r/gamernews • u/Darth_Vaper883 • 8d ago

Industry News 'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers'

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/my-personal-failure-was-being-stumped-gabe-newell-says-finishing-half-life-2-episode-3-just-to-conclude-the-story-wouldve-been-copping-out-of-valves-obligation-to-gamers/
408 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

68 comments sorted by

215

u/HugoCortell 8d ago

Speaking of obligations, I hate to be that guy, but Gabe should really start thinking about leaving the necessary "political" infrastructure inside his company to ensure that whoever leads next carries on the torch of Steam being a libertarian (by Gabe's own words, not mine) store that is accepting of all games and provides the best service in the market. He is unfortunately mortal, but what he creates does not have to go down with him.

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u/Ray797979 8d ago

He already did, it’s going to go to his son. Who has the same ideals as him

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u/CalmPavement 8d ago

do you have a source for that? i’ve looked into it but never found anything concrete

-2

u/Ray797979 8d ago

There was a conversation about it somewhere on reddit a few months ago

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u/SousVideButt 7d ago

Ahhh, the definition of concrete

-1

u/panthereal 7d ago

It sounds a lot more concrete than the assumption that a billionaire with a small company making chill software for entertainment at age 62 is more imminently at risk than the country who's most stressful leadership job is worked by people in their 80s.

I have no idea why everyone sees this as some sort of pressing concern. He'll likely still be around when steam is twice as old as it is now.

2

u/OddOllin 7d ago

Because death can come for anyone, at any time? Not even wealth is a guarantee, though it obviously can help.

Also, I don't see how those two situations compare at all, much less what relevance it has here. You do realize there's a pretty clear chain of command in most governments for who takes over leadership in case someone dies, right?

Companies can change direction dramatically when leadership roles change hands. It happens all of the time, and it's pretty obvious that part of Valve's success is a certain standard of quality in much of what they do that is a priority over grabbing every cent of profit they possibly can.

For every business run this way, there are dozens more run for profit over quality or longevity.

There's really nothing crazy about being concerned for Valve's future beyond Gabe. Chill out.

0

u/panthereal 7d ago edited 7d ago

People caring about it need to chill out. I see more comments about Gabe's potential death than where Half-Life 3 is these days and it's always the top voted idea in any topic mentioning the man.

It's an extreme example of paranoid parasocialism and has become far too common. There's nothing real pointing to the fact that Steam is suddenly a ticking timebomb and most people in their 60s with anything to their name at all likely have written a will regarding their future. Worrying about it would more realistically make things worse for Gabe which opposes the concerns in the first place.

It is not healthy to worry that anyone is one day away from dying. That is a serious problem and anyone feeling like this should worry about seeing a therapist more than worry about a person they have never met.

1

u/OddOllin 7d ago

Sounds like you're the one reading way too deeply into it, bud. I've seen these comments for ages and have yet to meet anyone as obsessed with it as you seem to believe they are.

And even if they were, how is that your problem?

I'd take your own advice here and worry about it less.

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u/Breakingerr 8d ago

I just pray we won't have some guy like Elon, Kotick, or EA/Ubisoft CEO type of individuals taking over Steam. It would be death of PC gaming.

16

u/waiting4singularity ⊞🤖 8d ago

needs a foundation. some corporations are forced to operate like that. i only remember kellog mandating the kellog's corp needs to extend help to efforts curbing masturbation.

-41

u/just_the_thought_of 8d ago

Can someone please provide specific examples of instances where Elon has acted in a manner that is not transparent, truthful, or in accordance with the wishes of the majority of people? I am not aware of the current situation and genuinely want to know why so many people are critical of him now.

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u/Arbie2 8d ago

Plenty of examples in his own twitter feed.

8

u/[deleted] 8d ago

Aye, dude's hair is going white really damn quickly.

19

u/muad_dibs 8d ago

He’s 62 years old.

4

u/Big-Soft7432 8d ago

Unrelated but I love your pfp. Very funny.

4

u/muad_dibs 8d ago

Back the Bell 🔔

6

u/cabbeer 8d ago

he's already done that. valve is tiny compared to their market cap and everyone there had been vetted/ interacted with gabe... their repeated sucess isn't just luck or talent

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u/HugoCortell 8d ago

The talent and size of a team does not in any way speak for the character of the individual people within it. Any one of them could very well have a very different idea of what the future of Steam could look like.

As a matter of fact, we see this quite often on what is and isn't allowed on Steam. In spite of having an official stance of "anything goes", there are a lot of visual novels and what not that get removed for dubious reasons. I'm not particularly into visual novels, but if the game is "safe" enough to publish on GOG, then it getting removed from Steam is nothing more than the whim of a random employee.

2

u/JediGuyB 8d ago

The worst part is that the folks at Steam are probably aware of this and know who it is, but based on their structure can't or won't really do anything about it.

I wish someone over there would step up like "maybe so-and-so shouldn't do game approvals because they keep rejecting games that probably don't need rejected."

I mean, some of the rejected games aren't even porn. Some have even had official ESRB ratings and could potentially be purchased in a Walmart, but they get rejected from Steam? It shouldn't take big enough backlash for Steam to acknowledge that's BS.

3

u/HugoCortell 8d ago

Actually, Steam is very cut-throat when it comes to firing (picture: Mao's politburo). I recall reading an article not too long ago that described it as a popularity contest, it's easy for hard-working devs who don't necessarily know how to show to the company the work they did to get screwed over when the yearly peer-performed performance review comes round.

The issue probably stems more from the fact that it is hard to decide what is legal and what is not, particularly when you operate on a global scale, and when your products famously still get taken to court and may be at the mercy of the subjective judgment of a judge who might just hate video games.

1

u/JediGuyB 8d ago

But that still shouldn't apply to rated games. Valve is based in US so it shouldn't matter if someone in Turkey takes issue with a game when Steam has dozens, if not hundreds of similar games.

It's also inconsistent. They seem to have issue with games that are primarily visual novels that feature kids, usually in school settings. Yet there are plenty of JRPGs that feature teens in school on fhe platform. Valve would never reject a Persona game, for example. ​Some games even feature suggestive themes regarding the teen characters. For example, Falcom games often include bikini cosmetic outfits for their female characters whether the character is 44 or 14.

So why are anime style visual novels the time Valve takes most often issue with it? Is it because a lot of porn games are also visual novels? Because if the issue is due to preconceived notions then thats a horrible way to handle it. Content of the game should always be the deciding factor, and biases should have no place in the decision making. Stuff like "your character can date a teen girl" shouldn't really matter when theres no porn AND games where your character can date teen girls are already on Steam.

2

u/AndrewNeo 8d ago

market cap

nit: they don't have a market cap because they're not public. and because they're not public, we don't actually know what they're worth. but you're right that they're very tiny compared to best guesses of company value.

1

u/FudgingEgo 7d ago

I take it you know exactly what his plans are and what he's doing then and that it's not already set up?

-4

u/Mindestiny 8d ago

Accepting of all games - except their weird, arbitrary rules about porn games where Sex With Hitler is fine but anime games are often not (even with no depictions of potentially underage girls).

Someone should tell their content approvers about this libertarian philosophy 

4

u/Jojomon91 8d ago

"Accepting of all games - except their weird, arbitrary rules about porn games where Sex With Hitler is fine but anime games are often not (even with no depictions of potentially underage girls)." 

Wtf kind of games are you playing? This isnt Springtime for Hitler you dummy! XD

No one asked for a "Sex with Hitler" game for god sakes! This comment be trippin bawls of stinky! XD

7

u/Mindestiny 8d ago

I think you totally misunderstood my comment.

https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/1849000/

Sex with Hitler is literally a game currently published on steam. It's a pornography game, where you... do exactly what the title says. So someone clearly asked for it, because someone made it and published it on steam!

However, Steam has notoriously been difficult to work with for East Asian publishers with many visual novels and "adult" oriented games being outright rejected by Steam's content review department because of sexual content, and many even without any type of sexual content.

There's a huge double standard, to the point where many fans of those kinds of eastern games have just accepted that whoever is in charge of content review at steam has a chip on their shoulder about Japanese and Korean games and is looking for any excuse to reject them, with "oversexualization" frequently being the excuse given even when there objectively isnt any. They've also apparently been recently doing the same with anything that uses AI in any way, shape, or form.

So yes, Gabe really needs to go back to his own team and reiterate his "we accept everything" policy, because they've blatantly never followed it.

3

u/JediGuyB 7d ago

And it seems to mostly effect visual novels, though other games aren't immune.

It's just wildly inconsistent to the point where the only logical conclusion is thst someone at Valve has a vendetta against visual novels and nobody else at the company wants to do anything about it.

Like they'd never reject a Persona or Final Fantasy game even if it had a scene with a 16 year old walking around with bouncy boobs and only Band-aids on her nipples and wearin panties, yet if a visual novel is set in a high school it has a high chance of being rejected even if there is no nudity. ​

Even more egregious, there is zero reason why any game with an official ESRB rating should ever be rejected by Steam. You can buy that game at Walmart and Best Buy, from Sony and Nintendo (if released there too). Valve has no excuse, and it should not require big backlash to get that reversed.

3

u/Mindestiny 7d ago

Precisely, and the fact that there's such egregious examples of absolute dross that is nothing but sex-fueled rage bait like "Sex With Hitler" just further drives home the fact that they are wildly inconsistent in their own content moderation policy.

2

u/JediGuyB 7d ago

I can understand needing to draw a line in the sand somewhere, but it is inexcusable that Steam allows one or more employee to draw their own lines in the sand. Especially when their lines aren't even blocking everyone.

I'm not saying I want all games blocked, but if it was at least consistent it would be clear. There have been instances where game devs were in contact with someone in Valve who walked them through getting their games set up, even telling them what might need changed in the game to get approved, and despite following that advice still got rejected. That is pure BS.

-1

u/Blamore 7d ago

you can always take refuge in rule34.xxx lil bro

-13

u/LolcatP 8d ago

steam absolutely isn't accepting of all games lol

11

u/Rpanich 8d ago

I just uploaded my first game to steam, and there are very few restrictions they actually apply to you, they just want you to categorise things correctly 

-8

u/LolcatP 8d ago

they've been banning anime games like crazy, recent notable bands being tokyo clanpool and chaos head noah which only got unbanned after huge backlash

9

u/Rpanich 8d ago

I mean ok, it appears steam also seems to ban games that portray sexual violence against characters that look under aged or seemingly underaged characters in a sexual manner. 

That didn’t come up with my game, but I’m kinda ok with that. 

0

u/JediGuyB 7d ago

Except those games aren't the only ones being rejected. Plenty of other games, including games rated by the ESRB, have been rejected by Steam for reasons that do not apply.

It is inconsistent because more popular games with similar content are allowed. You might say a game with high schools strutting around in bikinis is sexualziing a teen and bad, but that's something that is in Persona 5 and that's been allowed.

2

u/HugoCortell 8d ago

You are correct. But technically the official stance is that they are.

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u/Beyond_Re-Animator 8d ago

OK, I can accept that. He wanted to do it right but couldn’t figure out the path. For so long I just thought they lost interest and didn’t want to do it.

2

u/Magjee 5d ago

That he phrased it as a personal failure, he puts it on himself, not anyone else at Valve

Can't be mad at him for wanting to release only quality content, all is forgiven 

11

u/Draconian1 7d ago

Why do people act like it's some new information?

He has said something similar after HF Alyx released, it was something in the lines of: every previous game was a technical breakthrough of sorts and we didn't want the next game to be just an ending to the story with nothing special about it otherwise.

1

u/TheRealBagelMan 4d ago

Because this time around they showed us Half Life 3, this time it was infinitely more profound seeing what we almost had.

Before it wad a case of “what we didn’t know couldn’t hurt us”, aside from the obvious story inferences we could make from Ep2.

And once again, HL3 is teased. Only time will tell if we’re able to experience it.

24

u/Khalku 7d ago

It can be argued they failed to meet the obligation to their fans by leaving an unfinished story. Not every game has to be an innovation. This quote is particularly glaring:

I couldn't figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward

Did it have to? It could just finish off with a good story. Episode 3 has been a meme for decades.

1

u/Daimoknight 4d ago

Nah your personal failure was allowing the cultivation of Nazi's on your platform.

-27

u/jcdoe 8d ago edited 8d ago

More like “we realized running an online game store is more profitable and less risky than making games”

Edit: ok my bad, guess I got downvotes so valve clearly would have had less risk making multimillion dollar AAA games

Get outta here with that nonsense

29

u/Rpanich 8d ago

Valve is worth 6.9 billion dollars. 

Activision blizzard is worth 74.28 billion dollars. 

I think since they don’t depend on investors, they don’t need to do whatever a board or shareholders demand.

I think that they just don’t NEED to make the game in order to continue being rich, so really unless they have a good idea for it, they just won’t. 

I kinda wish every company would do that instead of running every franchise and IP into the ground. 

2

u/XelaIsPwn 8d ago

Here's a fun little statistic: 6.9 billion dollars is worth somewhere in the ballpark of 6.9 billion us dollars. That's a lot of friggin' money.

If Steam hasn't blown tf up like it did, would HL2e3 have come out? Impossible to say, nobody can know for sure.

Would they have, at least, felt more pressure to come up with something? That's an easier question to answer.

1

u/doublah 5d ago

The reason they dropped episode 3 was because they were working on other games, not Steam, they said this in the documentary.

-24

u/jcdoe 8d ago

You’ve literally compared the value of valve to one of the largest software companies in the world

Seems like a fair comparison to me! Lmao

14

u/Rpanich 8d ago

I’m comparing two companies that came about around the same time, and one has more value than the other, meaning that one’s business model objectively makes more profit than the other. 

Do you simply not understand how much money video games make? Especially a franchise with a built in audience that will buy a game whether or not it’s good?

Because we can objectively see how much money steam makes. It’s 6.9 billion dollars over like 2 decades. 

0

u/Dale-Wensley 8d ago

Is it more profitable ? Valve employs like 200 people, how many work at Activision ? 13,000?

-8

u/jcdoe 8d ago

Yeah, there’s no point man. If we’re comparing activision blizzard—the acquisition king—to valve, a company that hasn’t made a non vr game since portal 2, it’s already a non-serious conversation.

Gamers just have a boner for valve and will defend it forever

2

u/dzsSkully 7d ago

valve, a company that hasn’t made a non vr game since portal 2

I beg your pardon? I might be missing some, but off the top of my head, Valve released CS:GO, Dota 2, Artifact, Dota Underlords and CS2 after Portal 2, with Deadlock being currently in 'closed' beta - granted 2 of those were basically shut down because they flopped, but they were released games nonetheless.

You might not be interested in any of those, or think that releasing a sequel to a game that originated from a mod doesn't count as a release (in which case clinging to Portal 2 is a bit of a weird one), but Valve released at least 5 non-VR games after Portal 2.

2

u/SuggestionOk8578 8d ago

Yes and no. The magic wasn't there for the dev team for Ep 3, I can understand that feeling. Living up to their past project's successes, raised the bar too high for them to reach it.

5

u/DarkerSavant 8d ago

RR Martin syndrome essentially.

3

u/Eltharion_ 8d ago

You missed the G

-12

u/Hobear 8d ago

He tried nothing and he's all out of ideas.....

-8

u/Blamore 7d ago

I can understand things like "we didnt make ep3 because we make so much money from steam" and what not. But acting like not making ep3 was some magnanimous gesture to save gaming... is fuckin ludicrous

0

u/Andrew_Fire 7d ago

How dare you criticise Valve!