Scott Miller: Steam should not be a part of valve

The day 3D Realms starts working on real projects and are as successful as Valve, that day they can start criticizing them. I'm the first one to realize the difficulties Valve has to meet their own deadlines, but I for one am still waiting on Duke Nukem Forever, and 10 years to release a game like Prey is a pure joke.

Let me join this discussion.

From my point of view, there is no ambiguity and or confusion plight with reference to Steam and Steampowered.com

Steam is the new popular and widespread, up-to-date innovative for allocation and dealing the varius game raw materials.

If Steam could be the independent, particular business establishment we would never experience.. the delight in Steam! as it is today the supreme sharing convention to the common crowd and fans.

Scott Miller is all incorrect and untrue. Don't worry about him or do you still do

after reading this?

Steam is pure behaved by reason of that Valve controls it. Or is it?

Quote from Furyo

and 10 years to release a game like Prey is a pure joke.

To be fair though, it was dead for about half that if I remember right.

Wel steam is a bit cheaper for me then going to the store, but not that much as predicted by game magazines for online distributions.

As for Valve cutting of steam when they get in trouble developing a game,

I think it would probly work the other way, steam would feed valve's development and cutting that off just makes things worse

Besides that, who owns Valve? and there are more people who own a few different bisness.

I asume the contracts deal with how games are advertised on the front page of steam, and it seems locgic that new titles get the most attention.

I'm pretty confident that there are all sorts of legal bounds or other developers would be weary about steam.

Oh well only time will tell but I think its a save bet that steam will exist longer then Valve as a developer and that a split is hanging in the air if steam keeps growing.

Quote from Furyo

The day 3D Realms starts working on real projects and are as successful as Valve, that day they can start criticizing them. I'm the first one to realize the difficulties Valve has to meet their own deadlines, but I for one am still waiting on Duke Nukem Forever, and 10 years to release a game like Prey is a pure joke.

Exactly. Even on top of the deadlines thing, 3DR hasn't been as consistent as Valve with quality games, and their service's failure indicates that is probably a permanent roadblock. Seems like this guy is whining that Valve is just doing better business.

Quote from FrieChamp

Sounds reasonable that you don't want to feed a competitor's wallet, but Gabe Newell's take (the podcast after Scott's) was interesting too: 3D Realms licenses competitor's engines like many other studios do or work together with Nintendo and Sony for their consoles although these companies develop their 1st party titles as well.

Yes, they licensed an engine from id wich is a competitor and are releasing for the Xbox360 wich is owned by another competitor, Microsoft.

Strictly from a marketing point, while it may be superficial, the store interface cycles four games in the main banner. At the moment, none of these are Valve games. Even when EP2 launches there will still be three open slots plus the four quarter size banners to advertise alternate games (Although I can see this logic failing because of the Portal/TF2 bundle).

Then there is the top sellers and top rated tabs. Six of the the eight games are Valve games in the top sellers. Which sounds reasonable considering Valve games rolled out on Steam for the better part of Steam's incarnation and, of course, because it's Valve's network (This is a ratio I don't see changing much even though it may be somewhat unequal). Next is the Top rated games according to metascore. The eight slots are split 50/50 between Valve and other publishers. So, the fair trick to having a stronger presence in this particular area is to create great games (which get great metascores) that are distro'ed on Steam.

Apart from the conflict of interest issues, the store interface is well weighted as of now. Obviously there is room for improvement to market other publishers but, I guess, this is one of the conflicts; will Valve allow that to happen?

Miller's concerns are all valid but, I think, most of his public flames towards Steam are because he is bitter because of Triton's failure.

Quote from redhood

Miller's concerns are all valid but, I think, most of his public flames

towards Steam are because he is bitter because of Triton's failure.

I think that is true in a way, at least in the sense that Valve is doing better business than 3D Realms nowadays. Handing cash to one of your biggest competitors is twice as painful then.

Comments about why Valve is better than 3D Realms or about how long DN Forever is in development don't really add anything to the point discussed though.