Posted 07/20/09 at 11:10:57 PM by Nathan Grayson

No offense, publishers, but you can kind of be a pain to work with sometimes. So says Valve’s Gabe Newell, and we agree with him. Fortunately, good ol’ Gabe also has a solution to the developer-solution problem, and is very handsome.

“One of the areas that I am super interested in right now is how we can do financing from the community. So right now, what typically happens is you have this budget - it needs to be huge, it has to be $10m - $30m, and it has to be all available at the beginning of the project. There’s a huge amount of risk associated with those dollars and decisions have to be incredibly conservative,” he said.

“What I think would be much better would be if the community could finance the games. In other words, ‘Hey, I really like this idea you have. I’ll be an early investor in that and, as a result, at a later point I may make a return on that product, but I’ll also get a copy of that game.’”

Thus, he concluded, gamers would sacrifice their piggy banks only to game ideas they really like. Ideas lacking in the money magnetism department, then, would weed themselves out and never make it to market.

So, would you drop a few of your hard-earned dollars into an unproven concept? Honestly, we’re not sure how we feel about it. For instance, we doubt we’d have thrown cash at “A plumber who eats mushrooms, grows taller, and turns turtles into shoe-shaped putty,” and look how that turned out. With great power comes great responsibility, and we’re not sure if gamers are ready for that.

Read More

Posted 02/19/09 at 02:20:09 AM by Nathan Grayson

You should be excited about this. Like, sure-let’s-raise-and-drop-the-New-Year’s-Ball-again excited.  If you don’t know why, here’s some homework.

Anyway, at today’s Valve DICE keynote, Gabe Newell announced that a series of Valve-penned comics are setting up shop on Valve’s Monopoly map, and – even better – that they will receive their Certified Fine Art status from the team responsible for Valve’s “Meet the” series of Team Fortress 2 movies.

Ohboyohboyohboyohboy!  

Ahem. Apparently, the comic is meant to “excite customers about the company’s games outside of creating game content.”

Delightful. 2009 is now officially Best Year of the Century.

Read More

Posted 12/02/08 at 07:59:28 PM by Nathan Grayson

Joining Peter Molyneux, Good Old Games, and Stardock in a swelling anti-DRM chorus, Valve president Gabe Newell has voiced his concerns about DRM's diabolical rule. The big G-man's opinion? Most DRM (ahem) is "just dumb."

"As far as DRM goes, most DRM strategies are just dumb. The goal should be to create greater value for customers through service value (make it easy for me to play my games whenever and wherever I want to), not by decreasing the value of a product (maybe I'll be able to play my game and maybe I won't)," Newell said in an email to a fan named Paul Reisinger (who promptly posted the response on his Live Journal page).

"We really, really discourage other developers and publishers from using the broken DRM offerings, and in general there is a groundswell to abandon those approaches," he added.

Of course, this is a huge about-face for Valve, whose Steam platform once coated games in a jawbreaker-esque, nigh-impenetrable DRM shell. Luckily, Newell and co. had the sense to mash that particular padlock with a crowbar, rendering its DRM far more tolerable.

Nice preaching on Newell's part, though. Choir, do you have anything to add?

Read More

Posted 11/03/08 at 06:29:27 PM by Alex Castle

A press release from Valve has heralded the imminent arrival of the Steam Cloud; the ability to access your Steam savefiles and controller configs from any computer. Left 4 Dead will be the first title to have the Cloud functionality, and Valve has said they'll be retrofitting their back catalog with the feature.

According to Valve, the Steam Cloud will "just work." By this they mean that gamers won't have to do anything to get their saves and options into the Cloud; it will all happen automatically. Similarly, when a user logs onto their account on a new computer their data will be downloaded for them by default.

Valve president Gabe Newell explained the philosophy behind the Steam cloud, saying "For some time now, Steam has allowed gamers to log on from any computer in the world and access their applications ... Steam Cloud is a natural extension of the portability Steam affords gamers and developers, and we intend to expand its feature set as it is used in Left 4 Dead and other games coming to Steam."

Left 4 Dead launches on 18th, with the demo (which includes Steam Cloud) coming later this week. Are you psyched? Let us know after the jump.

Read More