The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Metro]

I've read rumors that L4D3 might be announced at E3 or whatever that upcoming event is... but I doubt it.

 

[Caim]

I've read rumors that L4D3 might be announced at E3 or whatever that upcoming event is... but I doubt it.

Unless they sell hats for the survivors and the various zombies I don't see this happening.

If they do though, I hope that they go with a good set of survivors. Bill, Louis, Zoey and Francis were a good team, and while Coach, Nick and Ellis were great Rochelle was just... there.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.pcgamesn.com/valve-vr-team

A third of Valve is now dedicated to VR development, says dev

It’s an eternal PC gaming question: just what are Valve up to? Rolling around in their piles of money? Tweaking Steam? Building ever more impressive hat towers? What we do know they’re getting on with is VR, and a recent post on the Vive subreddit has revealed that a third of the company is now dedicated to that cause.

Spotted by NeoGAF, developer Alan Yates was posting in reply to a thread about one of his tweets regarding VR his team was working on. In it he talks about the people that kept the idea of VR alive through the last couple of decades of uncertainty, and how the team at Valve grew.

“I was super fortunate to start at Valve right around the time Michael Abrash had begun the AR/VR research team,” he explains. “It was a much smaller team then than it is now, it has since grown to encompass about a third of the company, but the key individuals that solved most of the really hard technological problems and facilitated this generation of consumer headsets are still here working on the next generation.”

The thread poster on NeoGAF points out that the company is estimated to have around 380 employees, meaning around 120 working on VR. That may seem like a large team, but given games like WoW have teams of 300 on their own, plus the folks at Valve are helping to develop hardware solutions and software bases along with the actual games themselves, it’s fairly reasonable.

The question becomes: what are the other 200 or so folks up to? Let’s not actually say it, but think it all at once together in the hope that brings it into existence. All together now: Ricochet 2.

 

[BobtheTree]

Half-Life 3 as a VR exclusive game confirmed.

 

[Jaesun]

meh

 

[pippin]

VR is the new mobile.

 

[Metro]

It'll be another decade before VR games are borderline decent.

 

[pippin]

I don't think they'll ever be. In fact, most people think they'll get freedom of movement and stuff like that but the vr sets available right now depend too much on sensors to work, and that leaves you limited to a space which might be small but in some apartments people might struggle to find a room big enough to use the set.
And that's not considering the price. I do believe it's ging to be like the Power Glove... And I dunno, sometimes I think people who want VR don't know what they really want from games. To a certain degree, stuff like Until Dawn seems more honest, in a way.

 

[Country_Gravy]

VR porn with attachments will win out in the end.

For games...not so much.

 

[Dexter]

I don't think they'll ever be. In fact, most people think they'll get freedom of movement and stuff like that but the vr sets available right now depend too much on sensors to work, and that leaves you limited to a space which might be small but in some apartments people might struggle to find a room big enough to use the set.
And that's not considering the price. I do believe it's ging to be like the Power Glove... And I dunno, sometimes I think people who want VR don't know what they really want from games. To a certain degree, stuff like Until Dawn seems more honest, in a way.

Oculus Rift/Gear VR don't require more room than sitting in a chair or on a couch already provides. PSVR similarly, although it provides room for a standing experience. Most of the games played on either are controlled via Xbox One/PlayStation 4 Controllers, at least for now. The only VR HMD that requires "room" and actually moves the player around 1:1 is the HTC Vive at the moment, and while it is one of its biggest strenghts, it is also one of its biggest weaknesses, because while moving around is cool having only a very limited room to do so and having to teleport all around doesn't make for good game design or experiences.

Other than that there are already "VR games" with hundreds of reviews and even low hundreds of thousands of sales in the first six months of the platforms being on the market, while there's still a shortage of actual hardware and people have to wait months for it to arrive: http://store.steampowered.com/app/322770/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/341800/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/412740/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/269170/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/428370/

I'm not sorry to say that your prediction of the "power glove" with its 100k lifetime units sold and commercial software failure: https://www.isnare.com/encyclopedia/Power_Glove seems to be rather off considering that there's more than 300k Samsung GearVRs in 2016 alone: http://www.vrguru.com/2016/05/19/300000-gear-vrs-sold-europe-2016-new-bundle-announced/ with over 2 million households on track to own a VR HMD in 2016 alone: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/parks-associates-2-3-million-130000575.html with the PSVR expected to sell millions by itself at the low price and console market audience once it comes out.

And all of this without any Blockbuster titles or support from big studios yet to really push the platform, expect that in 2017/18 and beyond once there's a somewhat established audience. Not to mention that there's a big push from the hardware industry with both Microsoft and SONY knowing that they can't keep "wow-ing" people with slightly improved console re-releases ad infinitum and other parties like NVIDIA really happy about VR coming along, since it provides them a market and job security for the next 10-20 years assuming it takes off: http://www.androidheadlines.com/2016/06/nvidia-ceo-will-take-20-years-fix-virtual-reality.html

One of the biggest problem with VR right now is people who haven't tried it and don't know what to expect talking out of their ass about it, since it's one of those things that have to be experienced to be believed.

 

[pippin]

I don't think they'll ever be. In fact, most people think they'll get freedom of movement and stuff like that but the vr sets available right now depend too much on sensors to work, and that leaves you limited to a space which might be small but in some apartments people might struggle to find a room big enough to use the set.
And that's not considering the price. I do believe it's ging to be like the Power Glove... And I dunno, sometimes I think people who want VR don't know what they really want from games. To a certain degree, stuff like Until Dawn seems more honest, in a way.

Oculus Rift/Gear VR don't require more room than sitting in a chair or on a couch already provides. PSVR similarly, although it provides room for a standing experience. Most of the games played on either are controlled via Xbox One/PlayStation 4 Controllers, at least for now. The only VR HMD that requires "room" and actually moves the player around 1:1 is the HTC Vive at the moment, and while it is one of its biggest strenghts, it is also one of its biggest weaknesses, because while moving around is cool having only a very limited room to do so and having to teleport all around doesn't make for good game design or experiences.

Other than that there are already "VR games" with hundreds of reviews and even low hundreds of thousands of sales in the first six months of the platforms being on the market, while there's still a shortage of actual hardware and people have to wait months for it to arrive: http://store.steampowered.com/app/322770/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/341800/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/412740/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/269170/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/428370/

I'm not sorry to say that your prediction of the "power glove" with its 100k lifetime units sold and commercial software failure: https://www.isnare.com/encyclopedia/Power_Glove seems to be rather off considering that there's more than 300k Samsung GearVRs in 2016 alone: http://www.vrguru.com/2016/05/19/300000-gear-vrs-sold-europe-2016-new-bundle-announced/ with over 2 million households on track to own a VR HMD in 2016 alone: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/parks-associates-2-3-million-130000575.html with the PSVR expected to sell millions by itself at the low price and console market audience once it comes out.

And all of this without any Blockbuster titles or support from big studios yet to really push the platform, expect that in 2017/18 and beyond once there's a somewhat established audience. Not to mention that there's a big push from the hardware industry with both Microsoft and SONY knowing that they can't keep "wow-ing" people with slightly improved console re-releases ad infinitum and other parties like NVIDIA really happy about VR coming along, since it provides them a market and job security for the next 10-20 years assuming it takes off: http://www.androidheadlines.com/2016/06/nvidia-ceo-will-take-20-years-fix-virtual-reality.html

One of the biggest problem with VR right now is people who haven't tried it and don't know what to expect talking out of their ass about it, since it's one of those things that have to be experienced to be believed.

We are talking about different markets here, though. The Power Glove was a toy for kids. VR seems to be an indicator of luxury, and people will try to buy one so they are "in the know", so to speak, like how people often buy new smartphones just to have the latest thing. Last time I checked the vr sets were somewhat expensive (ad require certain hardware to run how they should) so people are buying more because it's a product made for that kind of audience.

 

[Dexter]

We are talking about different markets here, though. The Power Glove was a toy for kids. VR seems to be an indicator of luxury, and people will try to buy one so they are "in the know", so to speak, like how people often buy new smartphones just to have the latest thing. Last time I checked the vr sets were somewhat expensive (ad require certain hardware to run how they should) so people are buying more because it's a product made for that kind of audience.

GearVR is $99 and comes free with various Samsung phones: http://www.samsung.com/us/explore/gear-vr/

Get a free Gear VR powered by Oculus, plus a VR content experience - an estimated $150* value - with the purchase of a Samsung Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 edge, Galaxy Note5, Galaxy S6 edge+, Galaxy S6 edge or Galaxy S6. Limited time only, while supplies last.

PSVR costs $399 and will work on millions of PlayStation 4's and Nuu-PlayStation 4's when they come out.

The Oculus Rift costs $599, still within the limits of something like a high-end graphics card that will be required to play it or a mobile phone. It's likely that Microsoft will announce a partnership for their new Xbox/Project Scorpio in 2017, might come with a price decrease too.

At the upper end there's the HTC Vive for $799, which offers a lot more in addition to the headset, there's still high-end monitors or graphics cards that cost the same or a lot more nowadays and offer a lot less in the way of hardware. Both of these require a high-end gaming PC anyway, so they're mostly for enthusiasts now.

These things usually sell themselves through simple demonstrations of what they can do and how compelling a game or "experience" with it can be.

At the absolute lower end there's stuff like Google Cardboard that can be used in classrooms to arouse interest and costs absolutely nothing, just requires a relatively recent mobile phone:

Both Microsoft and Google are working on separate OS's for Virtual and Augmented Reality:



But this is probably better discussed in the other thread that someone just opened. I just don't think this concept will ever go away, the jack is out of the box and like the Internet or TV I don't think it'll go back into the box. Even if one or two of them or even all of them might fail commercially over the next few years (again very unlikely due to sheer number of tech industry titans involved at this point), the idea will be back within a few years after. There's just too much potential for all sorts of things (including a very lucrative market for both hardware and software) to just let it go to waste.

 

[Caim]

The main issue with VR as of now is the bulky headsets. They will have to be scaled down significantly in size, cost and have to get an internal battery somehow before we reach the true 'mershun.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

The Discovery Queue has been updated so now you can filter out games based on their tags.

Tags I've put in the filter so far:

Anime
Dating Sim
Free To Play
Games Workshop
Massively Multiplayer
Romance
Survival
Survival Horror
Tower Defense
VR
Walking Simulator

Plus I'm VERY tempted to put "Sandbox" in there. What filters are you putting in?

EDIT: More added.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

People actually use discovery queues and curator lists?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

For the sales (like the current one) they spit out cards if you use the Discovery queue...so there's that, at least.

 

[pippin]

I'd partake of the steam minigames but you have to connect your steam profile via mobile phone to use the market (apparently),so if it's like that then thanks but no thanks.

The few games I still want to buy, I'd rather buy full price on GOG.

 

[Spectacle]

For the sales (like the current one) they spit out cards if you use the Discovery queue...so there's that, at least.

People actually care about steam cards?

 

[pakoito]

I'm 45 pounds down, but it feels like freedom.

 

[Siveon]

The few games I still want to buy, I'd rather buy full price on GOG.

Same, but GOG doesn't have Dark Souls.

 

[pippin]

Yeah, Dark Sould is still the only vaguely interesting game for me that's not on gog. Well, that one and a bunch of others, but the discounts are so dull that it doesn't really make a difference for me to buy them at full price. I don't buy $60+ AAA games.

 

[Caim]

Anything really worth the money up there?

 

[Dexter]

http://www.pcgamesn.com/valve-vr-funding

Valve are funding VR projects, exclusivity-free, with "pre-paid Steam revenue"

In an e-mail sent by a Redditor and posted to the r/Vive subreddit, Gabe Newell has revealed how Valve are supporting VR developers. He also clarified Valve's position that they don't think exclusives are a good idea "for customers or developers."

On the funding side, the reason Valve are doing this is because of risk. Gabe says that they are in "a much better place to absorb financial risk as a new VR developer" and that developing for VR is generally a "triple-risk whammy - a new developer creating new game mechanics on a new platform." Therefore, they're giving funding in the form of "pre-paid Steam revenue." He doesn't go any further into this example, but presumably it means that those who accept the money pay it back over time from their profits from Steam sales, or elsewhere, assuming they finish.

However, Valve don't demand that these developers release on Vive. "They can develop for the Rift or Playstation VR or whatever the developer thinks are the right target VR systems." Valve do this because they think it will let developers avoid exclusivity deals, which, obviously, would be bad for everyone - Valve, the developers and customers.

Here's the full email, from Reddit user elpollodiablo187

 

[Caim]

Huh, looks like Gabe's losing weight and instead grows a massive santa beard.

Good for him.

 

[gaussgunner]

It'll be another decade before VR games are borderline decent.

That's what they said in 1995.
*EDIT: they said "before VR games are fucking awesome"

VR is the new mobile.

Heh yeah, and just in time. It'll be Facebook Second Life. Yeeeeeaaaaahhhhh....