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Here an interview with Gabe Newell (Valve's boss, for the ignorant among us). Does anyone understand what he is saying in the part I quoted below (when asked why it takes so long to come up with HL2 episode 3)?
Quote:
Newell: I want to make sure that I don’t sound like I’m dismissing user’s issues, right? I get a ton of email everyday saying why aren’t you talking about Episode 3? And there are very good reasons why we’re not talking about Episode 3, which I can’t talk about yet, but I will. So, I think there’s frustration there and I’m not somehow going to say that that’s not legitimate or length isn’t a concern or regularity. The speed with which these updates are coming out, people say, “Hey, gee, these episodes are supposed to be shorter and you take 25 years to ship each one.” So, I don’t wanna somehow dismiss those, or sort of throw them under - but I think we’re in much better shape than would have been, in terms of our ability to move stuff, technology, products, uh, forward faster by changing how, ya know, being different than, ya know, there was Half-Life 2 and then there was post-Half-Life 2 in terms of how we were approaching these things and yea, I think that we’re overall pretty happy without somehow dismissing the legitimate complaints that people should have towards us. But, we’re happy with that choice that we made.
G4: Do you think we’ll find out new details about Episode 3 by the end of the year?
Newell: Just so you know, the thing to me, that feels right, is the rhythm that Robin and his team are operating with. It’s like watching the reaction of that community, watching their ability to respond, looking at the quality of the work they’re getting with the length of those development cycles. They’re having a great time. And I think it shows on the other side, right? I mean, they were just giggling so hard when they were changing the buttons in the movies to say “leak video.” Do you remember the big screen with all the buttons? And they were like we have to put “leaks video” into that thing before we release it. They were just like cackling away. What should have been like, pretty demoralizing and stressful was for them, “Oh, this is no big deal.” So, yeah, people get the idea.
Posted: Fri Jun 12, 2009 1:05 am
Alez
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"but I think we’re in much better shape than would have been, in terms of our "
That's where it stopped making any fucking sense to me.
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Posted: Fri Jun 12, 2009 1:11 am
berzerker
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Another Gabe answer, in reaction to a question about Valve movies (I must have missed those, what movies has Valve made?):
Quote:
Newell: Well, one of the things it grows out of – answering the question – it’s like copy protection. When you think about copy protection as the thing that harms the service value that you’re creating, then it’s not that surprising that it’s not a way to fight piracy because you have to fight piracy at the service level, right? Building a bunch of expensive and painful technology that makes customers worried about whether or not their entertainment products are going to work on their next PC or when they go over to a friend’s house, that’s exactly backwards from what you should do. You should be able to make a promise to a customer that’s like, if you can connect to a PC, you can connect to this entertainment experience that you’d paid for and hey, if you can figure out how to integrate an iPhone into that experience, that’s going to be that much better.
From a model perspective, we’d like to say, hey, if you can play it on the PC, you can play it on an Xbox. You don’t care, right? That’s the direction that we see as being super valuable and also being something that would be very hard for the pirates to duplicate because people sort of ignore the fact that the ways that pirates get traction are, like in Russia, the pirates in Russia were translating. They were localizing the product, like half a year ahead of the publishers and they were making it available day and date. That’s not piracy, that’s like really useful as far as the customer is concerned. And if you just catch up with the pirates in terms of the useful service that they’re offering, all of a sudden you get lots and lots of sales and you should get ahead of the pirates, not be impaling yourself on things like copy protection, which freak customers out in total justifiable way.
And then once you have that sort of on-going relationship with customers, it turns out that doing these movies is a great piece of the equation. I mean, in the same way that customers were telling us, by their early, and really aggressive use of the internet, I mean it was this weird situation, where your average gamer had spent more time on the internet than your average marketing executive at a game publisher. They were like “Oh yea, I’ve downloaded something off of a BBS.” and “Yea, I’ve purchased a product on the internet” and they were ahead in terms of realizing the changes that the internet represented to gaming. I think they’re ahead of us again in terms of their notion of what an entertainment property should be. And one of those pieces, along with everything else, is that it’s a cross-media entertainment experience. And, the nice thing is that we can measure that, right? So, we put out a movie, and we see what happens with the community, they all start playing again. They all start gifting copies of the product to their friends. They play longer when they play. So they’re trying to tell us pretty clearly that when they’re fans of Team Fortress or Left 4 Dead or whatever that these story-telling pieces are an important part of what we need to do. And I don’t want us to go hire some third-party production studio who have no insight into the customers or into the world or into these characters, right?
It’s not like something they want us to shop out, they don’t want us to call up Steven Spielberg. They want the people who made Team Fortress exciting and cool, who can capture that, who are most likely to be able to capture that and translate it to do that. But this is really a case of us sort of, following where our customers are leading us, and they’re like pretty clearly sending us this signal that we don’t get to be just a games company anymore. That it’s harder, a harder thing that we need to do which is be more of an entertainment company.
Translation: he thinks his customers want Valve to make not just games but also movies, and he infers this from the fact that after a movie has been released that tells a part of the story, there is renewed interest in the game.
If my translation is correct, then it would seem silly, because creating new game content rather than movies would also get the customer back to the game, probably even more so.
hl2 was a bore and so where all the episodes....its the same boring formula they use all over. its basically left for dead toned down formula. oh sorry there is the exception of better graphics and gravity puzzles which should be more like portal. so it doesnt affect me in the least if ep3 comes out today or 10years later......suislide however will be paranoid impatient i mean its a valve game rt?
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Posted: Mon Jul 13, 2009 5:39 am
berzerker
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_Master_ wrote:
hl2 was a bore and so where all the episodes....its the same boring formula they use all over. its basically left for dead toned down formula. oh sorry there is the exception of better graphics and gravity puzzles which should be more like portal. so it doesnt affect me in the least if ep3 comes out today or 10years later
Basically I agree. This applies to any shooter actually. Most shooters get boring pretty quickly, and therefore I tend to play them in relatively short intervals (of half an hour or so). The first half hour is fun, so just quit when it becomes dull and continue next day or week. Shooters are not very long anyway nowadays, so you can still finish them within a few weeks.
FEAR was worst in this respect BTW.
I could play some RPG's or adventures all day BTW, just not shooters.
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i mean its a valve game rt?