Steam Success Holding Up Half-Life Development? 235
donniebaseball23 writes "Steam is a huge success, and it's arguably the leading digital distribution platform for gamers on the PC. But has the growth of Steam's business led to a slowdown in Valve's own games development? Is the so-called 'Valve Time' actually a symptom of Steam's hogging Valve's resources? That's the argument that Stardock's Brad Wardell made this week. 'If you were to look at a timeline of games developed in-house by Valve – not developed externally and then acquired – and you look at before Steam and after Steam, it's definitely had an effect,' he said."
It's probably also slowed by the imminent launch of Portal 2, which is due out next Tuesday in North America.
Ohyes, this makes sense... (Score:5, Interesting)
I assume that the sarcasm is noticed.
There's no need for Valve to work on Episode 3 in a hurry; Whenever it will be released, it will be sold by the millions.
And to be honest; I rather wait some more (actually, I'm not missing it), and get yet another awesome game, whereas I don't get the feeling that something is incomplete because of rushing it out for a certain date.
Other than that, I also have a theory in which I think that right now, they might be working on HL3, and just skip the whole Episode 3.
Then again, pure speculation of course.
Re:wat (Score:4, Interesting)
Lest we forget, the L4D series has pretty much been the coolest tech demo ever.
The original was released largely as a way to test the AI Director tech, that improves replay value and difficulty curves.
The sequel was released largely as a way to test the dialog selection tech, that allows characters to hold conversations at appropriate times and with greater attention to what's going on around them.