Last I checked they haven't been buying (and ruining) rival studios or doing dodgy DLC crap. Or rushing a game to get it out as fast as possible.
Valve can afford to not rush games, that's not exactly a point you can compare (similar to Blizzard in that regard). As for buying and ruining rival studios . . . how can a publisher buy developers that are somehow rivals (publishers rival publishers, developers rival developers)? Look up the history of L4D and what they did to the game so they could get L4D2 out of the door. Or how Portal wasn't even developed by them originally (same goes for L4D). Counter-Strike was a mod they bought out. They're in it to make money, like anyone else is. How bad a specific company is is just down to how much that company has affected you personally. Which is anecdotal bias, and thus not really evidence either.
L4D, Counter Strike and Portal were all fairly new ideas (at the time) with new talent. Valve's more taking in interesting ideas and concepts (particularly from student projects with the Portal games) that just "buying out people who are making money"
Valve are interested in making money. They have to be. People don't seem to understand this. To exist, a company has to make revenue equal to what it spends each year (rent, bills, payslips, you name it). Valve's primary motivation will always be making money. Doesn't matter how they do it, the point is that that's their bottom line. Which publishers buy out companies who're making money, and how does this make them "rivals" (bearing in mind EA make a metric ton of cash yearly)? Surely they're just acquiring talent like Valve are? Also, look up L4D vs. L4D2. Seriously. Look. It. Up.
As many agree, Nintendo wins E3! That invitational was super hype. I was bouncing up and down in my chair more or less the whole time... while watching it on a phone in Pittsburgh. I'm a Nintendo fan at heart. I'm super excited for the PlanetSide 2 coming to PS4, not that I have or ever will get a Playstation, but just because it means more devs working on the PC version too.
Needing to make money and it being the primary objective of the company are two vastly different things. When a company makes enough money it can do whatever the leadership wants after that. A leadership who's primary objective is to make money will work to expand revenue sources as a primary goal. A leadership who likes what it does will spend the excess money it has to do what it does better. A leadership that likes charity will donate. Any company that is losing money will work to get it because they want to survive. Them surviving can be a means to an end though, not an end unto itself. I respect Valve as a company because of how sound a number of their business decisions are, and a lot of them in recent years haven't really negatively influenced many people at all. The Portal/CS people you talked about got jobs. The augmented reality people got to keep working on the project after valve cut it. That's not to say they don't have a murky past, but for the most part it appears as though it's long since passed. I don't have access to their business meetings though, and I'm willing to bet neither do you.
You still haven't looked L4D up, have you? Or how the CS competitive scene thought Source was the worst thing to happen to comp. level CS since forever (coincidentally, GO is pretty good. Valve do learn from their mistakes to an extent. But then again, so do other publishers). Needing to make money and being the primary objective are the same thing. If it's the only need a company has, it is the company's primary objective. Valve no longer needs to make money. Other publishers still do. This is an assumption based on how much money people invest into the Steam platform, and also based on the fact that Valve aren't a publicly-traded company (as far as I'm aware - could be wrong). Valve's additional money has gone, pretty much without question, into expanding revenue sources as a primary goal. Steam Machines are an additional revenue source. Polishing Big Picture at the expense of leaving the desktop Steam client without significant updates is proof of the same direction. Their lack of games development proves that (new games are a risk in terms of cost/benefit analysis, and Half Life 3 is the elephant in the room they're going to get flak for nomatter how good the game is). I respect Valve, but I respect a lot of other companies for simply trying to surive. That doesn't mean they're not immune to making mistakes . . . and Valve is in that group as well. They've made mistakes, but those mistakes are forgiven for some reason I can't begin to fathom. Because they provide cheap games? If that's your metric for them screwing up other aspects of their business, so be it. I just don't let them get off scott-free for things that, if performed by other publishers, would be shamed across the Internet as more evidence that publisher X is big, bad and evil. I don't have access to Valve's business meetings. But I doubt nobody here has access to any "big bad" publisher's business meetings either, so that argument goes both ways, don't you agree?
I have, and found nothing on the development. I looked up L4d vs L4d2 and found reviews. I looked up development history of L4D and found mod junk. Responsibility of citation is on the person making the argument. No, they aren't. Let's say I made a pharmaceutical company with the goal of curing some disease that has personally effected me in some way. I make money to fund research involving that disease, and monetize any failed attempts or side projects in order to further fund the research. That's like saying that the primary goal of all people is to survive, and that all else is secondary to that end. People willingly give their lives on a regular basis and do things that have nothing at all to do with survival. Valve put updates for YEARS into TF2 updates before they went the F2P route with little to no money to show for it before making a switch to another model. Valve took on the Portal people without thinking it would do well. It was shoved in the orange box because it was thought it wouldn't sell well on its own. Valve experiments with the ways it makes money. It, as a company, has tried new things as revenue sources. Their entry into the console market is vastly different from other consoles, and can be seen as a significant risk over continuing to do what they already make money on, regular steam. I haven't really blamed valve for doing anything underhanded in the last 7+ years. Steam was underhanded in the beginning. It was a shitty DRM scheme that manhandled people into using their platform for a number of reasons. I didn't like the weapons they added with the hat updates, but it's still possible to play vanilla because they didn't pull any functionality from the game. So I can't be mad. Now they release updates that improve everybodies experience at pretty much no cost. Oh man, look at those steam workshop profits they must be getting. Clearly this is motivated entirely by greed. And look at how their releasing the Steam OS as a free and open source linux distro. I'm not going to deny that it will likely lead to improved publicity and sales, but things like that hardly scream "big bad". Releasing games you don't like doesn't make the publishers bad, resorting to shitty drm policies, shitty dlc schemes, and cutting support for older games does. From what I can see Valve has really only done the first and that was a while ago. Other companies have visibly shafted people. I can't really say the same for Valve. If they do it in the dark that's beyond me, but I haven't seen it. For the record, I've regularly defended Microsoft, EA, and other similar companies when people make stupid arguments about decisions they make that aren't primarily fueled by greed. And those companies visibly shaft people. Often the consumer, though also visibly developers.
The key point in all of this is "Valve have, but not any more". Other publishers are notably better these days than they were in the past. Don't you agree? Also, I will always disagree with "visibly shafted", because this is video games, and not about curing cancer (which is where your analogy falls down, because it doesn't pertain to video games. Drugs development has a lot of complicated restrictions on it, namely around patents and big pharma. But that's a debate for another time). Even if I feel wronged myself, I'm lenient on the language I use because I dislike making something seem like a bigger issue than it is. Valve can release updates nowadays (though Steam Workshop is pretty old now) because they're swimming in money. The Steam Inventory wouldn't exist without the need to create the cash market that exists around TF2 items (and now DotA 2 items); which feeds into the Community Market. Valve gets a cut of all of those items, every single one. All Linux distros are free and open source. They shouldn't be applauded for doing something that's legally required of them. Steam has had "shitty" DRM policies before and now. They only fixed Offline Mode because EA's Origin client launched in beta with that functionality. Or rather, it was fixed around the same time, and I don't believe in coincidence in that regard. With regards to L4D, Valve promised updates, a Workshop of sorts for L4D, custom campaigns, new Survivors, etc. That all became L4D2 and they completely dropped L4D like a hot brick. It annoyed a lot of people at the time, one of the major things they didn't handle well. I'd like to consider myself objective. I just have a bee in my bonnet when people assume there are "big bad publishers" out there, and that Valve somehow isn't developing for the same end goal as they are. What was Valve's last unique IP that they developed in-house and released?
Valve and CD Projekt seem like the only ones that got better that I can think of. EA's games used to have less obnoxious DRM and DLC policies. It's always been pretty bad but it's markedly worse now. Microsoft has just always been an ******* from the buisness side, since before they started getting into video game stuff. There's been little to no change in that regard. My phara analogy used alruistic purposes because it's easy to grasp. It's just harder to imagine why a person obsessed with lenses would sink money into making a better camera lens when all it does is bend light. But there are people like that. There are indie developers(and artists, and small buisness owners) who make choices that earn them less money because they live on some sort of code of ethics or have some desire beyond making money. A large company is capable of the exact same motivations, they just have more responsibility to deal with. And shafting people has nothing to do with the curing cancer bit. You can own a gas station and shaft your customers in one way or another. When you aren't fair and you don't treat your customer properly, you're shafting them. Being shafted just hurts, it won't kill you. Ask somebody who's been to prison. They could have not gone with linux, and gone with hiring somebody to make proprietary software that they hold rights over. They didn't. Their drm has gotten significantly less restrictive, and honestly I've never had an issue with online mode for offline games. You just mean that L4D boycott stuff? I thought there was something revealed about the behind the scenes stuff that was going on that I didn't know about. I remember that, and I remember looking at L4D2 and seeing why they didn't. You seem to also be forgetting that they DID update L4D after 2 came out with new maps and they DIDN'T drop server support like other companies have done. Since when does being original have anything to do with being good? Or not being bad? EDIT:This is getting too off topic for the thread. tl;dr You hate mindless valve fanboys, I hate mindless publisher haters. Let's just agree neither of us fit those demographics.
