consistent fashion and if anything those problems are way worst today than 20 years ago when they were heading into Half life 2

 

But other than that, kudos on the Sepultura reference: I approve, highly.

Well speaking of it, I don't believe there is a game engine out there that has ray-tracing naturally built into it and not just injected.

Epic Games' Unreal Engine has been dominating the scene for more than a decade now with it's royalty based scheme. It wasn't the most beautiful engine (CryEngine looked better IMO) but they had a lot of games built under it and I think that contributed a lot of success to Epic Games. Not really having the best in all aspects but the most marketed.

 

I mean look at this list. Certainly they made a lot of money from it.

 

I agree competition would be stiff but I think it's a race on who gets to ray-tracing first with the best and most efficient implementation. Imagine it by that time it could be 5 years from now but hopefully by then we get mainstream ray-tracing support through an API and some powerful hardware.

[YoloSwag]

4 hours ago, sYNTHwAVE said:

I feel the same way. At first I was kind of intoxicated by the city hub in mankind divided,  but then i quickly learnt its limitations. Taking the subways felt bizzare because all the stations were just a short walking distance from each other lol and there wasn't much to do.. it wasn't dynamic at all, the day/night cycle and different events changed between missions instead of in real time. Just dissapointing. And the whole game was short, clearly they cut it short. Human Revolution is the better game in many ways.

Yeah I liked DX:HR better too especially the story. Have you heard the devs said it was unlikely that we'd see a sequel anytime soon due to the not successful DX:MD? I hope after they see Cyberpunk 2077 they'd partner with CD Projekt Red.

[LukeLinusFanFic]

What valve needs is competition. A store that would be better. The reason they can work in valve time is because no one is threatening them. 

[YoloSwag]

22 minutes ago, SwagMaestro said:

What valve needs is competition. A store that would be better. The reason they can work in valve time is because no one is threatening them. 

Yes this is what I'm saying. That's why good on Epic Games releasing their own Epic Store.

[LukeLinusFanFic]

39 minutes ago, YoloSwag said:

Yes this is what I'm saying. That's why good on Epic Games releasing their own Epic Store.

I remember an old wan show where Linus was super happy about gog games starting to sell other stuff, but was disappointed to realize they are affiliated with CD project red...

I hope the epic store can do any dent, but I bet Linus still believes (and I tend to agree) that it would be best to have a store unaffiliated with a developer. 

[CowboyRazor]

The one thing I really really think Valve should try is to set up a bunch of GPUs and CPUs in a few different warehouses, and let people pay monthly for the GPU and CPU power, so even those with cheap laptops can play games with good performance. There's probably a lot of issues with this and its possibly in the works by a different company, but if they can make it work somehow it would be a game changer. Literally.

[Misanthrope]

8 hours ago, YoloSwag said:

Well speaking of it, I don't believe there is a game engine out there that has ray-tracing naturally built into it and not just injected.

Epic Games' Unreal Engine has been dominating the scene for more than a decade now with it's royalty based scheme. It wasn't the most beautiful engine (CryEngine looked better IMO) but they had a lot of games built under it and I think that contributed a lot of success to Epic Games. Not really having the best in all aspects but the most marketed.

 

I mean look at this list. Certainly they made a lot of money from it.

 

I agree competition would be stiff but I think it's a race on who gets to ray-tracing first with the best and most efficient implementation. Imagine it by that time it could be 5 years from now but hopefully by then we get mainstream ray-tracing support through an API and some powerful hardware.

Hmm

 

I mean ray-tracing could help them out quite a bit you make a good point there. Except I don't think Epic really made all that much money from Unreal Engine at least compared to their current finances and "making it rain!!!" attitude and spending due to Fortnite.

 

But Valve could potentially do both. Still the issue is that this requires a very strong hand and hierarchy, something I've read numerous times is kind of the opposite of Valve's culture.

[Drak3]

If Valve wants to 'get back in the game,' they need to start by actually making one.

 

And in retrospect, their games and the hype around them don't hold up well on their own, but instead the communities that made content for or based upon their games (except for Portal).

[CookieSmasherGus]

A new game would probably do the trick. And obviously not some flavor of the month Battle Royale knock-off that everyone is sick of already. There was a card game boom, they made Artifact and it didn't work out. The first one's to nail some new and exciting game get copied to hell and back, but the original is usually better unless the copies improve where need be. I don't know what that game could be, maybe something with VR or AR, maybe a mobile game, but that wouldn't be received well either (example: Blizzard and mobile Diablo). Instead of one AAA game they could split their team and make a bunch of smaller innovative games to see what works. I'm sure they make plenty of money from TF2, Dota, CSGO and Steam to take some risks.

[YoloSwag]

4 hours ago, CowboyRazor said:

The one thing I really really think Valve should try is to set up a bunch of GPUs and CPUs in a few different warehouses, and let people pay monthly for the GPU and CPU power, so even those with cheap laptops can play games with good performance. There's probably a lot of issues with this and its possibly in the works by a different company, but if they can make it work somehow it would be a game changer. Literally.

I think Nvidia had a project like this that didn't kick off. I also thought about this so games would turn out like a streaming service but you're still the one controlling things.

 

7 hours ago, SwagMaestro said:

I remember an old wan show where Linus was super happy about gog games starting to sell other stuff, but was disappointed to realize they are affiliated with CD project red...

I hope the epic store can do any dent, but I bet Linus still believes (and I tend to agree) that it would be best to have a store unaffiliated with a developer. 

Technically speaking I don't see anything bad about a store being associated with a developer or publisher. It's the greedy company schemes that ruin everything and I think it's present in almost every company with varying degrees of severity.

 

10 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Hmm

 

I mean ray-tracing could help them out quite a bit you make a good point there. Except I don't think Epic really made all that much money from Unreal Engine at least compared to their current finances and "making it rain!!!" attitude and spending due to Fortnite.

 

But Valve could potentially do both. Still the issue is that this requires a very strong hand and hierarchy, something I've read numerous times is kind of the opposite of Valve's culture.

It might be just me, but I think when Epic Games "got lucky" on Fortnite they started to capitalize on it real good. It's a risk and reward thing that they did when they made what was arguably a PUBG clone but they made it happen. If only VALVE were willing to take risks again. For me, they got scared to make a finale to the Half-Life series that didn't live up to the hype. It's like how some people viewed BioShock Infinite although I liked it a lot.

 

Yeah, I think VALVE did grew soft and pudgy over the years.

 

9 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

If Valve wants to 'get back in the game,' they need to start by actually making one.

 

And in retrospect, their games and the hype around them don't hold up well on their own, but instead the communities that made content for or based upon their games (except for Portal).

Definitely. I remember Garry's mod and the tons of community stuff related to it.

It's time they took things seriously when talking about making games.

[Peskanova]

Valve is not a company known for making AAA games, I think they got success because hl and cs at those times it could run on any computer and they are one of the creators of e-sports itself.

Dont make Gabe like kojima , Valve is like AMD , they need to be there to stop pricing abuse, cs:go , cs:s ,hl , all valve games where at 5$ or less at some time. csgo now is free with battle royale... You dont know how much valve cares for you till they stay behind and let gambling p2w companies do their evil.

[YoloSwag]

10 minutes ago, CookieSmasherGus said:

A new game would probably do the trick. And obviously not some flavor of the month Battle Royale knock-off that everyone is sick of already. There was a card game boom, they made Artifact and it didn't work out. The first one's to nail some new and exciting game get copied to hell and back, but the original is usually better unless the copies improve where need be. I don't know what that game could be, maybe something with VR or AR, maybe a mobile game, but that wouldn't be received well either (example: Blizzard and mobile Diablo). Instead of one AAA game they could split their team and make a bunch of smaller innovative games to see what works. I'm sure they make plenty of money from TF2, Dota, CSGO and Steam to take some risks.

They actually made a Battle Royale mode for CS:GO which made the game's community rating go down by a lot.

 

If you know their game 'Day of Defeat: Source' it should have easily been like the Modern Warfare or Battlefield series. I think VALVE could do something like this again with like 128 vs 128 or even more. Integrating a Battle Royale mode in that would give people an option to play it like a regular war game or like what the kids play these days. I think this would be a win-win. Also let's call the new game 'Day of Defeat: Global Offensive'  lol

[YoloSwag]

3 minutes ago, Peskanova said:

Valve is not a company known for making AAA games, I think they got success because hl and cs at those times it could run on any computer and they are one of the creators of e-sports itself.

Dont make Gabe like kojima , Valve is like AMD , they need to be there to stop pricing abuse, cs:go , cs:s ,hl , all valve games where at 5$ or less at some time. csgo now is free with battle royale... You dont know how much valve cares for you till they stay behind and let gambling p2w companies do their evil.

I don't know man, Counter-Strike has been really popular in the competitive scene and it's a game without a story. Half-Life 2 I would consider 'AAA' before triple 'A' was even a thing. It was revolutionary at that time and looked better than other games released during that period.

 

I don't think Gaben is like Kojima, they seem to think very differently. Also, Kojima is more concerned about his work in games, he is involved in almost every aspect of it and I know Gaben does actually work, the work he does is more of an overhead role now because he's running a billion dollar company so I wouldn't say they are the same but are great in their own way.

 

Also yeah, they need to stop abusing their other games. They're literally milking it to shreds.

[Peskanova]

11 minutes ago, YoloSwag said:

I don't know man, Counter-Strike has been really popular in the competitive scene and it's a game without a story. Half-Life 2 I would consider 'AAA' before triple 'A' was even a thing. It was revolutionary at that time and looked better than other games released during that period.

I allways thout that Half Life was like gears of war, every iteration to source engine comes a half life , like every unreal big update, goes a gears of war title, I never had seen as a AAA, just a show of the Source Engine newest additions. hl2 was popular because source engine was so ahead of its time that makes me shiver, Valve just need a new engine with things like over the top optimization or any feature like dlss without turning gpu's on fire

[YoloSwag]

23 minutes ago, Peskanova said:

I allways thout that Half Life was like gears of war, every iteration to source engine comes a half life , like every unreal big update, goes a gears of war title, I never had seen as a AAA, just a show of the Source Engine newest additions. hl2 was popular because source engine was so ahead of its time that makes me shiver, Valve just need a new engine with things like over the top optimization or any feature like dlss without turning gpu's on fire

I would actually like VALVE to keep on avoiding exclusivity like when Gaben expressed his thoughts on having VR exclusive games to HTC. DLSS is one thing, until now there's just no real support to it yet that's why I was irritated about Jensen's comments regarding the RX VII being crushed by the RTX 2080 if they turned on DLSS, but DLSS isn't open to AMD. It's like what they did a long time ago with PhysX, they say the game runs better on Nvidia hardware if you have PhysX on - of course it does. It's just not a fair comparison.

 

If you look at AMD sponsored titles, they support Nvidia hardware even in Tomb Raider (2013) I remember playing the game with TressFX (AMD's own hair tech before Nvidia's HairWorks) on my GTX 660. It was running fine. In fact nowadays you can think of how Assassin's Creed Odyssey is an AMD sponsored title but the funny thing is that Nvidia hardware seems to run perfectly fine even beating AMD's own cards.

 

You can even think of the Vulkan API how it was made with AMD but is supported by Nvidia hardware. There's just no gimping involved. There was even a case before with hacked drivers where AMD cards could run PhysX just fine but it wasn't officially supported because PhysX (just like HairWorks and DLSS) is Nvidia's proprietary bastard.

 

I hope you don't get me wrong, I'm not attacking you or anything I just really hate Nvidia...

Speaking of which, 5 of the last 6 cards I owned were Nvidia cards. I really wish I had gone AMD on 3 out of 6 of those occasions instead.

 

And to be honest with you, if I had the money right now I'd buy an RTX 2060 since AMD has only older cards for show.

[Peskanova]

Well Valve has now hard times to make players return, (I've allways used steam and keep using as main source) there are a lot clones, 1 for each game that Valve tried to milk, they cut the benefits but seems too late as companies invested in their own platform.

Also making a new engine that will be a hit like source is a race against time and money with low success chance its normal to avoid that.

The only thing that can sky rocket Valve and we all agree (I think) its a viable SteamOS  and grab the game industry by the p....(like trump)

[YoloSwag]

16 minutes ago, Peskanova said:

Well Valve has now hard times to make players return, (I've allways used steam and keep using as main source) there are a lot clones, 1 for each game that Valve tried to milk, they cut the benefits but seems too late as companies invested in their own platform.

Also making a new engine that will be a hit like source is a race against time and money with low success chance its normal to avoid that.

The only thing that can sky rocket Valve and we all agree (I think) its a viable SteamOS  and grab the game industry by the p....(like trump)

You just brought me back a lot of memories by mentioning SteamOS. Also remember Steam Machines? Time flies pretty fast. 

 

I hope some undercover guy from VALVE is reading this thread right now. Maybe even Gaben himself would only have a look to see what a lot of people feel about VALVE right now that would be great.

[LukeLinusFanFic]

13 hours ago, Peskanova said:

Valve is not a company known for making AAA games, I think they got success because hl and cs at those times it could run on any computer and they are one of the creators of e-sports itself.

Dont make Gabe like kojima , Valve is like AMD , they need to be there to stop pricing abuse, cs:go , cs:s ,hl , all valve games where at 5$ or less at some time. csgo now is free with battle royale... You dont know how much valve cares for you till they stay behind and let gambling p2w companies do their evil.

Except valve is the abuser. They're more like Intel. They haven't used their power for evil yet. But they're not perfect either. 

[mxk]

Spoiler

 

I'm pretty mad about the new csgo update. I really feel like they should have made prime cost more to stray cheaters away from buying the game. But now, just today, they release an update saying that if a non prime free account hits level 21, they get prime.

 

What's the fucking point of even buying the game for 15? Obviously, you have to farm XP, but thats not an issue for a person spin botting in a comp game. Comp games give you a lot of XP if you do well, and if a cheater goes blatant or does really well they'll get to level 21 pretty quickly, then be playing with a larger group of legit players. Vavle's VACnet AI better be fucking working...

 

Rant^

 

I think they should make a new counter strike on the source 2 engine, or they should be paying wayyyy more attention to the community. They've been doing good, but the fact that they just killed paying for prime csgo, is silly to me. I went more in depth in my rant.

[CookieSmasherGus]

16 hours ago, YoloSwag said:

They actually made a Battle Royale mode for CS:GO which made the game's community rating go down by a lot.

 

If you know their game 'Day of Defeat: Source' it should have easily been like the Modern Warfare or Battlefield series. I think VALVE could do something like this again with like 128 vs 128 or even more. Integrating a Battle Royale mode in that would give people an option to play it like a regular war game or like what the kids play these days. I think this would be a win-win. Also let's call the new game 'Day of Defeat: Global Offensive'  lol

Ugh, at this point I'd prefer a well made shooter MMO. Some kind of weird mix of Borderlands, Fallout, Warframe and maybe Stalker. Sounds weird but I'd be really into it. I know about Planetside and its ok, but poorly optimized so I can't really play it and I've heard its being milked for money with poor decisions. Day of Defeat looks kinda old, not a lot of kids would play it.

[Ross Siggers]

I'm at work and have only had time to skim this topic. But looking at all the talk of developing a new engine, does anyone think it would be a worthwhile short term, cost effective investment to buy back the changes that other companies have made to source? Titanfall 2 runs on a heavily modified version of Source and works fantastically.

Although, I do hope that if they do produce something new in-house, that it's suitably innovative to require something more unique or newly developed.

[YoloSwag]

18 hours ago, Finwillwin said:

They need to start taking in indie teams and limiting the developers who release games on Steam.

I think they do buy out indie teams like with Campo Santo. However I don't think Gaben would ever limit releases on Steam, just probably filter some but remember when Steam literally approved the release of thousands of those weird anime-like games not too long ago?

 

3 hours ago, mxk. said:

  Hide contents

 

I'm pretty mad about the new csgo update. I really feel like they should have made prime cost more to stray cheaters away from buying the game. But now, just today, they release an update saying that if a non prime free account hits level 21, they get prime.

 

What's the fucking point of even buying the game for 15? Obviously, you have to farm XP, but thats not an issue for a person spin botting in a comp game. Comp games give you a lot of XP if you do well, and if a cheater goes blatant or does really well they'll get to level 21 pretty quickly, then be playing with a larger group of legit players. Vavle's VACnet AI better be fucking working...

 

Rant^

 

I think they should make a new counter strike on the source 2 engine, or they should be paying wayyyy more attention to the community. They've been doing good, but the fact that they just killed paying for prime csgo, is silly to me. I went more in depth in my rant.

I predict it could be another 3-5 years before they ever release a new one alongside an improved Dota 2. They're still milking it nicely.

 

2 hours ago, CookieSmasherGus said:

Ugh, at this point I'd prefer a well made shooter MMO. Some kind of weird mix of Borderlands, Fallout, Warframe and maybe Stalker. Sounds weird but I'd be really into it. I know about Planetside and its ok, but poorly optimized so I can't really play it and I've heard its being milked for money with poor decisions. Day of Defeat looks kinda old, not a lot of kids would play it.

You mean like Anthem and Destiny? I think they can make one however I don't think it would be their forte. It could work if VALVE acquired a studio that makes these games and publishes it. Day of Defeat: Global Offensive could work though if they can make it like Battlefield and Modern Warfare using a new engine.

 

Also, I'm still kind of mad about how a generation of gamers don't know TF2 when Overwatch and Paladins are HEAVILY influenced by it.

2 hours ago, Ross Siggers said:

I'm at work and have only had time to skim this topic. But looking at all the talk of developing a new engine, does anyone think it would be a worthwhile short term, cost effective investment to buy back the changes that other companies have made to source? Titanfall 2 runs on a heavily modified version of Source and works fantastically.

Although, I do hope that if they do produce something new in-house, that it's suitably innovative to require something more unique or newly developed.

I didn't know that about Titanfall 2. I think they'll get ripped off if they try to buy other engines even though it was originally their own. But I don't think they would do that either since a lot of their older games were built from the modified engines of other studios.

 

Once they just give up on monetization schemes I think they'll finally make something interesting.

[CookieSmasherGus]

On 1/25/2019 at 1:24 PM, YoloSwag said:

You mean like Anthem and Destiny? I think they can make one however I don't think it would be their forte. It could work if VALVE acquired a studio that makes these games and publishes it. Day of Defeat: Global Offensive could work though if they can make it like Battlefield and Modern Warfare using a new engine.

 

Also, I'm still kind of mad about how a generation of gamers don't know TF2 when Overwatch and Paladins are HEAVILY influenced by it.

I've played TF2 before getting into Overwatch, there are similarities for sure, but they are very different. Overwatch is very team based while in TF2 you can play solo and still do pretty well.

I'm going to try out Destiny pretty soon because I've heard it's quite similar to Borderlands (which I really enjoyed). I'm just not that interested in the idea of Day of Defeat because there are plenty of military shooters out already (CSGO, CoD, Battlefield etc). Unless they make some really interesting twist on it. I guess its just personal preference because I like shooters with less conventional guns like UT or Quake.

[YoloSwag]

1 hour ago, CookieSmasherGus said:

I've played TF2 before getting into Overwatch, there are similarities for sure, but they are very different. Overwatch is very team based while in TF2 you can play solo and still do pretty well.

I'm going to try out Destiny pretty soon because I've heard it's quite similar to Borderlands (which I really enjoyed). I'm just not that interested in the idea of Day of Defeat because there are plenty of military shooters out already (CSGO, CoD, Battlefield etc). Unless they make some really interesting twist on it. I guess its just personal preference because I like shooters with less conventional guns like UT or Quake.

I did enjoy Quake 4's death matches back in the day. Also watching Fatal1ty play back then, pretty awesome.