Speaker 1: Technology with tech Stuff from dot Com. Hey there, and
Speaker 1: welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, Podcast extraordinaire,
Speaker 1: even a podcaster. I am glad that you could join
Speaker 1: me here for the part three of the Valve story. Hey,
Speaker 1: if you haven't listened to parts one and two, you
Speaker 1: should probably go do that, because otherwise this episode is
Speaker 1: not going to make a whole lot of sense. We're
Speaker 1: looking at the company Valve, the game developer company that
Speaker 1: was launched by a couple of Microsoft millionaires. And as
Speaker 1: I mentioned in part two of this series, we were
Speaker 1: leaving off at two thousand three. That was when Steam launched.
Speaker 1: That would be Valves online platform. It was much more
Speaker 1: modest at that time than what it is today. So
Speaker 1: when Steam launched, it was largely meant to do three things.
Speaker 1: It was meant to roll out patches for Valve games
Speaker 1: that already existed, so you could get them up to
Speaker 1: the latest version and therefore make them compatible with other players.
Speaker 1: A lot of Valves games are multiplayer games, and you
Speaker 1: have to have everybody using the same basic game rules
Speaker 1: in order to be able to play together. That's what
Speaker 1: Steam was meant to do. For the first part I
Speaker 1: would let players match up against each other without any conflicts.
Speaker 1: The second purpose for Steam was to activate some digital
Speaker 1: rights management strategies by requiring players to essentially check in
Speaker 1: online when their games were active to verify that they
Speaker 1: were in fact playing with legitimate copies of that game.
Speaker 1: And the third purpose was to sell Valve Games as
Speaker 1: an online store, with Half Life two becoming the title
Speaker 1: that would lead that charge. This would mark the beginning
Speaker 1: of a shift toward digital delivery rather than physical media
Speaker 1: for games, though obviously that did not happen right away.
Speaker 1: It wasn't an overnight success. For one thing, not everyone
Speaker 1: had a fast enough Internet connection, so many folks didn't
Speaker 1: really like the idea of spending a day or longer
Speaker 1: just to download a single game when you could just
Speaker 1: drive over to a video game store down the street
Speaker 1: and pick up a physical copy right there. Valve also
Speaker 1: moved to acquire another popular Half Life mod in that year.
Speaker 1: That mod was called Day of Defeat and it featured
Speaker 1: the Western Front of World War Two as the game setting,
Speaker 1: So it was taking the basic game engine and graphics
Speaker 1: of Half Life but modifying it for this World War
Speaker 1: two setting, and it was a multiplayer only game in
Speaker 1: which players could choose characters of various classes of various
Speaker 1: sides of the conflict to complete objectives and compete against
Speaker 1: each other in team based play. And that leads us
Speaker 1: up to two thousand four, which was a huge year
Speaker 1: for Valve. First things first, Early in the year, Valve
Speaker 1: announced a new game engine. So it had been using
Speaker 1: one called gold Source g O L D s r C,
Speaker 1: which was a heavily modified Quake engine. It had been
Speaker 1: relying upon that since the foundation of Valve. Now it
Speaker 1: had a new game engine and they called it Source,
Speaker 1: So so so you r ce. Source wasn't built from scratch exactly.
Speaker 1: It was more of a fork off of the Quake
Speaker 1: engine code that was the foundation for gold Source. So
Speaker 1: on one branch of that fork you would find yourself
Speaker 1: heading toward gold Source, the engine that powered Half Life
Speaker 1: and the numerous mods like counter Strike and Day of Defeat.
Speaker 1: Along the other branch you had Source, the more risky
Speaker 1: game engine, stuff that needed work so that it could
Speaker 1: become usable and stable. And with the Steam platform, Valve
Speaker 1: could roll out updates to the Source gin across its
Speaker 1: user base on a regular basis. And it also meant
Speaker 1: the company could avoid backwards compatibility issues. Everyone would always
Speaker 1: be on the same page as long as they were
Speaker 1: maintaining their Steam account. The Source engine itself would branch
Speaker 1: for different games in the future, so the version for
Speaker 1: Left for Dead is significantly different than the one for
Speaker 1: Half Life Too. But we'll get into more about those
Speaker 1: games later on. The Source Engine actually got its debut
Speaker 1: with the launch of Half Life two. It was the
Speaker 1: first game to really push the Steam platform, as gamers
Speaker 1: could buy the game in stores or they could purchase
Speaker 1: it digitally through Steam. It also would become the second
Speaker 1: title the company produced for the Xbox platform. The first
Speaker 1: one was counter Strike, which came out the year before.
Speaker 1: Both Counterstrike and the original Half Life would get Source
Speaker 1: re releases in two thousand four. The counter Strike one
Speaker 1: was called counter Strike Source. It also came out the
Speaker 1: same year as counter Strike zero, so that's a little confusing,
Speaker 1: especially since Counterstrike zero was still based off the old
Speaker 1: Gold Source engine and counter Strike Source was obviously based
Speaker 1: off the Source game engine and had a lot of
Speaker 1: visual upgrades compared to the original game. As for Half
Speaker 1: Life Too, it was eagerly received by the gaming public.
Speaker 1: The game had taken six years to complete and forty
Speaker 1: million dollars to develop. In the game, you are once
Speaker 1: again playing as the character Gordon Freeman, the silent protagonist.
Speaker 1: You are a physicist who's out of his elements, so
Speaker 1: to speak, and you're awakened by the government agent the
Speaker 1: g Man from the end of the first Half Life game. Now,
Speaker 1: this sequel assumes that at the end of Half Life
Speaker 1: you accepted the G Man's offer to work for his organization,
Speaker 1: because obviously if you did not accept that job, you
Speaker 1: got teleported into an area filled with an endless stream
Speaker 1: of enemies and you would eventually die. So you start
Speaker 1: off the game as an lay of the G Man,
Speaker 1: and you learn that there is an extra dimensional alien
Speaker 1: called the Combine, and it is pretty much wrecked shop
Speaker 1: and taken over everything. It's your job to free humanity
Speaker 1: from the oppressive alien force. And like its predecessor, it
Speaker 1: received critical and popular acclaim, It pulled in tons of
Speaker 1: awards in the process and sold millions of copies, and
Speaker 1: it would set up an expectation among gamers that would
Speaker 1: plague the company up to and including the present day.
Speaker 1: I am talking about the expectation for a Half Life three.
Speaker 1: Spoiler alert that's part of the Valve story that doesn't
Speaker 1: really have a resolution even as we speak, so don't
Speaker 1: get your hopes up. I do not have any insider
Speaker 1: information about a magical release of Half Life three, So
Speaker 1: if that's what you're listening for, uh, I'm sorry. But
Speaker 1: in two thousand five, Steam took its first big step
Speaker 1: into becoming the powerhouse that is today, because that's when
Speaker 1: Valve began to carry third party games on the Steam platform.
Speaker 1: So if you've never used Steam or you aren't into
Speaker 1: games at all, here's kind of how it shakes out.
Speaker 1: Imagine you have an online store similar to something like Amazon,
Speaker 1: only in this particular online store you're primarily buying games
Speaker 1: or expansion packs or downloadable content stuff like that. You're
Speaker 1: doing it digitally, so once you make the purchase, you
Speaker 1: can download that data to your computer. Games you've purchased
Speaker 1: remain attached to your Steam account. Now that means even
Speaker 1: if you delete the game off of your machine, there's
Speaker 1: still a record of your purchase and that exists on
Speaker 1: your Steam account, which means that you can download the
Speaker 1: game again at some future point if you have the
Speaker 1: desire to do so. It also means that you can
Speaker 1: download that same game to different computers using your Steam account.
Speaker 1: You log into your Steam account and then you can
Speaker 1: download it to that machine. Typically, there are imitations as
Speaker 1: to how many instances of the same game can be
Speaker 1: active at one time. So in other words, you might
Speaker 1: have the same game on three different computers, but you
Speaker 1: may only be able to run it on one computer
Speaker 1: at a time. You can't just download the game endlessly
Speaker 1: on different machines and therefore distribute one title to say
Speaker 1: all of your friends. They thought about that ahead of time,
Speaker 1: so it's convenient for gamers, but it also tries to
Speaker 1: avoid abuse of the system. And also you need to
Speaker 1: typically have an Internet connection to play a lot of
Speaker 1: these games because of that DRM segment. It's checking back
Speaker 1: in with the home server to make sure that, in fact,
Speaker 1: you are playing the one and only allowable instance of
Speaker 1: that game. Now, Valve makes money from these sales of
Speaker 1: third party games. The company didn't make those games. They're
Speaker 1: just acting as a store, virtual shelf for those games
Speaker 1: to exist upon the actual details of how much money
Speaker 1: Valve makes and whether it's the same across all games
Speaker 1: studios remains a secret. However, a general rule in the
Speaker 1: industry is that a platform like Steam takes a thirty
Speaker 1: percent cut of all sales, with the rest of it
Speaker 1: going to the game's publisher. So if you spend sixty
Speaker 1: dollars on a game on Steam, Valve would take an
Speaker 1: eighteen dollar cut of that. The other forty two dollars
Speaker 1: would go to the publisher. As Steam has grown to
Speaker 1: carry games from various publishers, it has earned Valve a
Speaker 1: truly enormous sum of money every year. And how much
Speaker 1: are we talking about? Well, and and sixteen Valve took
Speaker 1: in about three and a half billion dollars from Steam
Speaker 1: sales alone. Now, games Industry Biz points out that that
Speaker 1: really means that the growth was flat in Steam sales
Speaker 1: across the two years. It was three and a half
Speaker 1: billion and twenty fifteen, three and a half billion and
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen. But one, that's three and a half billion
Speaker 1: dollars largely made by selling other people's stuff. That's not
Speaker 1: bad now for those of you who want to impress
Speaker 1: or perhaps disturb people with your knowledge of Steam based trivia.
Speaker 1: The first two non Valve games to hit the virtual
Speaker 1: market were rag Doll Kung Fu and Darwinia. Rag Doll
Speaker 1: Kung Fu was the brainchild of Mark Keeley, who at
Speaker 1: the time was working at Lionhead Studios, and it requires
Speaker 1: players to control fighters who move kind of like marionettes,
Speaker 1: like stretchy marionettes. You can grab parts of their body
Speaker 1: and move them around and then make them engage in
Speaker 1: fierce kung fu battles. It looks absolutely ridiculous. You can
Speaker 1: find game footage online. Darwinia, however, was a tactical real
Speaker 1: time strategy game in which you could would control these
Speaker 1: artificially intelligent polygonal constructs against a malicious computer virus. So
Speaker 1: think of like an RTS game, something like war Raft
Speaker 1: or something along those lines, where you're controlling different units
Speaker 1: and you're positioning them and making them attack enemies. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like that, except it was all very tron
Speaker 1: esque and that you're working with virtual constructs, not representations
Speaker 1: of units. In two thousand five, Valve also released Half
Speaker 1: Life two, Lost Coast as a tech demo and the
Speaker 1: source version of Day of Defeat. The company also decided
Speaker 1: to hire on six students from Digipin Institute of Technology.
Speaker 1: The students had created a game called Narbacular Drop. Now.
Speaker 1: In that game, the player had to navigate puzzles inside
Speaker 1: of a dungeon using the ability to create magical gateways
Speaker 1: or portals from one point to another. Placing those portals
Speaker 1: in particular ways would allow players to cross big gaps
Speaker 1: or avoid enemies and traps. You would put one in
Speaker 1: the portal near you the other end of the portals,
Speaker 1: say on the other side of a big gap. You
Speaker 1: walk through your side, and you come out the other side.
Speaker 1: The game impressed Valve so much that the company began
Speaker 1: development on its own spin, using that same basic gameplay mechanic.
Speaker 1: Now that game would eventually become portal and would impress
Speaker 1: gamers when it launched a few years later. But before
Speaker 1: we get to that, we still have two thousand six
Speaker 1: to talk about. And that's when Valve released Half Life two,
Speaker 1: Episode one, and here's where we get into some tricky territory.
Speaker 1: Valve made the decision to take an episodic approach to
Speaker 1: releasing a sequel to Half Life Too. Originally, they released
Speaker 1: the game and called it Half Life to Aftermath. Because
Speaker 1: Valve had not yet revealed that they were looking at
Speaker 1: this from an episodic point of view, they wanted to
Speaker 1: kind of test the waters. It was a success, so
Speaker 1: they retroactively renamed it Half Life two Episode one, and
Speaker 1: this was to be the first in a trilogy of
Speaker 1: episodes that would follow the events that happened in Half
Speaker 1: Life to The second episode would come out in two
Speaker 1: thousand seven, and the third episode, well, we're still waiting
Speaker 1: on Half Life two episode three. Half Life two Episode
Speaker 1: two came out in two thousand seven, and ten years later,
Speaker 1: episode three is nowhere to be seen. Back when episodes
Speaker 1: one and two came out, Valve announced that their intent
Speaker 1: was to release episodes between six and eight months apart
Speaker 1: from each other, and in fact, there was even talk
Speaker 1: of an episode four that would be developed by a
Speaker 1: different game studio but then published by Valve under the
Speaker 1: half Life two brand. But the only thing we've seen
Speaker 1: of episode three over the last decade are some examples
Speaker 1: of concept art, and there was a synopsis of what
Speaker 1: the story was supposed to be. Now, within the gaming community,
Speaker 1: there's been a lot of discussion about this, and discussion
Speaker 1: is a kind word for what has been going on
Speaker 1: for the last ten years. Some people think Valve made
Speaker 1: a decision to drop episode three entirely and instead develop
Speaker 1: up an all new Half Life three, a fully formed
Speaker 1: sequel to Half Life two that would take whatever the
Speaker 1: elements of Episode three and incorporated into a larger game
Speaker 1: with a new game engine, new graphics, something along those lines.
Speaker 1: Maybe they said Episode three was just getting too complicated,
Speaker 1: too big to be an episodic game. It had to
Speaker 1: be something more than that, or maybe there were other
Speaker 1: problems during the development process. Valve has been infamously quiet
Speaker 1: about the whole thing, to the point that employees get
Speaker 1: visibly irritated when asked about it. There's been no official
Speaker 1: confirmation from Valve that the series is over, which leaves
Speaker 1: fans somewhat in the lurch as they wonder if they'll
Speaker 1: ever see another entry. In fact, Half Like three has
Speaker 1: now supplanted Duke knewkeambe Forever as the poster child for vaporware,
Speaker 1: since Duke Nukem Forever finally came out in two thousand
Speaker 1: eleven after years of being in development. And if you
Speaker 1: don't know what vapor ware is, vaporware is when a
Speaker 1: company announces a product and the product never seems to
Speaker 1: come out. There are tons of different examples, and in fact,
Speaker 1: if you search through the Tech Stuff archives, you will
Speaker 1: find that we've done full episodes about the concept of
Speaker 1: vaporware and given lots of different examples of it throughout
Speaker 1: the years. Now I'm gonna get back to the timeline
Speaker 1: for Valve in a second, but figured this is as
Speaker 1: good a place as any to wrap up the half
Speaker 1: life part of the history, because there's no resolution to this.
Speaker 1: It's still ongoing, it's still nebulous, and it's better to
Speaker 1: go ahead and rip off the band aid here than
Speaker 1: just prolonged it throughout the rest of the episode. In
Speaker 1: Mark laid Law, who you'll remember, was an author who
Speaker 1: joined Valve back in its earliest days and helped define
Speaker 1: valves approach to gamemaking as being very story centric. He
Speaker 1: left the company left the company in twenty six. Perhaps
Speaker 1: at that point he had come to the conclusion that
Speaker 1: Valve had no more need for storytellers, as maybe there
Speaker 1: were no plans to develop any games that were revolve
Speaker 1: around the cohesive story. Well, whatever his reasons were, he left,
Speaker 1: and he also wrote a piece called Epistle three in
Speaker 1: the voice of Gordon Freeman himself, which is a bit
Speaker 1: ironic since Gordon never actually spoke in the games, but
Speaker 1: it was from his point of view, and in that
Speaker 1: letter laid Law gave out information about what the plot
Speaker 1: of Episode three was supposed to be. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to go into detail about that here because some of
Speaker 1: you might still want to read it for yourselves, or
Speaker 1: maybe you're holding out hope that at some point, in
Speaker 1: some form this game will finally emerge in those story
Speaker 1: points will be incorporated into it. But it does exist
Speaker 1: online if you want to find it. It's called Epistle
Speaker 1: three and it's from Mark laid Law. Now, when we
Speaker 1: come back, we'll jump in Devolves timeline and talk about
Speaker 1: some of the other big events that have shaped the
Speaker 1: company and how it found itself moving away from developing games,
Speaker 1: or at least appeared to. But first, let's take a
Speaker 1: quick break and thank our sponsor. Back before I jumped
Speaker 1: on the Half Life two and three, tangent I was
Speaker 1: talking about the year two thousand and six. That year,
Speaker 1: Valve began to add more content to Steam, so not
Speaker 1: only could you purchase games and use it to get
Speaker 1: the latest patches for your game library, you could also
Speaker 1: visit Steam to get HD videos or you could get
Speaker 1: demos of upcoming games. By the end of the year,
Speaker 1: Steam carried about one games, and it wasn't enough to
Speaker 1: make Brick and mortar stores nervous, but it was starting
Speaker 1: to build some serious momentum. In two thousand seven, Valve
Speaker 1: released a collection of games under the title The Orange Box.
Speaker 1: The collection included Half Life two and Half Life two
Speaker 1: Episode one, both of which had already been published, but
Speaker 1: it also included Half Life two Episode two, Portal, and
Speaker 1: the game Gabe Newell had announced after the first Half
Speaker 1: Life went gold so many years before Team Fortress Too.
Speaker 1: We've already talked about Half Life two, so let's talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about these other games. Portal, as I
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, was created by the team that built the
Speaker 1: similar dungeon puzzle game called an Arbocular Drop, and as
Speaker 1: I mentioned, in that game, you could create gateways that
Speaker 1: linked to different points in space. Together, passed through one gateway,
Speaker 1: you emerge out of the other. The same game mechanic
Speaker 1: exists in Portal. One interesting aspect of this gameplay mechanic
Speaker 1: is that the laws of motion remain in effect with
Speaker 1: the portals. So if you were to open up one
Speaker 1: portal on the ceiling and a second on the floor
Speaker 1: directly underneath the first portal, dropping something into the floor
Speaker 1: portal will cause it to fall through the top. One
Speaker 1: all the way down into the bottom one, again through
Speaker 1: the top one, and it will continue this until it
Speaker 1: reaches terminal velocity, until it falls as fast as it
Speaker 1: can possibly go. Then you can open up a portal
Speaker 1: on a wall, closing the one that's on the ceiling,
Speaker 1: and the falling object will shoot out of that at
Speaker 1: the same velocity it was falling earlier, except now it's
Speaker 1: going to go in a different direction. So if you
Speaker 1: switch it to go from a vertical alignment to horizontal,
Speaker 1: it will suddenly shoot out across the game area. Sometimes
Speaker 1: this object might end up being the player character herself,
Speaker 1: so you could use it to get across particularly tricky
Speaker 1: areas of the game. In the game Portal, you're playing
Speaker 1: as a test subject, a woman attempting to escape from
Speaker 1: Aperture Science Labs. Now that's an organization that exists in
Speaker 1: the same universe as Black Mesub, the fictional research facility
Speaker 1: in the Half Life franchise, there's an artificially intelligent construct
Speaker 1: called Gladows, and GLaDOS claims to be testing your ability
Speaker 1: to navigate puzzles, but simultaneously is hurling lots of passive
Speaker 1: aggressive insults your way. She's a jerk. The game received
Speaker 1: critical acclaim for its novel approach to problem solving and
Speaker 1: the versatility of the portal gimmick. The game also featured
Speaker 1: one of the greatest songs in video game history, in
Speaker 1: my opinion, it's a sa called Still Alive, and in
Speaker 1: the game it's sung by Gladows. It was a song
Speaker 1: that was written by Jonathan Colton, who made a name
Speaker 1: for himself by releasing his music online independently and writing
Speaker 1: lots of geeky, nerdy songs. So if you're not familiar
Speaker 1: with him, go check him out. Jonathan Colton. He's really great.
Speaker 1: His earlier stuff tends to be a little bit more nerdy,
Speaker 1: and his later stuff a little bit more melancholic kind
Speaker 1: of uh, exploring the existential crises of the average person
Speaker 1: in there the middle of their lives, that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: But all of it's great now. The other game I
Speaker 1: mentioned Team Fortress too. That one had been announced way
Speaker 1: back in n game. Newell said that was the next
Speaker 1: game they were gonna work on after Half Life went Gold,
Speaker 1: but then it seemed to kind of disappear into vapor.
Speaker 1: Around two thousand was the last time the company had
Speaker 1: ever publicly acknowledged the fact that Team Fortress Too was
Speaker 1: in development, they just stopped talking about it after two thousand.
Speaker 1: At that time, the word was developers were working to
Speaker 1: adapt it to the new Source engine and that that
Speaker 1: was slowing things down. The game that came out was
Speaker 1: dramatically different from the original Team Fortress, which in itself
Speaker 1: was a mod of the game Quake. The original Team
Speaker 1: Fortress was a serious team based, competitive multiplayer game that
Speaker 1: had vehicles in it. It had realistic violence, and strategic
Speaker 1: elements like air drops were part of the game. That
Speaker 1: all changed with Team Fortress Too. Valves said that while
Speaker 1: it was working on Team Fortress, who had actually developed
Speaker 1: three or four different style games almost to completion, and
Speaker 1: there was a chance that any one of them could
Speaker 1: have become the actual Team Fortress Too. But eventually Valve
Speaker 1: decided that, for some reason or another, each of those
Speaker 1: didn't work, and the one that did come out was
Speaker 1: again very different from its predecessor. So some of the
Speaker 1: ideas that didn't make it into Team Fortress Too included
Speaker 1: setting it in the same universe as Half Life, something
Speaker 1: that val has done a lot of, or allowing for
Speaker 1: non player characters to appear in multiplayer matches. However, the
Speaker 1: Team Fortress two game that did come out would just
Speaker 1: feature a lot more not just that's unfair, but it
Speaker 1: would feature more cartoonish and comedic characters and art styles,
Speaker 1: with players selecting from ultimately nine character classes to play
Speaker 1: on a team, and they would play against other teams.
Speaker 1: So you and your team made up of various players
Speaker 1: playing different classes of characters, would be competing against a
Speaker 1: similar team operated by different people, and game modes would
Speaker 1: include stuff like a King of the Hill style control
Speaker 1: point mode. There was Captured the Flag games, a very
Speaker 1: classic kind of online game attack defend modes in which
Speaker 1: one team would have to defend a position and the
Speaker 1: other one has to try and take that position away.
Speaker 1: The game became enormously popular and developed a peculiar reputation
Speaker 1: involving hats. So the hats thing would come a little
Speaker 1: bit later, but let's go ahead and cover it now
Speaker 1: because I think it's an interesting part of what makes
Speaker 1: Team Fortress Too special. It also is another example of
Speaker 1: how Valve did something that today has become a widespread
Speaker 1: tactic in games across multiple genres. So within Team Fortress
Speaker 1: to players can customize the look of their characters to
Speaker 1: some extent with various accessories such as hats. Now, some
Speaker 1: of those accessories are just included in the basic form
Speaker 1: of the game, but others are called unusuals, and you
Speaker 1: have to actually get earned those those types of of accessories,
Speaker 1: and they can even have visual effects associated with them,
Speaker 1: like particle effects, and it kind of gives you a
Speaker 1: special kind of flare. Now, those effects don't give you
Speaker 1: any special bonuses or advantages, but they are seen as
Speaker 1: something of a status symbol. So within the game world,
Speaker 1: if you have one of those cool hats, people will
Speaker 1: take notice of it. It's not necessarily going to give
Speaker 1: you a real advantage, but people might say, wow, it's
Speaker 1: really cool. I want that. Within some groups, people who
Speaker 1: play together regularly with a group of people, they may
Speaker 1: all wear similar hats, so that would require each member
Speaker 1: to get one of those hats for him or herself.
Speaker 1: Special hats, those unusuals I was talking about, they can
Speaker 1: only be found in crates, which you can purchase with
Speaker 1: real money if you want to, or you can trade
Speaker 1: with other players and get hats that way. This created
Speaker 1: an ongoing economy and Team Fortress too, and opened up
Speaker 1: a revenue stream for Valve. These days, it's not unusual
Speaker 1: for a game to include some sort of paid content
Speaker 1: element like this. The ones that tend to use it
Speaker 1: as a way of setting apart your character cosmetically, those
Speaker 1: seem to get a better reaction from the gaming community
Speaker 1: than say, a game that offers up items and skills
Speaker 1: that give you an advantage over other players. That strategy
Speaker 1: a lot of people derisively referred to as pay to win.
Speaker 1: You pay the money, you get the various weapons or
Speaker 1: other items that give you an advantage, and then you
Speaker 1: are making up for a lack of skill with the
Speaker 1: willingness to pay money to get artificially better at a game.
Speaker 1: That's the pay to win approach, whereas this was more
Speaker 1: of a cosmetic thing. A lot of players I know
Speaker 1: don't have a problem with this. Some of them don't
Speaker 1: care for it, they don't purchase into it, but at
Speaker 1: the same time, it ultimately makes no effect on the
Speaker 1: gameplay itself, and so therefore it is more easily accepted
Speaker 1: in some circles of the gaming community. Now you can
Speaker 1: find this in lots of other games, like Overwatch. Overwatch
Speaker 1: has a similar crates system, and you can earn crates
Speaker 1: through gameplay at a certain speed, or you can spend
Speaker 1: real money to buy several crates at a time and
Speaker 1: try your luck opening one crate after the next to
Speaker 1: try and get that one special item you're looking for.
Speaker 1: And typically there's no guarantee that whatever it is you
Speaker 1: want is going to be an any given crate, so
Speaker 1: you could open it up and find a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of neat stuff, but none of the things that you
Speaker 1: specifically wanted, and you might end up finding out that
Speaker 1: you're dropping as much cash as you spend on the game,
Speaker 1: or more in some cases, just trying to chase that
Speaker 1: one accessory. It's certainly true now that Team Fortress Too
Speaker 1: Is is a free to play game, but at the
Speaker 1: time you would actually purchase it. Not everyone is lured
Speaker 1: by this promise, but enough people are to make it
Speaker 1: very profitable. Meanwhile, Valve also upgraded Steam and added the
Speaker 1: Steam Community, which was a suite of social networking features
Speaker 1: on the online platform. This let people use Steam as
Speaker 1: a virtual gathering place they could share information, they could
Speaker 1: try and find groups with other like minded gamers to
Speaker 1: play certain games, and according to Valve, around that time,
Speaker 1: there were about fifteen million people using Steam regularly playing
Speaker 1: around two hundred games. The new version of Steam also
Speaker 1: incorporated Metacritic ratings for games, which gave players a chance
Speaker 1: to see what other critics have thought about different game
Speaker 1: titles before they made the commitment to purchase that game
Speaker 1: for themselves. In two thousand and eight, Valve acquired a
Speaker 1: game developer called Turtle Rock. That company had been hard
Speaker 1: at work on a cooperative multiplayer game set in a
Speaker 1: zombie apocalypse. The game was Left for Dead, with four
Speaker 1: being the numeral for Turtle Rock had been developing the
Speaker 1: game before Valve acquired the company, but the developers had
Speaker 1: been receiving some funding from Valve toward the late stages
Speaker 1: of game development. Valve would end up being the publisher
Speaker 1: for Left for Dead, and this became another big hit.
Speaker 1: Turtle Rock, however, would not remain part of Valve for
Speaker 1: very long. It was a fairly curious turn of events.
Speaker 1: Valve Is located out of Washington State, but Turtle Rocks
Speaker 1: headquarters were in California, and at first Turtle Rock would
Speaker 1: operate as an offshoot of Valve called Valve South. It
Speaker 1: was a satellite office for Valve is the first time
Speaker 1: the company he had really been trying to do that
Speaker 1: but things didn't work out very well. The folks a
Speaker 1: Valve South in general felt like they were largely forgotten
Speaker 1: about and we're out of the loop. They had infrequent
Speaker 1: communication with Valve HQ up in Washington. The developers at
Speaker 1: the former Turtle Rock Studios also got frustrated with Valve time.
Speaker 1: That's that lag time between when a company has said,
Speaker 1: or when specifically when Valvis said it's going to develop
Speaker 1: something and when it finally, if ever comes out. It's
Speaker 1: that nebulous, indefinable amount of time, and the folks over
Speaker 1: Turtle Rock didn't much care for that kind of uncertainty.
Speaker 1: So after only a year or so of working with Valve,
Speaker 1: Gabe Newell agreed with the folks over at Valve South
Speaker 1: that it just wasn't a great arrangement and the group
Speaker 1: split off again from Valve. It would re establish itself
Speaker 1: once again as Turtle Rock Studios. Turtle Rock would continue
Speaker 1: to collaborate with Valve, but it would operate as its
Speaker 1: own independent entity from that moment forward. Valve in return,
Speaker 1: received ownership of the left for dead intellectual property and
Speaker 1: they got to work on the sequel. Steam also evolved
Speaker 1: some more, allowing players to create cloud based saves so
Speaker 1: that they could continue playing certain games across different devices
Speaker 1: and pick up where they had left off. It also
Speaker 1: meant that if you create a specific control scheme for
Speaker 1: a game where you bind keys to specific in game actions,
Speaker 1: you could save that configuration on Steam and have access
Speaker 1: to it on a different machine under your account. Valve
Speaker 1: also released a software suite called steam Works to third
Speaker 1: party developers, which gave them the ability to use the
Speaker 1: tools Valve had created over the years while they were
Speaker 1: developing Steam itself. Team Fortress Too would also get a
Speaker 1: few new classes in two thousand and eight which would
Speaker 1: help refresh the game and players eyes. And the following year,
Speaker 1: which was two thousand nine for those of you keeping score,
Speaker 1: we would see the release of Left for Dead Too,
Speaker 1: which is still one of my favorite games. It broke
Speaker 1: all of valves records for pre sale figures, meaning more
Speaker 1: people pay for the game before it was even available
Speaker 1: than any other Valve game up to that point. That's
Speaker 1: despite the fact that there was a growing movement online
Speaker 1: to boycott the game. So what was that all about? Well,
Speaker 1: the crux of the matter was in downloadable content or
Speaker 1: DLC for the original Left for Dead game. Some players
Speaker 1: who were fans of Left for Dead got very upset
Speaker 1: when Valve announced that there was going to be a
Speaker 1: sequel coming out just one year after Left for Dead
Speaker 1: itself had come out. They said, that's too soon. That
Speaker 1: means you're abandoning this other game. And you said you
Speaker 1: were going to develop downloadable content. How dare you go
Speaker 1: back on your promise? Valve, I shake my fist at
Speaker 1: you and anger and say ger. So they felt like
Speaker 1: they were never going to get the d L see
Speaker 1: that they felt they had been promised, and as a result,
Speaker 1: about forty thousand people banded together and said they were
Speaker 1: going to boycott Left for Dead too. That turned out
Speaker 1: to not matter so much. A lot of them ended
Speaker 1: up buying the game on pre sales anyway, even though
Speaker 1: they were saying they were going to boycott it, because
Speaker 1: they really wanted to play the game. And further down
Speaker 1: the line, Valve would release DLC both for the first
Speaker 1: game and for Left for Dead too, including DLC that
Speaker 1: would link the two games together because if you aren't familiar,
Speaker 1: both games feature four sets of playable characters, but it's
Speaker 1: two different sets of four, so you've got four characters
Speaker 1: in Left for Dead one and four different characters, and
Speaker 1: Left for Dead too. They released some DLC that had
Speaker 1: a bridging character that would go between the two and
Speaker 1: link them together. Otherwise they were independent titles within the
Speaker 1: same universe. In two thousand ten, Steam users were treated
Speaker 1: to a redesign that made the service much easier to
Speaker 1: navigate and more attractive to boot. It also added in
Speaker 1: more content, including stuff that wasn't related to gaming, so
Speaker 1: you could get non gaming apps through Steam. At that point,
Speaker 1: players could also get a look at games in development
Speaker 1: through Steam green Light, which is a service that would
Speaker 1: let potential game developers essentially audition their ideas an attempt
Speaker 1: to get some funding to complete a full game. Valve
Speaker 1: also learned the power of the Steam Sale. Those are
Speaker 1: always big events on the Steam platform. Several times a year.
Speaker 1: Valve will offer titles at severely discounted prices, and I
Speaker 1: am definitely one of those people who have been known
Speaker 1: to pick up a title or two, even titles that
Speaker 1: I previously had not had much interest in because their
Speaker 1: price so low that I feel like an idiot if
Speaker 1: I don't buy them. And yes, there are games in
Speaker 1: my Steam library that I have yet to even open,
Speaker 1: so I am part of the problem. Oh. In was
Speaker 1: also when Mac users would finally get support for Steam
Speaker 1: and there was much rejoicing. Y I got a lot
Speaker 1: more to say, but before I jump into the last
Speaker 1: section of the last episode of the story of Valve,
Speaker 1: let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. A
Speaker 1: couple of other things happened in that I had not
Speaker 1: yet mentioned. One of those was that Valve moved to
Speaker 1: a larger office space in Bellevue, Washington. It would stay
Speaker 1: there until when it would move again. Valve also announced
Speaker 1: it was working on Portal two and that the game
Speaker 1: would release in twleven, and the company began development on
Speaker 1: a little project called Doda Too. So what the heck
Speaker 1: is Dota Too, And for that matter, what the heck
Speaker 1: was Dota one and what happened to it? Well, let's
Speaker 1: start at the beginning. DODA is an acronym d O
Speaker 1: t A. It stands for Defense of the Ancients. At
Speaker 1: least the original DODA did. This was a multiplayer online
Speaker 1: battle arena game or mobile game. So if you've ever
Speaker 1: heard the term mobile, it stands for multiplayer online battle arena.
Speaker 1: This particular one was based of Blizzards title Warcraft three
Speaker 1: Reign of Chaos, as well as an expansion for that
Speaker 1: game called The Frozen Throne. Now, the way a mobile
Speaker 1: game typically works because you have two teams that are
Speaker 1: fighting against each other and the goal is to destroy
Speaker 1: the opposite team's structure. It might be a base or
Speaker 1: some other representation of that team. So you are to
Speaker 1: try and take your character from your end of the map,
Speaker 1: go across the map to the enemy side of the
Speaker 1: map and destroy their structure while they're trying to do
Speaker 1: the same thing to you. So you control a unit.
Speaker 1: In DODA, they are called heroes. These are characters that
Speaker 1: have particular powerful abilities, sometimes their time based, so you
Speaker 1: can use an ability and then it's on a cool
Speaker 1: down period until you can use it again. Some other
Speaker 1: games might use something similar, like a Manna meter where
Speaker 1: you have to fill up the meter in order to
Speaker 1: use special abilities, but the basic idea is the same.
Speaker 1: You're not just allowed to spam the enemy to team
Speaker 1: with an ability over and over again. There's a cool
Speaker 1: down period built in one way or another, so you
Speaker 1: have to preserve your side while destroying their side, and
Speaker 1: they're typically different pathways to get from your end of
Speaker 1: the map to the other end of the map. That's
Speaker 1: your basic MOBI and Doda was a great example of that. Well,
Speaker 1: Valves saw the value in that style of game. They
Speaker 1: didn't have one of those themselves, and they decided to
Speaker 1: hire abdul Ismail, better known as ice Frog, who was
Speaker 1: one of the developers for that Doda mod back in
Speaker 1: the day, so they brought him on board to develop
Speaker 1: the sequel. Now, this relied upon valves source engine instead
Speaker 1: of on the Blizzard game and Valve launched the game
Speaker 1: at the game's con conference in Germany, Inn and that
Speaker 1: became the first Dota to Championship tournament. It remains an
Speaker 1: insanely popular mobile and is frequently featured in various pro
Speaker 1: gaming tournaments. For a very long time, it was consistently
Speaker 1: the most played game by concurrent players on Steam. Recently,
Speaker 1: it has been replaced by a little game called Player
Speaker 1: Unknowns Battlegrounds, a game I am so bad at that
Speaker 1: you're gonna want me to be in the game if
Speaker 1: you ever play, because I'm guaranteed to soak up those
Speaker 1: bullets for you. Well, Valves Dota to tiptoed around the
Speaker 1: fact that it was a sequel to a mod to
Speaker 1: a game that Valve you know, didn't actually make. Blizzard
Speaker 1: wasn't quite ready to concede and ended up filing a
Speaker 1: lawsuit against Valve. That lawsuit would stretch into twelve but
Speaker 1: it was eventually settled out of court. Back in Valve
Speaker 1: made the decision to switch Team Fortress to two free
Speaker 1: to play mode at that point, and that means you
Speaker 1: can download and play Team Fortress too absolutely free. Players
Speaker 1: can still pay to get access to crates in an
Speaker 1: effort to find unusuals, and lots of people still do that,
Speaker 1: which means Team Interest Too is profitable even though the
Speaker 1: company gives away the basic game for free. Gabe Newell
Speaker 1: had some pretty hefty criticisms for his former employer, that
Speaker 1: being Microsoft in the year that was when Microsoft launched
Speaker 1: Windows eight, and Gabe Newell called it quote a catastrophe
Speaker 1: for everyone in the PC space end quote. He went
Speaker 1: on to say, and I quote, I think we'll lose
Speaker 1: some of the top tier PC O E M s
Speaker 1: who will exit the market. I think margins will be
Speaker 1: destroyed for a bunch of people. End quote. He was saying,
Speaker 1: essentially that the platform wasn't as open as it should
Speaker 1: be and that Microsoft was taking too much of a
Speaker 1: micromanagement approach as to what could and could not run
Speaker 1: on their platform, and this was a hint that Valve
Speaker 1: was starting to look around at other options, including developing
Speaker 1: something that could run on a Lenox based machine, Lenox
Speaker 1: being totally different operating system, and it stirred rumors that
Speaker 1: the company might be looking into creating a console like
Speaker 1: device of its own. This would become the foundation for
Speaker 1: the stories about the fabled Steam machine. At the end
Speaker 1: of twenty twelve of the company announced that it in
Speaker 1: fact was working on a set top box dubbed the
Speaker 1: steam Box. Valve planned on creating a piece of hardware
Speaker 1: in house that they called Bigfoot. This was the internal
Speaker 1: name for the device, and that the purpose of this
Speaker 1: was to be a model upon which other manufacturers could
Speaker 1: base their designs. So, in other words, Valve wanted to
Speaker 1: make steam boxes a new type of hardware, not just
Speaker 1: a single product. It's not like the Microsoft Xbox. It's
Speaker 1: more like an offshoot of the PC itself. So they
Speaker 1: would open this up so other manufacturers could make their
Speaker 1: own version of the steambox using the Steam operating system
Speaker 1: and some other basic parameters. That meant that you could purchase,
Speaker 1: presumably a steambox from any number of different providers, each
Speaker 1: of whom would determine the design and components of the
Speaker 1: box pursuant to the various parameters that Valve had set up.
Speaker 1: Val revealed some of the Steam OS devices in along
Speaker 1: with a special controller that resembled the game pads found
Speaker 1: with consoles like the Xbox, although it had a lot
Speaker 1: of touchpad type stuff with it. I never got a
Speaker 1: chance to actually play with one of those myself, but
Speaker 1: I heard a lot of my friends criticize it for
Speaker 1: the way they performed, and also the Steam controller was
Speaker 1: one of those devices that underwent numerous changes throughout its development,
Speaker 1: to the point where gamers were starting to get a
Speaker 1: little frustrated with that story as well. Steam devices went
Speaker 1: into beta testing in ten with the goal of releasing
Speaker 1: them as commercial hardware, and eventually Valve would push that
Speaker 1: date back to November two thousand fifteen, and today you
Speaker 1: can go out and buy a Steam OS box from
Speaker 1: the few places that will have them. They just haven't
Speaker 1: sold very well, so a lot of manufacturers discontinued their
Speaker 1: Steam product lines as a result, and it might mean
Speaker 1: that you can't find one anywhere, So why didn't they
Speaker 1: take off? Well, they're probably a lot of different answers
Speaker 1: to that question, but one of them maybe that gamers
Speaker 1: tend to be drawn either to the consoles or to
Speaker 1: the PCs. In the extreme, they might own both, but
Speaker 1: there don't appear to be very many who care for
Speaker 1: something that seems to straddle between the two different extremes.
Speaker 1: In Valve launched a Steam app for smartphones, which gave
Speaker 1: users the chance to interact on online forums or peruse
Speaker 1: the Steam Shop even when they were on the go,
Speaker 1: which meant, never again, what a player need to worry
Speaker 1: about missing out on one of those Steam sales just
Speaker 1: because they weren't away or they weren't near, Rather their
Speaker 1: gaming rig at home. Valve released a successor to their
Speaker 1: Source game engine, called fittingly enough, Source two in two
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen, and the first game to get the Source
Speaker 1: to treatment was Dota Too. They updated Dota two to
Speaker 1: the Source to engine. Steam has continued to evolve over
Speaker 1: time and is now one of the primary stores for
Speaker 1: PC games, including virtual reality games. It has also become
Speaker 1: the tool of players when they want to send a
Speaker 1: message to the video game industry. If a developer does
Speaker 1: something that displeases gamers. Sometimes they will organize and they
Speaker 1: will head over to Steam and they will leave reactionary reviews,
Speaker 1: negative ones. Typically for that developers games. This is called
Speaker 1: review bombing. It does not necessarily reflect how people feel
Speaker 1: about the specific game they're reviewing. That's kind of messed
Speaker 1: up when you think about it. So here's an example.
Speaker 1: Some players felt that Valve abandoned development of Dota two.
Speaker 1: And these are hardcore Dota two players that want more content,
Speaker 1: They want more development on that game, and they continue
Speaker 1: to play Dota two, but they will go and leave
Speaker 1: negative reviews on Steam about Dota two to voice their
Speaker 1: disappointment to Valve that the company is no longer actively
Speaker 1: seeming to support them. Now, those negative reviews don't indicate
Speaker 1: that the game itself is bad. In fact, the players
Speaker 1: still love the game. The negative reviews are there because
Speaker 1: they love the game so much they want more of
Speaker 1: it and they're not getting it. But let's say you're
Speaker 1: a new player. You're someone who's just now coming to
Speaker 1: look at Dota two, and then you see all these
Speaker 1: negative reviews are there. You might be disinclined to get
Speaker 1: it for yourself because you think oh, this must be
Speaker 1: a bad game. Look at all the negative reviews. It
Speaker 1: becomes sort of a self defeating strategy for gamers, really,
Speaker 1: because lower adoption rates of a game are not the
Speaker 1: best motivator for a company to go and throw some
Speaker 1: support behind that product. There's even more extreme examples than that.
Speaker 1: In fact, here's a recent one, a story that continues
Speaker 1: to unfold as I record this episode. The YouTube personality
Speaker 1: Beauty Pie, who has the largest following on YouTube, found
Speaker 1: himself the tar to get of game developer Campo Santo's
Speaker 1: ire after the streamer had used a racial slur in
Speaker 1: a live streamed gaming session. So Campo Santo's response was
Speaker 1: to issue a Digital Millennium Copyright Act or d m
Speaker 1: C a takedown request of all of put Pies gameplay
Speaker 1: videos that featured him playing one of their games, and
Speaker 1: YouTube complied. And that's a sizeable portion of Pauti Pies videos,
Speaker 1: not all of them, obviously, he's done hundreds of videos,
Speaker 1: but he was making money off of those videos and
Speaker 1: now they're gone. A sizeable group of his audience responded
Speaker 1: by flocking to Steam to give Compo Santo's title fire
Speaker 1: Watch a negative review. They skewed the score dramatically, so
Speaker 1: they weren't actually feeling like Firewatch was a bad game.
Speaker 1: They were expressing their disdain for the game developer or
Speaker 1: issuing the d m C a takedown notice in response
Speaker 1: to this racial slur. It's all pretty ugly when you
Speaker 1: get down to it. Valve has attempted to address this
Speaker 1: in a couple of ways, the most recent of which
Speaker 1: is to create a means of visualizing when a game
Speaker 1: gets a dramatic number of extreme reviews. So this idea
Speaker 1: being that you can see a visualization of here's the
Speaker 1: date where all these negative reviews piled in, and you
Speaker 1: can see that it is correlated with this other development
Speaker 1: that happened and therefore may not have any connection to
Speaker 1: the quality of the game itself. So presumably this will
Speaker 1: give gamers more information so that they can make a
Speaker 1: decision about buying a game and not feel like that
Speaker 1: decision was influenced by unfair reviews that don't actually reflect
Speaker 1: the quality of that game. However, there's some critics who
Speaker 1: say this strategy really just prolongs and possibly enhances the
Speaker 1: effects of those negative reviews, and that it may do
Speaker 1: more harm than good. But Valve may always go back
Speaker 1: and change this up again, tweak it again. In fact,
Speaker 1: they're constantly tweaking Steam to make it more effective, usable,
Speaker 1: and to have more features. Valve continues to have an
Speaker 1: enormous impact on the PC games industry. Will we see
Speaker 1: any more transformative titles emerged from the company, actual titles
Speaker 1: developed by Valve and not just published or or sold
Speaker 1: by Valve. Well that's hard to say, because everyone at Valve,
Speaker 1: all thirty five of them or so, or pretty quiet
Speaker 1: about what they're working on. But there's no doubt the
Speaker 1: company will continue to be a major mover and shaker
Speaker 1: in the PC gaming world moving forward. Well that's all
Speaker 1: I've got to say about the story of Valve in
Speaker 1: these three episodes. And again, the reason I decided to
Speaker 1: break it out into that many is because so many
Speaker 1: of those elements spill out beyond Valve to affect the
Speaker 1: gaming industry and general also just the general PC industry
Speaker 1: in ways that are felt today well beyond video games.
Speaker 1: So things like having the online store platform, the online forums,
Speaker 1: the community, having this issue of a community acting as
Speaker 1: a block vote against stuff because they feel that that
Speaker 1: is their way to voice displeasure or their opinions. There
Speaker 1: are a lot of these issues that are plaguing various
Speaker 1: companies or or challenged to various companies that have nothing
Speaker 1: to do with video games. But Valve is a great
Speaker 1: example of how those play out. And it's just a
Speaker 1: fascinating story all on its own right. And I know
Speaker 1: there are plenty of people out there eagerly hoping that
Speaker 1: someday they'll hear something about another Half Life game. Keep
Speaker 1: holding out, hope, just don't hold your breath. If you
Speaker 1: guys have any suggestions for future topics for tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: whether it's a person or a company specific technology, let
Speaker 1: me know. Send me an email the addresses tech Stuff
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop
Speaker 1: me a line on any social media platform you like,
Speaker 1: as long as it's Twitter or Facebook. The handle of
Speaker 1: both of those is tech Stuff hs W. Remember I
Speaker 1: often will stream this show live on twitch dot tv
Speaker 1: slash tech Stuff. I record on Wednesdays and Fridays, so
Speaker 1: just head over to twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: You'll see the recording schedule there. You can join me
Speaker 1: for a live recording. I often will chat with the
Speaker 1: chat room answer questions. You get to see me mess up.
Speaker 1: It's a good old time for everybody, and now I'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon for more on this
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