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I have a theory. Valve wants to do a major half life movie. make at least a billion on the box office. and then maybe they will let loose the game they have been hiding in gabe's private vault secured by his weight. yes, it is safe coz he's so heavy that no one will ever be able to open it with him sleeping on top of it. OOPS! I didnt just reveal the location of HL3

MadManOriginal wrote:

We get stuff like 'Steam trading cards' (wtf?) rather than HL2 Ep3.

Why, exactly, is that a bad thing?

grantmeaname wrote:

Why, exactly, is that a bad thing?

Do you enjoy those cards? Honestly that stuff is very silly to me, but I have what seems like one or two friends who won't stop begging for my cards... so some must care. I do not think these events are necessarily related. Meaning I don't really think those working on these cards were working on HL3/HL2EP3. So I don't find it upsetting. But those cards add zero to a gaming nor do they enhance the Steam social experience... if anything I'm already annoyed of being bugged about them.

They don't add much for me, either. But it's not like they took as much work to implement as a AAA title. He's presenting a false dichotomy.

Glorious - chill dude, and put down the Kool-Aid for a while. And I can understand what you write perfectly fine without you trying to make a post the into the text version of the great wall of china with various bold paragraphs and upper case words mixed in here and there.

Also, read the article and watch the interview again, you might found out that the things you just wrote actually aren't stated in the article. If you want to be literal, at least take the relevant text out of the article instead of what you made up that weren't either said or written. And if you aren't literal, don't take non-litareal statement and state them as anything else then opinion.

The big point here, after reading and looking at that interview, is that I think parts of what you write are pretty much a poor attempt at trying to reiterate already stated arguments in the hope that we suddenly will se them as you do, instead of actually going a step further and either refuting our arguments or actually looking past the literal sense of the article. Easy as that. Not to mention that you also seem rather hell bent on not trying to understand my point of view.



Although I'll give you a few freebie.

While they mentioned that they were understaffed by a factor of 100, that is in relation to an unknown amount of concepts being developed. Then you had a comparison that there is a rumor that Microsoft had a thousand or so working with things relating to the xbox. One of the few things that are more clearly stated is that they tried to but couldn't hire a single machinist to work for the team with production because of mentioned cultural issues. And this was obviously not a cost saving since the machining equipment were worth a few million, while a machinist costs $40K a year, thus she claims that they couldn't do it because the other people in the flat management structure were afraid of that change polluting their culture.

Once you reach a certain size in a team, you can do much better work if you specialize in different things. How many directors also works in the prop department sculpting mask or doing makeup for the actors. Why don't helpdesk people run the network and setup and manage the servers. Why don't architects mix concrete and build the buildings they designed themselves, they "obviously" have the skill for it.


As for a few other points, and yeah, this is pretty much an opinionated guess, it was a smart move of Gabe (Not Valve), Gabe, one that has the ultimate decision over what valve does, to give away the hardware. Of course, a guy estimated to be worth a billion+ $ cant be all bad, he probably earned it somehow. Because if any of those things come to market, valve can take advantage of those technologies, both as a publishing house and a developer, and now they don't even have to take on the burden on brining anything new and innovative to the market with all the risk that entails. Mothballing the whole operation and shelving a few million dollars worth of equipment would have been less useful then giving it away since they basically fired anybody that could work with hardware. And to be honest, since valve is in the publishing business, so kindly pointed out by you, they have an abundance of money, which allows the employees to do as they see fit, so obviously the equipment wasn't worth more staying then giving it away from those in power to decide such things.

Aphasia wrote:

Glorious - chill dude, and put down the Kool-Aid for a while. And I can understand what you write perfectly fine without you trying to make a post the into the text version of the great wall of china with various bold paragraphs and upper case words mixed in here and there.

What Kool-Aid? I'm not the one blindly getting behind some news article because it happens to hew to my prejudices.

It's clear that you don't like Valve as publisher, and therefore you were willing to uncritically accept the complaints of someone who doesn't like them as a developer.

Aphasia wrote:

Also, read the article and watch the interview again, you might found out that the things you just wrote actually aren't stated in the article. If you want to be literal, at least take the relevant text out of the article instead of what you made up that weren't either said or written. And if you aren't literal, don't take non-litareal statement and state them as anything else then opinion.

That's an incredible statement, considering that I appear to be the only person here who actually quoted the article.

It's notable that you don't actually have any examples, only empty claims.

Aphasia wrote:

The big point here, after reading and looking at that interview, is that I think parts of what you write are pretty much a poor attempt at trying to reiterate already stated arguments in the hope that we suddenly will se them as you do, instead of actually going a step further and either refuting our arguments or actually looking past the literal sense of the article. Easy as that. Not to mention that you also seem rather hell bent on not trying to understand my point of view.

That's absolute nonsense. I addressed your arguments. Instead of trying to refute any of my responses, or demonstrate my supposed misrepresentations, you're just making the meta-argument that I don't argue fair.

Obviously I have a point of view. So do you. The apparent difference here is that I defend my point of view with factual evidence, not baseless sentimentality.

You took Ellsworth's characterization of Valve at face value, utterly ignoring the factual scenario she actually described. The problem with that, as I said before you even entered the fray, is that Ellsworth's factual scenario entirely undermines her characterization of Valve. I've made that case, and you haven't bothered to respond to it.

Would you care to?

grantmeaname wrote:

They don't add much for me, either. But it's not like they took as much work to implement as a AAA title. He's presenting a false dichotomy.

It's not a false dichotomy...maybe at most a semi-false dichotomy because the cards still represent resources of some type spent on fluff. Just because they took fewer resources than a AAA title doesn't change that, and I didn't mean there is a simplistic 1:1 relationship such that 'if no cards, then HL2 Ep3 = released today.' It's a good example of some of what the ex-employee is talking about - employees can do practically whatever they want to due to lack of structure and direction, so they spend time on their personal pet projects like these cards rather than on games.

Given the weird things that people go "gotta catch them all" over, it's possible that those cards are more profitable (prorated for time and cost) than HL3.