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S3 Ep257: Valve Corporation
100 Plays3 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they dig into the history and discuss the games of the biggest PC publisher of all time - Valve!
Intro:
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Intro:
- Half Life 2 - Hazardous Environments
- Left 4 Dead - The Monsters Without
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
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Transcript
Comedic banter and humor in podcasting
00:00:24
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Substone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host is always Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? Terrible. It took my kidneys. Both of them. Oh. That's not ideal. You're supposed to keep one of those, I think, right?
00:00:44
Speaker
Yeah, you should keep one on hand at all times, and the other one in the freezer is a backup. Mm-hmm, yeah. Well, somebody got the keys. I mean, the one on me was pretty easy to find. I'm very surprised I didn't wake up, but, you know.
00:01:00
Speaker
Well, I guess we should probably jump right in then, because I don't know how long you can live without kidneys, but I think those are pretty important. Well, I found some backup kidney beans that I'm eating slowly and hoping for the best. Gotcha. It'll just grow into a full-sized large kidney bean in your body. I have said so many times, I am not a scientist. I'm just doing my goddamn best, you know?
00:01:30
Speaker
I like that. I like that as an excuse for pretty much anything, right? Regardless of what circumstance you're in, you're just like, you're sitting there. You've got like a bloody ax. You're standing over someone on the ground. You're like, I am not a scientist. I'm just doing my best. We'll get that splinter. Yeah. I think that's fair.
00:01:57
Speaker
I do occasionally find myself in a situation where like I might do something a little bit dumb or not smart. Usually I'm doing something dumb. It's for a meme because I think that's funny to emulate somebody who just doesn't have the forethought. Right. But then there are other times I just honestly maybe don't know. It's always like when that's approached with like a benefit of the doubt thing instead of like I'm just actually maliciously that
Valve's impact on PC gaming
00:02:25
Speaker
stupid.
00:02:25
Speaker
There's a reference I'm missing, not you're having a stroke, right? A fine line in between. Yeah, it's definitely good to weave that a little bit so you maintain the goodwill of the people around you to give you the benefit of the doubt without yourself becoming the person that it's just like...
00:02:47
Speaker
This person's always online or something like that. Memelord 24-7, whatever the heck. Yeah, I really like the jumping back and forth. Yeah. The place that's always safe is the call and response game.
00:03:05
Speaker
I think. And I can't call it mockery. But that that's that's the space. Someone says something and I can't even think of any of them off the top of my head. And there's an immediate follow up of OK, here's here. Here's the other part of the line.
00:03:25
Speaker
No, it's a one of those beautiful examples of memetics as a whole and how humans communicate with each other. But it's nice to have like some in humor. I just like when the in humor comes up intermittently, like I hate when something gets beat to death. Yes. It's like for a week, everyone's like, yeah, I'm like, you got to stop. But when it comes up, it's been like a year or two of like a. Mm hmm.
00:03:51
Speaker
I think one example of that, and the process of being beaten to death was when Chris Pratt was the voice of Mario when I was announced, because I didn't really research too much once the movie came out, thankfully. But everybody was just talking about it, and it's just like, it's a me, Mario. Everyone had an impression or something like that.
00:04:17
Speaker
Yeah. It's it. I don't think it got as bad as like the Arnold Schwarzenegger get to the choppa or something. Oh my God. That was so trite at this point. That was so much of high school times. Yeah. Anytime I hear Chris Pratt's name come up. Oh yeah. Has Chris Pratt. He's so cool. And like, it's just, it gets appended to his name now. He's so cool. He's so cool. That's a much better example. But you know, who else is so cool?
00:04:49
Speaker
ice cube ladies no i mean abandon that segue this episode we're talking about valve yeah i mean depending on where you're at and depending on where they're at i think that's that's a fair take would you say it's it's safe to say that they've had a pretty big impact on
The origins and legacy of Valve
00:05:18
Speaker
at least pc gaming if not gaming as a whole hot take option it's so hard for me to not say yeah in the exact same way again yeah but dave's actually not here definitely yes he left i took yeah and i'm gonna be pasting it into the rest of the episode and when i get to like the dota 2 segment i'm just gonna mash it three times it's just a sound board
00:05:40
Speaker
Dave's weirdly non-confrontational this episode. What's up with that? I just reverse, yeah. But I mean, I think everybody would agree that yes, they are very huge in the PC gaming space at least.
00:06:00
Speaker
Uh, because pretty much everyone who has been playing on PC games has had steam and that's primarily where they get their games from. Like that's the go-to client. Um, so obviously like they have their games on there and then they've been hosting so many other games on that platform as well. And it's been like the main thing for such a long time that when the Epic store came out, we were shitting on it, but we're like, Oh man, maybe this will like kinda drum up some competition and make valve do a better job with steam.
00:06:30
Speaker
And it didn't happen. I can't speak to how the Epic Store is doing, but nothing with Steam drastically changed to my knowledge. I mean, Steam isn't giving out free games or two free games every week, right? That's kind of just the way to put it, right? Do you think companies do that just because? No, it's because they need the market share. They got to pull people back.
00:06:56
Speaker
That's true. I think it always says a little bit more about your business if you don't have to offer free incentives for something as like a get you in the door hook. I mean, to be fair, like they were starting out in comparison to steam that's been established for
00:07:16
Speaker
10, 15 years. Oh yeah. And we actually have some dates. I'm going to go into them here. I just realized I missed one of the very important start dates. So Valve was founded in 1996, which is even longer than a hot minute ago.
00:07:35
Speaker
Um, and the really brief, I'm not going into a lot of history because I'm going to get the facts wrong, but was founded by two people, Gabe Newell, uh, or Gabe N as he's known today. Um, and Mike Harrington, and they both came from Microsoft. Um, I guess they worked on like windows NT or some such. Nobody cares. Nobody knows what that is. We're a gaming podcast. Um, but, uh, they're,
00:08:04
Speaker
I have a dumb joke I'd like to insert at this time. Sure. What, what PlayStation can't, Microsoft windows-ent. That is, that is the type of joke Microsoft would have made back in those days, because it was, it was very dry. But yeah, they had a lot of ambition and they were like, hey, we're pretty good at what we do, right? Couldn't we do more with this? And they went off and they made Half-Life.
00:08:34
Speaker
Um, I believe Half-Life was in development for two years then. So that would have been 98, I think. Um, and, uh, Mike at that point was like, I'm good because he actually put a lot of effort and heart and soul and all of that into Half-Life. And there was an interview with him where he was talking about, um, if he didn't like, he was concerned about doing that again for another game.
00:09:01
Speaker
and potentially having a risk failure, right? In this case, would have been like half-life too. And I mean, fair.
00:09:09
Speaker
Um, I don't understand how people go from like these major projects to another major project when like, a great example, Omori was singularly developed by, uh, an individual and they spent like seven or eight years. I don't want to credit them. I don't want to credit this person. Yeah, sorry. It was Omakat. Um, but like they spent seven or eight years just working on that. Mm-hmm.
00:09:35
Speaker
And then like, how do you find something else? Like I'm going to pour that much time and devotion into it at the same level. I guess inspiration, which I've never had, but it is impressive to say the least.
00:09:48
Speaker
I mean, it's, it's tough, right? Like we have a lot of examples of games that are like, they basically exist in this post digital distribution live service model one way or another, even if it's not a traditional like battle pass more money in our pocket type system. Where it was a passion project that just underwent development forever. Factorio was like that. Stardew Valley was like that.
Valve's revolutionary game releases
00:10:11
Speaker
Um, there's a lot of games out there that,
00:10:14
Speaker
escaped the early access hellhole, actually launched and then continued to see content.
00:10:22
Speaker
But yeah, in this case, Mike was in a very good spot financially. So he's like, I am going to go get a boat and travel the world with my wife or something like that. I don't know if it was a world, but go boating, essentially. So he did that. And that's pretty much where his Wikipedia article essentially ends. That was his involvement. Gabe, Gabe Newell said that he
00:10:45
Speaker
It was isolating when Mike left and I can get that if you're like a two-person founded company and then you start to bring in some other people and stuff and then your co-founder leaves it's like Oh, it's just me now. I hope he was not the magic
00:11:03
Speaker
But no, I mean they went on to make Half-Life 2 and Steam, Half-Life 1, or Half-Life Episode 1, Half-Life Episode 2, and then the Orange Box, and that was all over the early 2000s until they, a little past the mid-2000s. And that alone was gigantic.
00:11:25
Speaker
Yeah, like people still talk about the orange box to this day because For the time it was an insane amount of value. Oh, yeah, cuz it's like was it actually $50 there's 50 US dollars. Yeah, but it had and for pink three different games, right? Yeah, but the it had both half-life episodes episode one and episode two and then half-life two and the half-life episodes were actually stand-alones and
00:11:54
Speaker
like you could consider those basically individual games they were so more than a crappy dlc so at least two games there portal itself was part of the orange box yep team fortress 2 as well the big one for me but yeah which would later become free but like yes um
00:12:14
Speaker
Like they were majorly impactful because there wasn't anything else like it in that space that had that much personality. Like first person shooters existed, but typically it was some triple A publisher trying to pipe down like pipe down is not the right term. I was trying to like down pipe.
00:12:37
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, trying to do things like gold and I like, Hey, here's an existing IP, something you're familiar with. And now you can play it using like some shitty controls. Um, but I would say that TF two and half life really helps make FPS better from a PC standpoint. And it's definitely worth noting early and probably often throughout this, but valve is like,
00:13:04
Speaker
they tend to take things and then just like refine it and refine it and refine it. I'm gonna make a comparison to some of the older Blizzard games where they did that, but the difference is Valve also injected innovation, right? So like we skip past Half-Life 1 pretty quick, but like that was a big deal in PC games back then because ever, like there was a bunch of shooters, but there were shooters like Doom where you just like run around killing things.
00:13:34
Speaker
Maybe there's a little bit of exploration. Maybe there's, you know, some story that you can divine from the strategy guide or the instruction manual, whatever the crap. But Half-Life was straight up. They started in a non-combat sequence of you on that tram, like having a conversation with another person or being the recipient of a conversation. Gordon Freeman doesn't have many true dialogues.
00:14:01
Speaker
Being a silent protagonist and then like you spin a significant amount of the game just walking around going into this facility because your job is to like push some sort of science material into a reactor essentially and That's that's literally just his job right and then everything just the scientists. Yeah, I
00:14:26
Speaker
But that's the thing, it's actually a good example of world building. And I think, now it's sort of like Dave's ex, a lot of games struggle to kind of get off the ground running with that.
00:14:41
Speaker
But actually just like hey, we want you to give a shit about the environment You're in we want you to want to explore and uncover like the mystery of the game and what's happening in universe versus just We'll feed it all to you kill these things exactly
00:14:59
Speaker
And it had a lot of justification. There was characters in like an FPS that would talk to you and they would recur. It had some puzzle solving, which I think some other games also had some measure of puzzle solving. But I mean, compare this to like Quake, right? Because like this is coming off of Quake essentially. Does Quake have a story mode? So technically it has a story in the way of
00:15:27
Speaker
You're working your way through levels and then there's a final boss at the end. And then there's like a congratulations message. But until you actually saw that congratulations message, you don't, maybe didn't know what your overall objective was. Right. The Half-Life has characters like Gordon, like Alex. Um, I almost said that the doctor's name is Steiner, but I think it's something else. It's like Steinman, Steinman, I think. Steinman is from Bioshock. Make me pretty Steinman.
00:15:54
Speaker
I don't remember the doctor's name, but I can remember his voice cause he's in every GMOD creation ever, but. Oh, Gordon. That was a terrible impression. That was actually not bad. I think that was good. Um, but, uh, yeah, it was the start of a story basically, which people didn't really go to FPS for prior to half-life.
00:16:21
Speaker
But again, what I mentioned earlier, and I want to repeat, they do a really good job of injecting personality into things. And we'll definitely talk about this more throughout other games, but like portal for me was the standout one.
00:16:37
Speaker
Yeah. It just, it had so much because they gave you kind of little to nothing. Again, silent protagonist, explore, figure out your puzzle game. And your only overarching voice or narrative is really from Gladys. And you're like, okay. Like she's kind of like funny and tyrannical. But like the more you play, like the more things develop,
00:17:00
Speaker
And then they explore, expanded that so fucking much with portal two when that eventually came out. But, but even with TF2 having like the different classes, I like, they had personnel. It wasn't like, uh, I use this gun instead. Yeah. Oh, it's like, they had like introduction trailers for like, I'm this character and like, nobody's ever going to confuse like the heavy with the spy, you know? Right. It was all very distinct, which is nice.
00:17:29
Speaker
Yeah, and this kind of goes back to my argument of Valve improving these things, because Team Fortress 2, there was a Team Fortress, and it was Team Fortress Classic, and I think it was literally a Quake mod. If it wasn't Quake, it might have been Source 1 or something like that, but there was not a massive difference between this old Quake engine and Source 1. If you look at the games and things like that, they're fairly similar. And a lot of these run their two-year release cycle,
00:18:00
Speaker
Right like which seems absurd now once we get to modern valve the idea. Oh my god your release cycle for game is crazy, but things were moving pretty rapidly back then and I Mean game development kind of had to right you can't have people live in a basement with no food or water for so long Before you have the ship something right
00:18:22
Speaker
And yeah, OrangeBox is around when I actually got in for Steam. My Steam account was created in 2008 and OrangeBox came out in 2007. And so I kind of had the backlog to go back through and play, but like,
00:18:39
Speaker
Yeah. TF2 characters to second your point. So freaking good. Love the spy. And even Gabe Newell's commentary note is like, and my favorite class is the spy. It's still burned into my head, but their interactions have basically been like timeless to the extent that literally when Overwatch dropped, people were like,
00:19:00
Speaker
These characters don't really have the same identity as the characters from TF2. And that's with, they were, they're more of like, I don't want to say vague tropes, cause like they still have personality, like with their voice lines and interactions and play style, but it's not as distinct. Cause I think you could, a lot of the tanks kind of overlap a little bit as far as like, I'm this person or the feminine version of I'm this person. Um,
00:19:32
Speaker
I think part of it was because, and this is gonna come back, but they'll playtest things a lot, and that might be one of the reasons why it's hard to ship some products. Zing! But the universe for TF2 is incredibly pared down.
00:19:49
Speaker
right like overwatch is trying to tell you like these characters have interactions because there's this big story and all this stuff going on in tf2 like they released some comics over the years that flush things out a little bit but there's not this big
00:20:05
Speaker
like overarching goal or something to some grand event. It's two teams and two spawns with the exact same faces and different color uniforms. Yeah. So it just became the reds versus the blues. Yeah. Red team, blue team. That's all it is.
00:20:22
Speaker
They actually had their own spin-off show, weirdly enough. Yeah. I was just going to say on the red-blue thing. I literally remember now. There was one in the one of the arcs was because one of the demo men was friends with the opposite color soldier. And I remember there was an arc related to that. It was kind of funny. And it led to a community challenge where
00:20:52
Speaker
The side the one that got the most kills on the opposite class Got an update and then the other update came later That's cute. Yeah
00:21:02
Speaker
Yeah, they're good at keeping things minimal as needed. Like we're going to end up talking about Dota, but Dota is something where, again, it was initially a mod from Warcraft 3 and there's like, oh, we're using these assets. Oh, we need to give them a thing. They're all fighting in an eternal battle. And then they're like, let's never update that again. And just be like, that's the thing. Yeah.
00:21:26
Speaker
and they'll expand on some of the individual characters to give them like profile more of like a sense of who that character is and that like their play style maybe but they really don't go into a whole lot of extra stuff like they will do additional con- like they still made comics for Dota which I think I have a book of and they even made it technically an animated TV show but I don't think any of that's canon um
00:21:54
Speaker
Yeah, they really don't flesh out things unless they really feel that they need to. That's maybe been part of their part of their their their fault here, right? Because we do have to eventually talk about the the Half-Life controversy. And I believe I asked you some years back. We had a not an episode on Valve specifically, but I think it was PC games. I asked you if you'd ever played Half-Life and I think the answer is no. Not the original. I have played Half-Life 2 episode. One, two.
00:22:24
Speaker
I was like, if you say three, I'm going to press X to doubt. You're just like, no, it was great. And you go on about like all the plot and the story and stuff. And this becomes our most popular episode ever released because for some reason Dave played a game that never released and the entire world wanted to play it.
00:22:44
Speaker
I'm just recounting like you don't know but like I'm just I just have an article up here for like Starcraft ghost plot and mechanics I'm just like I'm just reading off that and you're like okay yeah it was um like Half-Life is basically they were Valve's baby
00:23:03
Speaker
Like that was their primary IP they had this commitment to keep the story going and episode one and episode two You had only one year between their releases, which is absurd. You will never see that again In the rest of the history that we at least go through here Until we get four left four dead and then you'll see it right then but It doesn't count They brought portal in like you mentioned and that was the first one they brought in they basically had a team of developers demo something for them
00:23:33
Speaker
And Valve was like, that, that's really cool. And then they just like wrapped them in like a big Gabe Newell bear hug, and then they carried them into the office. And that happened several times in the course of Valve's history, where they're like, that's really cool, you're really far along on this compared to us, join our company.
00:23:56
Speaker
Um, I mean, if you are able to actually recognize talent and then work with it, I think that's a skill in and of itself. But I think you do need to have some basis initially before you can just say, Oh, this is good versus this is bad. You need to have gone through the trenches a little bit first to say, Oh, I know. Yeah. Versus just getting a upsell upsold. Mm-hmm.
00:24:25
Speaker
Yeah. And I think like there's other examples of people that do this now, like Devolver is a good example of a publisher who sees potential and indies and gets them across the finish line.
Steam's rise and industry influence
00:24:35
Speaker
But, um, when you're talking about the big guys, they don't do this nearly as much, right? Like Activision or EA, they tend to buy studios that already have really established IPS because they kind of have proven value and valve has not traditionally cared as much about proven value.
00:24:53
Speaker
Um, probably because they can lean on steam, which we mentioned came out, um, believe it or not, that was launched in 2003. Um, and it was basically launched ahead of the Half-Life 2 distribution. And I don't think anyone likes steam when it launched. It was literally like, what is this for? It's basically a patcher.
00:25:19
Speaker
Yeah, I mean it it didn't have as many features as it does today because now like it has options for Social it has like an expansive store if you want to find something. Yeah, it's become like your repository of games You can use it to patch as well Like it's the way you interact with friends and everything else in the gaming space on PC now
00:25:42
Speaker
But I cannot imagine at launch that it was much more than you want to run our game. There you go. It was it was very much a launcher for their game. It was this. I remember it was this like combat army green. And yeah, I mean, there's certain elements of the UI who haven't really that haven't really changed that much. The patch UI is actually kind of similar when it's like updating. But
00:26:08
Speaker
it was it was crazy back then and it actually got them in hot water because again steam is the cutting edge on digital distribution right every but everything was physical and even when you're talking about Half-Life 2 which came the year uh the year it launched the year after steam came out like people were like i don't know if i should really trust the ability to grab this game off your platform and not have a cd for a single player game like is that
00:26:36
Speaker
I don't know. And then the way they got in hot water is their publisher was Sierra back then. And they had a deal where Sierra was publishing their physical product and Valve was like, oh, well, we'll just do the digital stuff.
00:26:51
Speaker
And I guess like that must have slipped a little bit under the radar. Because no one has a prolific digital store. So yours like, okay, I guess that means we get 100% of the money or whatever. Or, you know, at least they get percentage of all the sales. And then, and then they're like, yeah, by the way, we have steam.
00:27:11
Speaker
And it's an entire platform so people can just buy the digital version of this and we're gonna give you none of that money So Sierra was like not like that and they had a suit over it actually
00:27:27
Speaker
I think I settled at some point, but Yeah, it could have gone in either way. It was pretty big for a while Sierra almost got the half-life IP Was what they were trying to get from valve. Holy shit. Yeah, which I don't think they deserve
00:27:44
Speaker
When's the last time you made King's Quest, motherfucker? You get out of here. Yeah, you don't hear about Sierra butch anymore because I don't think they exist. At least not with that name. No, I think they were primarily just doing CD-ROM games during like the early 90s and then just kind of faded out or maybe they did rebrand into something else. I'm just haven't followed up with them.
00:28:10
Speaker
I think, and this is me venturing into unknown territory, I think their lunch was basically eaten by Electronic Arts and Activision, who just got increasing amounts of the publishing pie, and Sierra was just like, we make adventure games.
00:28:26
Speaker
And then LucasArts is like, oh, yeah, so do we. As the lights slowly turn out in the building, turn off in the building. I will say, I remember back in the day when some of those companies were kind of merging together and I was like, oh, like that was a new thing for me at the time. Yeah. Like, do you remember when it was actually Squaresoft? Square and
00:28:54
Speaker
Was it something Enix or was it literally just Enix on their own? I don't remember. I'm conflating with Eidos. Right. What was the Eidos merge either?
00:29:10
Speaker
Journey back to the 1990s where game companies were merging all of the time. Uh-huh. I think that Wiki, I gotta be able to trust Wiki on this because they love to tell you about mergers at like the very top of, uh... Dave, mergers didn't happen in the 1990s, they happened in the early 2000s. I wasn't wrong. Cool, you get a gold sticker. This is something that happened in 2003. Well, it's... Because it's like where the merge happened.
00:29:40
Speaker
but it was a square in enix so very common their name made sense it became square enix right it's it doesn't sound as bad to me as like Activision Blizzard does that yeah it's just literally two separate things yeah um
00:29:55
Speaker
But, uh, steam was a big deal and it only continues to become a big deal as, you know, they publish more games. And by the time we're at the midpoint in this list, like there's so much of valve's revenue is entirely steam. It's, it's almost entirely all of it. It's, it's their main business. They can make a games if they kind of feel like it because of the massive success of steam.
00:30:20
Speaker
Yeah. And I, I do miss them making games mainly because like when a valve game launched, you had the valve logo, which was animated and creepy and was always some guy who has like an actual valve jammed into some part of his head. Um, but that was the thing for so long. You're like, Oh, this is a valve game. Oh shit. And that's how you knew it was going to be good. Yeah. And then they stopped doing that. Unfortunately.
00:30:50
Speaker
at one point they changed it to, and it was, I don't know if that made it more creepy or less creepy. I think that's when they added the animation would have been around the time of the orange box. I think where the guy slowly kind of turns to you and then jerks back into position. Yes. Yeah. I was like, why are you, why are you jump scaring people with your, you don't even make horror games. Like, what is this? I guess because they can. Yeah. Um,
00:31:16
Speaker
But yeah, when you got into initially playing PC gaming, did you jump in with Steam or did you use some other platform for community? Do you remember? I mean, early days, it was all just CD-ROM in those jewel cases.
00:31:35
Speaker
Mm-hmm because that's what we had you boot up the e-machines you wait 20 minutes you possibly boot up DOS for some games, but It was mainly that for a while and then some of the battle chests with Blizzard into eventually a hearing about steam An orange box. I don't think actually got orange box at the time I actually think I missed that when it was released and I wasn't able to get it and
00:31:59
Speaker
But then soon after like portal was either free or very close to free. Got that checked it out. And then the rest is they say is history.
00:32:10
Speaker
They definitely, I remember there was a promotion for free portal and the orange box price jump dropped. Not, I can't remember when it dropped, but it launched it 50 for PC, 60 for consoles. Also they released games for hidden consoles. These people that are known for PC games. Um, and then it dropped to 12 or not 12, uh, $20 at a point. And that's still its retail prices 20, but it frequently goes to like basically free. Um, along with, you know, the whole valve collection at this point.
00:32:39
Speaker
I mean, it's still worth. They should do another Orange Boxes for their newer game sense, even if it is just like a game that is free to play, like Dota 2. It should be only games that are free to play. Dota 2. Artifact. Oh man. Oh yeah.
00:33:02
Speaker
Yeah. For me, I started with Xfire, actually, as my community, and then started to switch over to teams.
Dota 2 and esports dominance
00:33:10
Speaker
Ew.
00:33:12
Speaker
It was the thing back then. It had a lot of features that Steam actually didn't have. Like you could share, you could stream your game, you could take clips. I think it had like a recorder, stuff like that. There was a lot of stuff. And then it had that kind of like Winamp theme look to it, where it's got like the jagged edges and stuff. It was trying to be a futuristic hackerscape client, but I have a,
00:33:38
Speaker
I have fond memories and a lot of hours in games were recorded on Xfire because it would track your hours played for every game. Um, and then at some point I switched to Steam primarily and that was no longer the case.
00:33:55
Speaker
So now your actual hours are skewed? They are. It's kind of depressing actually when I look at something and I'm like, this is a thousand hour game when I put a bunch of time into it. I'm like, did I? I guess Steam would always track it if it was like a Steam game. But there are other games that I used to play when I was younger that will never show up on that list. Right. Exactly. Steam games. Yeah.
00:34:18
Speaker
There's so many things on console. I would love to have a metric of more of how I spend my time And then it'd be like what's it? Oh, that was me pooping. Okay, cool like Or just like what the actual breakup is of your activities Mm-hmm
00:34:35
Speaker
It can get daunting at some point, though. As I know we've talked about, we had an episode literally on our most played games. No judgment. No comment. Thank you for the no judgment. Appreciate that.
00:34:50
Speaker
But yeah, speaking of Dota 2, obviously, probably one of their biggest moneymakers at this point, because Dota 2 is, I think, the only game that they have that is being played internationally and has huge fucking tournaments to make them money.
Left 4 Dead's multiplayer innovation
00:35:07
Speaker
Pun intended, I assume. Hmm.
00:35:11
Speaker
He said it's played internationally and they have tournaments. It's called the International. We'll say that was intentional. Editor, please. Yeah, this was the second, not second. We kind of jumped over left for dead. Should we circle back for left for dead or do that one now? Let's jump in left for dead now.
00:35:33
Speaker
Okay. What were your experiences with Left 4 Dead? Because I remember when we had our Left 4 Dead episode, it wasn't just me talking.
00:35:44
Speaker
Every episode I have to I have to progress the narrative Throughout the episode. Yeah, I mean left 4 dead for me was the first time I was actively That wasn't on a console like playing on a couch in the basement with friends at first split screen typically like a halo to the first time that I was actually playing online with friends and obsessed
00:36:11
Speaker
Like the story was good enough on its own. The gameplay felt good. I liked the, again, the personality of the characters as they had a love plan.
00:36:23
Speaker
Zoe probably. But it was the fact that you could also do a versus mode, which felt crazy. Because typically in FPS games, you're like, you're the main character. Go shoot shit. This is like, all right, do you want to be a zombie? You can be a zombie. And I was like, I want to be the zombie all the time. So you could fuck over other human players when you're playing against 4v4. But it was just so real and new to me at the time.
00:36:52
Speaker
Like I had a strategy to deal with like hordes of zombies. I just got very into it. I knew about like certain spots for like, Oh, this is good to gank. Or we should be careful here because they're going to try and ledge you and everything else. And it was just so much, so, so much. And that just carried over through to left for dead too. So like for me, that got, that was my, I think go to co-op shooter. Yeah. For many, many years. Did you, did you get deep into paint as well?
00:37:22
Speaker
I did for Left 4 Dead 1. I didn't do it nearly as much for 2. I'm going to subtly inject the background here for Left 4 Dead. This was another acquisition by Valve because it was made by Turtle Rock, which were called Valve South while they were with Valve.
00:37:41
Speaker
And leopard had one and two came out within a year. I think or maybe slightly over is 2008 and 2009 Those are those are Bioshock years by the way, but
00:37:54
Speaker
But it was massive, right? Like this was, this was, I had a gaming community with team fortress and this one solidified it. This made it real for the platform, right? If you were playing, if you were on Steam playing games, um, with friends and it was a valve game, it was like TF2 for the most part. Now it's like, Hey, people are making clans for, for left for dead. Like it's a community. We had a, um, a tournament we entered at one point and we did freaking terrible.
00:38:24
Speaker
it was great um i remember actually uh do i actually wanna no i'm not gonna talk about the clan name because i don't know where people are at in that clan and i don't anticipate it's still actively a major clan uh-huh yeah and i don't know where it's gone since then right i i disavow any relationship with anything they're doing now i disavow my connections to the clan i yes exactly when in doubt always do that
00:38:50
Speaker
but it was it was big and the multiplayer thing i mean i enjoyed the single player single player was good good range of difficulties and on the hardest one like you could lose control like things things could go to crap but the thing that was big for multiplayer for me was they set up the game when it launched pretty much as this could be competitive
00:39:14
Speaker
And the way they did it was by making you take turns as you went through. Like if you wanted to see how you do, so you have four survivors versus four infected and you're on a map, the survivors will go through first against the infected, see how far they get. Maybe you get it to the safe room and you hear the cool guitar riff and all that stuff.
00:39:40
Speaker
But then after they get wiped out where they make it, you switch sides and see how far you can get as the opposite side. And that was huge. That was freaking awesome in multiplayer back then because they single-handedly essentially solved the issue of balance.
00:39:59
Speaker
If you ever had a concern like, Hey, boomers are way too strong. They're like warping the meta, whatever the crap. That's not actually a concern for left for dead. Because if you were playing against friends, you took turns. Like you each got the overpowered thing, right? Yeah, that's the thing. If you got, if you were playing as survivor and you got your ass kicked again, I'm just going to go to like the hotel at the beginning of I'm going to use two as the example. Cause I remember that map the most.
00:40:27
Speaker
Like if you got charged out that window in the first hallway because you're dumb, you're like, OK, now that we're infected, we're going to try and do the same thing to them or see like, oh, they're definitely going to try and get this. It allowed for like a counterplay to a degree because you could like learn how the other people played and adapt to it.
00:40:46
Speaker
Oh, this person, Johnny's always lying behind. Let's get a smoker to kind of pick him off from the back and then we'll gank the others together. It allowed for like a nice PVP, but like you also had your team play with it. Yeah. Cause like when the survivors were on their shit and like going through, it's very hard, but also if the infected like are able to pick somebody off and you can get swarmed effectively. Ooh.
00:41:14
Speaker
So it was a nice shift in the scales depending on how coordinated those teams were.
00:41:20
Speaker
If I recall correctly, they even had a mechanic where if you were ahead in score, you would always play survivor first because the RNG was the same. So if there were some resources or something like that that the survivors found, oh, well, they're not gonna have foreknowledge of that if they're ahead in score, but the team that's behind will get that advantage as you run through the level. And just like little things like that, it was just,
00:41:48
Speaker
Like, we see so many complaints about balance for everything now, and it's kind of crazy to think that there was an entire game where that didn't matter, really, just because of the mirror aspect. Now, I'm not suggesting that every match of Dota should be you play with the heroes that you selected and then switch with the enemy team, because that's a heavy commitment. Sorry, guys, I can only do one game of Dota tonight. It's going to take me four hours.
00:42:17
Speaker
And that wouldn't really be fair because all of the survivors played somewhat similarly and the infected you get were somewhat random. If you just pick, if you just learn and pick Meepo every game, you're gonna screw over a lot of enemy games.
00:42:33
Speaker
But also I think so many people just because it was a new option and they were so used to traditional FPS a lot of people wanted to play infected so anytime like you'd make those public lobbies people like infect infect infected and the one the last person is like fuck I'll play Rochelle and They're like, okay. I will get a chance to be infected later. Yes, so that was always the incentive
00:42:57
Speaker
It would have been so much less interesting I'm again this kind of goes back to the play testing But it would have been so much less interesting if you played through an entire campaign Like an entire set of maps that air or whatever what have you no mercy And you were survivors the entire time, right? No one would no one would play this game because it was so much more fun to be infected to be the agents of chaos and
00:43:21
Speaker
Setting up like in the shadows not spawning in talking in voice comms. Mm-hmm again Steam was steam was one of the first platforms that was like for PC I should say that was like hey, we're gonna like inject voice communications into All of our games didn't make as much sense in half-life That's that's a joke. I don't think they had that but For TF 2 for Left 4 Dead. It was great. It was it helped build that sense of community
00:43:50
Speaker
It was also good because they had different channels for survivors and the infected. So let's say you're playing in the lane with people. You had a specific button for, like, here's your all chat versus, it's like, hey guys, we're gonna set up the lobby, we'll be done in a sec. And then you had your specific thing for infected. So it was always fun to like, play as an infected, and then just like in the all speak be like, alright guys, I'm gonna come around this court and just like let it cut out. And they're like,
00:44:14
Speaker
What? What's happening? Some mind games. Again, I spent so much time with it. It was very fun.
00:44:25
Speaker
I think it's sad that we won't have enough content for Turtle Rock to have a similar episode on their things because they've had some great ideas since then, but then some things that they didn't land. And unfortunately, I think history is kind of playing out that they probably should have stayed as Valve South. But maybe at some point there will be an actual
00:44:48
Speaker
good, well-received spiritual successor for Left 4 Dead that will actually carry the torch. So far it seems like the, I don't want to say imitators, but the people who are trying to follow in that space to a degree,
00:45:06
Speaker
It's not going so good. Yeah, they were the same people. That was the problem too. I know, I know. And they also didn't get a hit for Evolve, which I thought was just, it had a really cool theme. But again, not their episode and unfortunately their success kind of tapers off a bit here.
00:45:26
Speaker
Going back to what you were saying, there was a spark of an old Warcraft 3 game that Valve latched onto. You want to tell us about that? I will, but I will try and go through it a little bit quickly, because we've talked about Dota 2 so many times. Not as much as Dark Souls, though. Oh, speaking of!
00:45:49
Speaker
So you have the notes here, 2010 is actually when Valve hires Ice Frog and Yule, who is the original maker of the mod for Dota in Warcraft 3. And they helped out with everything and made it become Dota 2. And this released around when I was actually sophomore in college, if you want to figure out how old I am. And I didn't really pay any attention to it at the time.
00:46:15
Speaker
I heard one person mentioned it. I'm like, I don't really know that person nor did I like that person too much. That's kind of like just blew it off. And I was playing so much League of Legends through college at the time as well. I'm like, this is my MOBA not going back to that Warcraft three dumb shit. And then at some point, so the awards were like the console wars for the people who weren't there in that moment.
00:46:37
Speaker
But it was just what was new at the time for me, and I just latched on the League for a while. But then I actually had a chance to check out Dota 2, and it has definitely revised itself so much over time, and I keep still having these major patches as characters get added to make major functional changes, but...
00:46:56
Speaker
It is fucking gigantic now, and it is so cool to see that it's grown this much, and then it has this much of an impact. Like, I have a whole other Discord server for just playing Dota with people. And they are actually better Dota fans than me, because they will actually go and watch these pro games happen.
00:47:16
Speaker
off of Twitch. They have commentators they like. They have players they like. They know the names of teams. When somebody gets traded, they know. It's wild how much of a community and following it has for something that just seems like, oh, it's just some MOBA. No, it is fucking gigantic.
00:47:35
Speaker
I think I agree with all of that. Second, there's only been one game I've ever had a watch party for, actually, and it was Dota. I've played a lot of games since then. I'm recovered. I have issues with MOBA's in general, but those are I think the psychological problems that they helped me embrace. But it's massive, like you said, and I don't think we're ever going to see
00:48:05
Speaker
a game that has the amount of support the Dota has, right? The community is upset because or was upset. Those people have since aged out and died that we were never getting Half-Life 3.
00:48:18
Speaker
The questions of like, is valve ever going to support something that they make again are basically invalidated by how much Dota is supported.
Valve's spin-offs and diversification
00:48:28
Speaker
Yeah. And it's not like they haven't made efforts. It's just like, it hasn't panned out. So like, uh, Dota underlords was their spinoff from when they had, again, a custom game out of Dota. Um.
00:48:46
Speaker
Which is now like team fight tactics and everything out like There's a lot of has been right out of chess. Yeah It's gone through so many names because everybody made their own version of it because it was like a big selling point Like they have their own version of that and it's fine, but I don't think it's seen major success They tried doing artifact in 2018 which is again based off of like dota 2 characters and lore
00:49:13
Speaker
But it didn't really pan out for being a success. And at some point it just kind of died. They're like, let's just not talk about it and move on. There was, which is sad because there was a lot of hype for artifact. I think even, I mean, I've played some card games digitally. You've played both physical and digital card games mostly. I guess it's still magic in both cases.
00:49:34
Speaker
They had like Richard Garfield from from magic. He was like one of the founders I think or at least a big wig there And so we're like come on. This has got it. It's got it. They got name brand record like this has got to be good and then literally when it launched the There's the big What was it?
00:49:56
Speaker
announcement during one of their tournaments and they had the like the the message for it the reveal essentially and people were like You could actually hear like the the tenor of the audience shift from like excitement to Disappointment as like a gradient when people kind of figured out it was a card game like Yeah, yeah
00:50:20
Speaker
I want to commend them for trying something that's outside of their demographic space. Yeah. Cause it's definitely a big leap and I applaud that.
00:50:32
Speaker
But I mean, card games, I think are so fickle because certain ones just seem to have fine mechanics. They just don't persist. And something as simple as like Marvel snap is fucking gigantic and it only has six rounds. So like, I don't know where that line is for good card game versus bad, but, uh, this one just did not survive in the slightest. Yeah. They can't all be fair. Yeah.
00:50:59
Speaker
yo i think i occasionally think about launching it again i do too it's even to listen to the music it's so freaking good i'm not sure if remember the music that much it's nice very soothing
00:51:14
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, Dota is going to be a big thing forever. You mentioned the show. It's worth mentioning that one here as well. It's kind of funny that both Dota and League did shows. I mean, the League wins better. Here's the difference, right? League has so much fucking money. So much fucking money. And they spend it on merchandising and making so much spinoff content for their universe and IP.
00:51:45
Speaker
Like they always have music videos and like also huge tournaments as well but The amount of effort that went into arcane versus the amount of effort that went into Dota 2 dragons blood Mm-hmm arcane was just so good. Yeah, and Dota 2 dragons blood was a
00:52:08
Speaker
Okay. It technically has more than one season, but I've been told by other people on that discord, they're like, you don't really need to check it out. It's just kind of eh. Yeah. I mean, part of that though is.
00:52:20
Speaker
I mean, if the narrative is bad, right? Like, are people not watching the show because the graphics are bad? That's a money problem. If the people aren't watching the show because it's fine, is it interesting? Narratively, then that's a vision problem. I don't think it had good vision. Like, legitimately watch season one, because nobody's watched it besides me. Come back to me and tell me your honest thoughts.
00:52:45
Speaker
Breaking breaking also he's Dave. Dave is the first one to play episode three He's also the only one to watch the dota animators if you wanted to hear about that. I'm part of an exclusive club But yeah, it's just I don't know it didn't seem to have Like I didn't give a fuck about any of the characters really so much The only one that I thought was like mildly interesting because of like again mute personality so like you project on to them is Marcy who they actually brought in as a character and
00:53:15
Speaker
Which is a cool way to do it. Yeah. For sure. So I liked that they did that, but again, I don't think making a show about this video game, at least in this context, uh, just isn't really doing it. Yeah. Because like your fan base should be excited to see more content of the thing that they like, but both with artifact and dota two dragons blood, it's just like, eh,
Valve's hardware ventures
00:53:46
Speaker
Yeah, the subsequent products, the products surrounding artifact or artifact products surrounding Dota have not had the same market penetration for sure. I will say, though, I still have faceless void underwear. I guess that is something that is something.
00:54:07
Speaker
Yeah, the other games, even Cyberpunk, Cyberpunk's anime was really freaking good. And that drove interest in something that probably didn't deserve the interest as much. The world does. Mike Pondsmith, the world that you created has great, it deserves the interest. And for CD Projekt Red writers.
00:54:26
Speaker
Man, driving people back to play that game is definitely a choice. Doing the devil's work. Some of the other stuff, it's worth noting, so they eventually made Half-Life Alyx, which was their VR game. I heard that reviewed well, but I honestly, I have a VR headset and I don't normally feel too comparable to use it. It's kind of high effort.
00:54:50
Speaker
We could have a VR episode, but it would basically be me saying I have a VR headset and I don't use it that much because it's high effort. Um, the valve cares about hardware. It did seem to be like where their focus was going. They actually had failed projects leading up to the index. One of them was called Vader and like.
00:55:12
Speaker
I mean, they should be happy that they canceled that because Disney owned Star Wars now. And it doesn't matter how big valve is. Disney will just walk in and kill all of them in the office. They've done it before. So, yeah, don't call your product Vader. But the index is supposed to be good if you're into VR, and then eventually they made the steam deck. I will say really good things about.
00:55:41
Speaker
I hear good things about it as well. I guess for both. But the main thing, because I don't have either. I'll stay on the outside until I think the water has enough pee in it to be warm for me to go in type thing.
00:55:57
Speaker
But obviously the index was a much higher buy-in price point compared to other VR So if you just wanted to try Alex, it's 1000 plus That the actual game itself or maybe it came with but the index came with the game and the game does work on other VR systems, but Index is the it's the the top tier one or it was some years back when I was looking at him
00:56:22
Speaker
But when people are debating if they wanna get a PS5, if they can get a PS5 for like five, $600, a thousand's a big fucking jump. It's so hard. And then with the Steam Deck, again, I have a Switch. I don't even use it for the portable aspect, 99% of the time. But I'm still struggling to use my other small emulator box that I'm playing around with in Minecraft, playing around with the emulator box in Minecraft.
00:56:52
Speaker
But it's full of Pokemon games, like every single... Every single copyrighted thing is there in Minecraft.
00:57:02
Speaker
But yeah, I've heard good things about the Steam Deck overall. Obviously, I assume it supports Valve games pretty well. And then a lot of the indie games I hear other friends talking about, they also say runs very well in the Steam Deck, or they might have to do some configuration to set it up. But I've not heard anything actively negative about the Steam Deck from my communities.
00:57:26
Speaker
Yeah, this came off of their, they had a controller. I can't remember what it was called, but I'm just gonna assume it was called Steam Controller. And they were like, all right, we're gonna revolutionize basically the touchpad space.
00:57:41
Speaker
and the controller is pretty good for that and they they moved some of that over to the steam deck so their goal was basically to be able to play a game that was like a mouse controlled game with this kind of like dual stick or dual touchpad in this case approach and make it feel good and
00:57:59
Speaker
It sounds like they nailed that, but I have the same caveats as you, right? Like, this would be a product I would never use because I never go anywhere. And if I went somewhere, people aren't going to appreciate that I'm playing a steam deck in a restaurant, right? Like, it's funny because they had a Tears of the Kingdom trailer. It's like a guy who's on his commute on the train.
00:58:20
Speaker
And he's like, oh, I brought my switch here so I can like play this thing also look at the like the beauty of outside I'm like, I don't know if he fucking does that personally because like the people I know who have steam decks at least Mike front of the show like he's not outside walking around with it He's not like taking it out somewhere and being oh, I will also break my steam deck and
00:58:39
Speaker
It's docked at home so he can have the game he wants to play on the TV. And he does have the flexibility to bring it somewhere else. They're like, oh, I'm going to a friend's house. Oh, I can bring the steam deck. But again, it's usually to dock, not keep it solely handheld. Yeah.
00:58:55
Speaker
Which is fair, and that was probably the reason they had Steam Link. I have one of those actually, which was like, hey, it's on your wifi. I did, yeah. And that was pretty cool. But again, I just don't play that many. If it's a Steam game, if it's a game on Steam, I'm probably playing it at my PC.
Speculating Valve's future in gaming
00:59:12
Speaker
That's basically what it boils down to. Most of the time, yeah. Also with Steam Link specifically, I remember at an old apartment,
00:59:20
Speaker
I don't think I had great Wi-Fi by any means. Thank you, any internet service provider who sucks dick. But it wasn't like I had a huge apartment, but my computer is on one end of the apartment and then the projector and where I was gonna like have company was on the other side. I'm like, oh, we can play games here from over there. And then it just was very, very choppy. It struggled a lot.
00:59:46
Speaker
Yeah, so it didn't really make that gameplay enjoyable with people, right? Yeah, it can be a consideration for sure So as we come up on the end of the episode I would say There's a bunch of valve memes things like that. We didn't go over like valve time doesn't really matter We could talk about their flat development process and how maybe that's helped prevented them from launching some games and
01:00:13
Speaker
But it doesn't really matter. They're plenty successful and they're still working on Dota so that'll appease Dave forever. If you, this is a question for Dave, if you could pick one game for Valve to make, what would it be?
01:00:31
Speaker
Is this within the context of their space? Yeah. Or just make it easier. Pick something that they have the IP for. Or they bought the company at some point that had the IP. So I don't want them to really flood the market. I would always love another portal game.
01:00:56
Speaker
Like Portal 2 also just had so much great personality and fun aspects and they have like a multiplayer mode that's really enjoyable. I don't think they need to really break the camel's back trying to like make something completely new and innovative and have it be entirely fresh. It's just the concept of Portal is fun. So you can add new levels to it and put it in a separate game. Maybe you can add another mechanic and put it in that game.
01:01:23
Speaker
but I will always love those games and for me it was like very formative for puzzle solving so I'd love to see something with that I think if they did do Half-Life 3 now
01:01:37
Speaker
like i would be expecting a shooter i guess i don't know like i don't i don't have an expectation for exactly what i would want for that it's a forex space strategy yeah like i i think the market's saturated enough with shooters and at this point like a lot of shooters do have story they do have some physics to interact with and puzzles
01:02:00
Speaker
So I don't know what they would make specifically that would bring a unique perspective to that. So I'd rather see something in the portal space. I think it's a really good answer. We didn't even talk about portal to you. I realized somehow that there was a portal list. Wait, there was a second. You go back and play. It's good. I will say as a brief aside, yeah, this came out when I was in college and it came out literally on my birthday. I was ecstatic.
01:02:32
Speaker
No, that's good. I mean, you just, you know, release your birthday, but that's fine. That's fine. What he meant to say is within 10 days, plus or minus of his birthday. Plus or minus a year. It was on my birthday. Wait a minute. Yeah. Portal two was freaking great and a massive expansion over what they did with the first game.
01:02:57
Speaker
We have an episode on it. If you guys want to hear more about it, you can go back and listen to it. Um, but, uh, but yeah, I think for me, if I were to answer my own question, it's, it's tough. Cause I would love to see what they would do with left for dead three. If they had the confidence to actually ship it. Right. Cause they don't have turtle rock anymore. This would be a different thing, but maybe they need that fresh spin.
01:03:23
Speaker
But I'm also, these are two disruptive picks I think. My other disruptive pick would just be like, freaking drop Team Fortress 3. They neglected the heck out of TF2 in favor of Dota. Like the patch cycle has like fallen off a lot for TF2 and it's, so there's still a lot of people playing it, but it's not an actively developed game.
01:03:45
Speaker
And it would be hilarious to transition from the community and basically having given up on it entirely to Here is the the next one, right? And here's all these gameplay improvements and all this crap and it would actively in that space compete with other class space shooters like like overwatch Which I mean competitions good. So my vote would be TF team fortress 3 would be freaking awesome to see and
01:04:10
Speaker
That would be interesting honestly Because I think they they they have the potential to do a great job with it to make it an actual overwatch competitor Yeah, I mean they they wrote the blueprints so right Yeah, it was overwatch was was the Let me copy your homework. I'll make some changes from you In a lot of ways not all I don't want to take all of the developers credit from overwatch but
01:04:41
Speaker
It's treading the path that team fortress like created for them. So, um, yeah, that's valve. It's a, it's a company. Maybe they'll make some more games, but regardless, they're bound to continue to get my money. As long as they have the preeminent digital distributor for PC.
01:05:05
Speaker
If you guys have suggestions for other companies you think would be cool for us to cover, maybe talk about, do a little bit of a deep dive, a little bit of history, a little bit of personal anecdote, you can send those in to soapstonepodcast at gmail.com or you can join the discussion on Facebook at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. I don't think the kidney beans are working.