The Machines Are Winning
Last week’s Valve Software announcements add up to challenge the titular use of “Software.”
Valve Software, the famed videogame creator and maker of the Steam online game store, made three big announcements over the past week. Not to mention a fourth, if games enthusiasts read between the lines.
Item one: new operating system. Computer game players will soon be able to ignore the Windows/Mac/Linux/whatever option and instead install the “Steam OS” on their box, which will natively play “hundreds” of Steam games and stream video and audio.
Item two: new hardware. The Steam Machine had already been announced as a concept, a gaming computer built specifically to connect to living room HDTVs, and it’s still only a nebulous computer concept. Valve is making one; other hardware makers will build a few, as well, marketed in the “Steam Machine” line.
Item three: new controller. The OS and the Machine were advertised heavily this week for living room use, but Steam’s largely a mouse-and-keyboard domain. The new Steam Controller has been built to bridge the control gap. Giant trackpads and a touchscreen will, in theory, work with popular, complicated PC genres like strategy games and MOBAs.
On the surface level, those three things announce Valve’s newfound love for the living room, and if it all pans out, more paying customers will board the Steam train. Steam already debuted a “big screen” mode, so that people can connect their current computers to TVs and easily pick through video game libraries, but Valve knows it has to do more than that to kick Xbox and PlayStation out of the living room.
But that’s not the between-the-lines announcement. Friends, homies, nerds, let’s face it: The Valve you loved a long time ago, the company focused first and foremost on building the most honed gaming experiences in the industry, is dead.
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Valve has made a few curious moves in recent years. Dusting off and mounting its decade-old shooting series, Counter Strike, back on a giant pedestal with an “HD” refresh last year. Ponying up for the rights to the “DOTA” trademark in order to refresh and re-release the popular online-battle game with very few gameplay or rule changes.
Making a giant hullabulloo about its “decentralized” corporate structure by way of leaking a PDF of the company guidebook; among other things, the book asserted that, really, Valve doesn’t have managers or bosses! Hyping and teasing a special hardware lab within Valve’s corridors, an experiment that ended with some of its most ambitious staff being fired in a giant wave last year.
Maybe most telling, publicizing the hire of an economist, who still serves as a Valve consultant.
Valve used to function by following the gameplay—by sitting on the founders’ giant pile of cash reserves to hone and build amazing games, along with hiring white-hot modders and smiling about a “when it’s done” philosophy of game development.
But the only projects that Valve has released since early 2011 have revolved around play as a service; about games that focus on competition and connectivity. The series in question—Team Fortress 2, DOTA 2, Counter Strike—operate with in-game purchases as the leading economy (even CS has begun rolling out microtransactions).
On an economic scale, this transition makes a giant pile of greenback sense. Right now, Valve’s biggest competitors in the global gaming space include Wargaming, the makers of World of Tanks, and Riot, the makers of League of Legends. Both games offer always-online battles. Both depend on a microtransaction economy, nixing the issue of piracy. The model has borne out; the money’s in not-so-free-to-play.
Oh, and both eschew Steam so that they don’t have to give Valve a high-percentage cut of every sale, which means they almost certainly won’t work swimmingly with the Steam OS or Steam Machines or Steam Controller.
Valve may very well be working on the kinds of games that made it famous so long ago. Solo adventures full of drama, storytelling and gloriously scripted sequences. But the decentralized teams at Valve, which famously have no humans posing as a high-up boss to champion such a project, have, in the meantime, made their real boss clear.
The boss who drives Valve to build Steam as the essential online gaming shop, claiming over 20% of every third-party game sold. The boss who prioritizes grindy online games, fueled by addiction and micro-transactions, over artful advances in interactivity. The boss who hires economists and fires teams of augmented-reality experimentations.
Look that boss in the eyes, game fans, and accept the end of Valve’s original era. “Games as a service,” in Valve’s world, are the remains of the forest-fire clearance of the company’s original Half Life roots.
