Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

“When I own valve…”

cliffski

That’s kinda an inside joke. but anyway. What would be a better way than to avoid doing real work this morning than to daydream about what I’d do if I owned valve :D My assumptions are as follows:

1) Valve probably have a large stockpile of cash, or at least access to such cash at good terms

2) Valve want to grow.

Because I enjoy theoretical empire building (not real empire building, because I enjoy working from home, and that kinda limits one’s galaxy-conquering potential), I’m going to imagine how best to achieve global domination if I owned the company. Here are my thoughts.

Thought #1: Let someone else worry about hardware.

Make no mistake, valves VR experiments are jaw-droppingly amazing. And the idea of a steam machine in the living room is cool, and making a gamepad that PC gamers actually like is a worthy goal. These are all worthy goals, but the thing is, they are hardware, and outside the realm of the ‘low-hanging fruit’  that I think would make a more sensible business move. As I understand it, valve are (very sensibly) avoiding building anything, just providing design and encouragement to actual hardware builders. This makes a lot of sense, but I think as a result it will not achieve as much as they think. The design and R&D but not the implementation seems like a job half done. Either try to take on the console manufacturers (and set aside a minimum of a billion dollars to do that), or don’t. I get the impression that they are doing this stuff purely because it’s cool, which is kinda awesome, and the sort of thing only a privately owned company can justify.

Thought #2: Casual Games.

Steam only has a limited cross section of games. They are mostly ‘core’ hardcore gamer games. Not the sort of stuff that BigFishGames and the other casual portals stock. Why not? It seems to me that a re-skinned ‘steam-casual’ client that wasn’t quite so serious looking, that focused on casual games could probably crush BFG and it’s ilk and takeover that section of the market too. I suspect Valve have a bigger marketing war-chest than BFG’s new owners. This is nothing but a marketing change, Valve already have the back-end for selling games to people, supporting community etc, it’s a no-brainer.

Thought #3: Video

Twitch and youtube are great, but why can’t I just watch the lets-plays of a game inside the steam client or website? Surely there is a big market opportunity there? If I’m browsing steam and find a great game, then want to see gameplay video, and leave the site/client to go to youtube, who knows if I’ll ever return? That seems like a leak in the sales funnel to me that could be easily fixed. Maybe the downside is bandwidth costs, but if youtube can justify it purely on ads, then surely valve can based on sales? Maybe their PC dominance is so great that everyone who leaves for youtube comes back to buy anyway? (or do they just watch cat videos instead?)

Thought 4: TV

I bought and enjoyed Indie game the movie through steam, and enjoyed their e-sports documentary. Frankly steam is better than the iplayer or itunes. Why can’t I buy breaking-bad through steam? They are experts at content delivery and sales. A video game isn’t *that* different from a TV show download. I was very surprised that more movies didn’t show up on steam. I bet they’d sell a lot of copies of Battlestar Galactica, Firefly etc to people who already own them, just to have them on steam.

Thought 5: Content

Content is king? or is it? it depends which pundit is popular this week. One thing is true though, 100% of something is more than [UNDISCLOSED_PERCENTAGE]% of something. Valve produce games in-house, but not many. There are plenty of devs that need funding. Currently they go to kickstarter. You can see where I’m going here right? You want funding for your game, maybe valve will fund the game and buy out your company? Valve is a huge distribution portal and a (relatively) small game developer. Nudging towards being a publisher seems a logical step.

Thought 6: Pay what you want.

Why isn’t this an option? Lets be honest, Valve could crush every single indie bundle this time tomorrow, simply by including PWYW + Charity bundles. It’s amazing they haven’t done so.

So why do I think they don’t do most of this stuff? Maybe the enlightened long term self interest of ensuring a vibrant market. That sounds like hippy bullshit, but it was widely speculated that Microsoft deliberately let apple stay in business back-in-the-day, so that they weren’t totally crushed by the government for being a monopoly. Sometimes it’s in your interest to keep other companies in business. That’s one reason. Another is just being nice guys. Public companies can’t do this, but they may well take the attitude that crushing The Humble Bundle and BFG would be a dick move. I suspect more likely is that the people at valve just want to do what is cool. VR is incredibly cool. Steam machines are cool. Negotiating with TV company lawyers and marketing match-3 games is not cool. Maybe nobody in the company is volunteering to do that. They don’t *have* to make any more money, or grow at all, so where is the incentive to do anything that they aren’t passionate about? I can kind of relate to that.

 

5 thoughts on “When I own valve…”

  1. #1 sounds like having “software-colored glasses” on. I follow some hardware blogs and the impression I get is that “software is complicated” and hardware products are the low hanging fruit. (Looking at how easily obviously bad kickstarter hardware ideas got quite a bit more money than much more complicated software projects seems to suggest that people value ideas in hardware form more than those in software – I also suggest same effect may be in shipping a game in nice box at right price vs low price download – cheap may get cheaper/be worthless while nice box may dip in real value but atleast have some sort of sentimental value if nothing else that I doubt anyone attributes to downloads that are easy to copy)

    From personal observation, I think once a company has made or has plans to make some really complex software, they may be thinking about protecting IP. And the best way to do that is to take the software and implement it as hardware. I see this particularly in the music production tools. There’s all sort of neat things that could be shipped in software form that have been around since 80s but none of the algos are available in software and they do things not available in software packages today. Sure there’s a bunch of software that purports to do same things but devil is in the details and there’s also a lot of patented stuff – patents surely have expired by now but it’s not like software guys go read old patents and implement the details of what have the hardware the “edge” in terms of real usability, even if same usability would be good in software form.

  2. Though given this was about publishing and Valve, I kinda agree that the arguments above for doing hardware do not quite apply they way I thought. If they had some people with great ideas that made sense in another context but could provide some sort of mutual benefit, then maybe they’d test those ideas in R&D and then spin off as another company.

  3. Actually, if they used that Shift-Tab thing to also give you the videos for the area you are in, they’d probably make a killing. “I’m stuck”. Shift-Tab “And there is the walkthru.”

    But, I agree, the bundles or even single-product pay-what-you-want would be fantastic. Smashwords does it and it’s fantastic. The drawback is it gravitates the price to zero for those games. It also threatens to lead into the fremium model, which is my least favorite. (I read an article that suggested that Android games should have a “price to get it and a price for everything”.)

  4. Another comment for #1.

    I always got the impression that Valve’s hardware dalliances (Steam Machines) were an insurance policy against Microsoft suddenly deciding they would lock down PCs and block Steam. All the software in the world is no help if the hardware gets pulled out from under you.

  5. I don’t think people are looking at Valve’s hardware efforts in the correct light. Valve are long-term thinkers; they’ve been none-too-reticent on the threat to their business by either a hostile or indifferent Microsoft or a failure of Windows.

    I see all of their more speculative efforts as attempts to hedge, or begin to hedge, against the death of Windows as an open gaming platform. That’s not all that difficult to imagine, particularly a year or two ago when it looked like Windows 8 was another Vista-scale clusterfuck, and worse, Microsoft seemed determine to garden-path users to their own in-built Metro store.

    So, you’re Valve. You think Microsoft might be incompetent enough to let the Windows business die, or could try to lock down the user experience in a way that is detrimental to you. What do you do?

    You look at Linux. You start to deal with the issues that prevent Linux being successful as a gaming platform. Installation, driver issues, usability.

    Which leads you naturally to streaming tech. Because you need some way to maintaining a link to that Windows catalogue if people are to make the shift to a new Linux-based Steam.

    You look at hardware. If tablets are eating into the market for desktop PCs, where else could you go? Why not under the TV? Streaming helps with that, too, of course.

    And then there’s the controller. If you’re going to take on the console and bring some kind of Steam console to life, it would really help if you could solve the problem of playing non-joypad games on a joypad. Hence Steam Controller.

    I don’t see these as firm, world-dominating plans. I see them all as careful bets, easily affordable to a company with billion-dollar cash reserves like Valve.

    They are hedges against a future where Microsoft is either incompetent or hostile, and where the desktop PC market has some of its share eaten by other platforms.

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