Why is the publishing industry such a pride of dicks?
Aside from the example you gave, in what ways are they dicks?
They rush broken games to meet deadlines, then usually fail to support all but the most successful games.
They fire staff between those rush periods to save money, and then force them to work unpaid overtime again during the rush periods.
They create content alongside a game and then release it as extra paid DLC on day one, gouging you for extra money for what should be in the game in the first place.
They close off mod tools and customization - which has traditionally been a way for the user community to create tons of awesome content for the game - often better than what the game comes with - in order to force-feed us this dlc.
They buy out exclusive licenses to certain properties rather than compete on the quality of the product (most glaring example being EA and the NFL).
The bean pushers ignore the technical people and put in nasty DRM that doesn’t actually prevent piracy but actually encourages it because the drm-free cracked versions are superior products. The people who actually legitimately buy the game become inconvenienced and treated like criminals.
They will run a successful property into the ground by shovelling out barely different versions of games on short time spans that don’t offer much new content - like the COD series or Madden - while often buying up, mishandling, and crushing any small studio that’s actually looking to innovate.
When doing multiplat games, they only make it as good as the lowest common denominator, the worst platform they’re designing for, crippling the games for better platforms when with a little extra work they could make it good for everyone.
They generally treat the actual talent - the developers - like shit, controlling them into shitty contracts while reaping the benefit of their works. In a lot of ways they’re slimier than the music industry and their relationship with recording artists. Digital distribution is allowing more studios to self-publish and fix this, but it has a long ridiculous history of dickishness.
That’s just off the top of my head - I could come up with more if I gave it some thought.
Came in to say that I mostly agree with SenorBeef - Valve is largely great because they’re a ‘nice’ publisher. That’s a reason to like them in itself, but it also leads to their games being better.
In a maybe-separate-or-maybe-related point, it is illustrative to listen to some of the developer commentary in the Left 4 Dead games or Portal (maybe others - those are the ones I’ve listened to though). For instance, did you know that in Left 4 Dead there used to be a special type of zombie called (I think) a Screamer? The idea was you’d see it and it’d suddenly run away, and if you didn’t manage to kill it in a certain amount of time, it’d start screaming really loudly and attract the horde. So the moment you spotted a screamer, the game’s focus shifted to killing the screamer at all costs. The zombie itself was a former person in a straitjacket. Sounds like a pretty neat idea to me, especially given their notions that special infected should suddenly change how you play (Boomers and Witches break the ‘shoot anything that moves’ rule, for instance, and Spitters and Chargers break the ‘stick close to your teammates’ rule). But, they implemented the Screamer, apparently including at least concept art and perhaps in-game art, tweaked it a bit for maximum fun, and… found that it wasn’t much fun. It was too hard to see a screamer as separate from the regular zombies, so encountering one was a bit of a crapshoot. So they did something that a lot of developers wouldn’t do - they got rid of it. All that effort, all those developer hours, gone! Partly because their designers understand that less is more. But I would argue that it’s because as publishers, they aren’t dicks. Often in that situation, a developer would know that a feature sucks, but they can’t (or feel that they can’t) go to their publisher and say ‘hey you know that month of work that you funded? We’re cutting it’. So they leave it in, and perhaps even spend more months of work polishing it, and their game is worse for it. But Valve has the finances, the clout, and the philosophy that allows it to make the right decision for their games independent of concerns like that. I think that’s a big part of what makes their games so consistently good.
(The commentary reveals another reason - they grasp that loads and loads of playtesting is highly valuable - but they’re not really the only company to have cottoned onto that fact.)
QFT.
There may be other games but these are the only real ones. Kinda like Bllizzard. If you like their style games you will always love them, otherwise you never will. .
Aren’t Counter Strike and Team Fortress just Half Life mods?
I think Left 4 Dead should count as a Valve game as Turtle Rock was purchased by Valve very early in development.
Oh, also, this is wrong…
The NFL went to EA (and Take-Two) with the exclusive license plan. The fact that EA made the deal was just smart business from their point of view. What should they have done? Let Take-Two buy up the license and let their Madden cash cow dry up?
http://money.cnn.com/2004/12/14/commentary/game_over/column_gaming/
Ditto to everything in SenorBeef’s wonderful post.
In addition, I’d also mention Valve’s smartness, creativity, openness and good humor in their marketing and interactions with the public.
Creativity in marketing is plentiful, such as the staggeringly inventive Portal ARG (which began courtesy of an unannounced, mystery update to the game’s existing radios); the hilarious blog posts, comics and trailer/character videos for TF2 (mostly to promote free updates, though of course they also helped sell the games too); also, that recent comic for the L4D/L4D2 crossover stunt. (Sorry, I’m more vague on that 'cause I don’t play those games.)
Then there’s their skill in communicating with their community members: most of the high-ups in Valve respond to one-on-one emails, including Gabe himself.
Of course, they’re not perfect. Every company gets complaints, and every company makes mistakes – or perceived mistakes, depending on your POV. It’s how the company responds that makes its reputation unique.
Back when L4D2 was announced and released only a year after the original game, a sizeable portion of the community was outraged: among the reasons were a) many thought the sequel was pointless and would just retread the old material, b) they were disappointed by how little free content had been released for L4D, and c) they feared the imminent new sequel would make the game they just bought a year ago obsolete, thus destroying or at least splitting the multiplayer community. The famous boycott that resulted probably didn’t hamper sales too much, but they sure raised a ruckus.
I think 95% of most other huge game publishers would’ve just rolled their collective eyes and said “we’re sorry they feel that way but too bad, pre-sales for the new game are through the roof so we don’t give a rat’s ass.” Instead, before the sequel was launched, Gabe actually invited the guys who’d spearheaded the boycott movement out to Valve to show them the game’s progress and features. Result: the guys were actually satisfied by what they saw, and when they got back, they admitted that the new game wasn’t just a retread and said their complaints had been satisfactorally lessened. Now, some hardliners cried “payola” and “bribery,” or at least they accused the original two boycotters that they’d been too starstruck by Gabe & co’s awesomeness to fight the good fight. One could definitely argue that either one was in Gabe’s mind when he issued the invitation. Or maybe he sincerely believed that showing the two boycotters the sequel of which Gabe & co. were so proud would do the trick. Either way, the boycott was defused in an amicable and savvy way.
Fun follow-up as another example: Some weeks after this, a young L4D modder in Australia, who’d been chatting with Gabe about mod creation, jokingly demanded that Gabe fly him out to Valve so he could show Gabe et al. his mod campaign. Gabe wrote back the quip, “Sorry, we’re boycotting your campaign.” The modder responded with, “Does… does this mean I have to fly you out here?” Gabe replied: “Me and Erik.” (Meaning Erik Johnson, another Valve bigwig.)
And thus was born a crazy fundraising idea, where the modder asked the community at large for funds for the airline tickets (around $3K). Unbelievably, the money was raised and the modder contacted Gabe triumphantly. Naturally, Gabe rejected the donation, which was instead given to charity, and flew himself out to Sydney to attend a convention and meet with the kid to view his campaign! Here’s the blog where the whole tale is laid out.
And that’s just one example. Gabe’s recent replying to a random customer’s email request for a donation to a heart charity with a $100 donation is another.
TL,DR version of this egregiously long post: The great games and services are why Valve is so acclaimed and well-respected. The sense that there are imaginative, game-loving, smart, funny, down-to-earth people at the helm is why Valve is loved.
So wait, are you saying that if I write 2 books at one time I’m somehow obliged to give them both to you at once for the cost of one book? Should you be able to use your ticket stub from Harry Potter 7a as free entry to Harry Potter 7b?
Who are you to decide what content creators are or are not obligated to give you for free?
No, it’s more like this. You go to a movie with your friends and like it. You decide to go see the sequel with your friends, but now you have to pay an extra $6.50 just to have your friends there. Also, if you want a chair for the movie instead of standing up, well, that’s another $5. And if you want the movie to be more than 35 minutes long, well, that’s another $10. In other words, the second product (without additional charges) isn’t anything like the first product because it’s now a part of a successful franchise, which will be now milked to its inevitable death through shitty sequels, relentless mining of microtransactions, and poor support.
Nobody is debating that game publishers have a legal right to release schlock, but the question is why Valve is so respected among gamers. It’s because they don’t play games like this with people. Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.
Valve rocks for no other reason than the Orange Box. For less than the price of a ‘normal’ AAA game, I got TF, Half Life…and Portal…the bestest gaming experience evar, if only for the closing credits.
Games don’t translate well to other media, but it’s more like having to pay extra for cover art on a book.
Eh, not so small a thing. It’s more like the publisher ripped out all the pages of a filler chapter before shipping, bound it in a cheap folio, and told the book store to sell the missing chapter for 5 bucks.
Either way, the problem is that if it’s not presented well, it can go badly for the publisher and generate ill will among the consumers. If they feel you’re charging 100% of the going rate for 90% of the content they would normally get, they’re going to get unhappy.
Counter Strike yes. Well, 1.6 was. CS:Source is an adaptation of the CS game into the source engine. It isn’t really a new property, just an update, so I guess you could call it a mod.
The original TF was a quake mod. TF2 has enough redesign/new content/etc. to be a new game that stands on its own several times over again. TFC would be the equivelant of a modern/updated TF here - TF2 is pretty much a completely new game inspired by the old one.
Yeah, this analogy comes closest. It used to be that games had expansion packs. These were meaty content packs - not just a few quests here and there, or a few new vehicles, or maps - they were significant continuations on the original game with lots of new content. They’d usually sell in the $20-40 range, but they’d give a huge new life to games. They’d be developed after the original game was done and could stand on its own. But consoles can’t really work well with expansions because the game isn’t installed, so you can’t really add a bunch of stuff on top of the base game. DLCs work because they’re much more modest in scope.
DLC, though, is generally much smaller scale. It’s a few cars, a few maps, a few quests - sometimes it can be fairly substantial, but sometimes it can be quite small. DLC could be used to good effect in theory - although their bit by bit nature means they could never rework the fundamentals in a way that say the starcraft or warcraft III expansions could. But publishers historically got away with giving less and less in a DLC, and eventually they just started taking assets that were part of the original game, removing them, and then selling them back to you. Often this content is even located on the original game disk - just needing a $10 purchase to become unlocked or usable.
So extra content went from being essentially a big extension of the original game, or often adding entirely new functionality - to being a modest way to add little bits to a game - to a way of breaking up a game into pieces and selling them to you bit by bit.
Valve not engaging in that bullshit is part of the reason they are loved. Oh, they make DLC - quite a bit of it - but it’s just free extra content. Ironically they have a hard time giving away free content for the console versions of their games because MS/Sony contractually require people to charge money for that stuff.
Valve’s hands aren’t that clean. Some of the Mann Store stuff is pretty sketchy, like the $2.50 keys and minimum purchase amounts.
Oh please. Nothing in the Mann Store is all that important. People could pay to get cosmetic items. As far as keys, who cares? The whole crate thing is kinda silly in the first place. I guess if anything it’d be nice if you could turn crate drops out since that is pretty obnoxious.
Valve gives most of the money from Mann store purchases to the community who created the items anyway. How often do you see that?
Edit: Actually, I guess the polycount set item bonus thing was a pretty bad idea all around, but it’s not pay to play - most people get theirs from crafting or drops.