[Analemma_]

I'm not pleased that Valve has shifted its focus from developing great games to being a digital platform rent-extractor that tinkers with VR and disinterestedly ships occasional updates to Dota and CS:GO, but I'm optimistic this might be good, even if it's only out of motivated self-interest to drum up the VR hype again.

What I mean is, I get the sense Valve is unhappy that VR hasn't had its system-selling killer app yet, and I wonder if Alyx is trying to be that. If so, I'm reasonably hopeful they'll push hard to make this a genuinely good game that shows VR's full potential, rather than a disposable gimmick.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> I'm not pleased that Valve has shifted its focus from developing great games to being a digital platform rent-extractor

I actually kinda am. Because they created a really great platform that has helped the market thrive even for tiny nobody indie devs. They've set a seriously high bar for digital store fronts and distribution services. I think I've got a lot more enjoyment from the games Steam has enabled to exist and find an audience than I have from any game Valve itself produced.

Hell, they even made Linux gaming a significantly less laughable concept than it once was.

[sorenn111]

+1 to steam for how easy it is to enable mods via steam. modding can be a little daunting to your average user but steam enables communication about a mod (via the comment section which is really helpful for communicating with mod owner), quick and easy installation and uninstallation (underrated feature esp for non tech users), and discovery via the workshop

[fhood]

> They've set a seriously high bar for digital store fronts

I agree with your general point, but no. No they have not. The Steam client is terrible. Unresponsive, un-intuitive, and surprisingly bad for searching in as well.

[outworlder]

> The Steam client is terrible. Unresponsive, un-intuitive, and surprisingly bad for searching in as well.

I can only agree with the last one. It works fine for, you know, downloading and playing games. It rarely ever has issues.

The store could use some work, but it does a better job than, say, Apple App Store – the discovery queue has shown me titles I would have never seen before, as did the curators.

Have you tried the competition?

[fhood]

Steam's only real purpose is as a store right? I can open an executable pretty well most of the time. And Steam makes enough money through said store that I think they need to be held to the standards of Amazon, rather than their contemporaries.

[shadowgovt]

Store, purchase tracker, platform identification system, and analytics engine to push data on game performance and hardware configuration back to the Steam service itself as a mass aggregator so they can keep their finger on the "pulse" of real PC deployments and thereby come quite close to solving the problem that was once the bane of the entire industry ("Game doesn't work on my PC because drivers").

I think people tend to overlook how valuable Steam has been as a clearinghouse to aggregate that last piece of data.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Some of those things are true, but their competition isn't generally better and who else provides the same level of community features and discovery tooling? The new Steam Labs stuff is actually a pretty big improvement over traditional systems.

[defterGoose]

I agree. I have no idea why so many people praise steam endlessly. The last two games I tried to play through the app were unfixably buggy at times. These games were Portal and Doom2016. Boooooo.

[icebraining]

Steam is a shop, it has little to do with the quality of the games sold there.

[fhood]

Yeah, I can't bring my self to spend the 400-1000 dollars required for adding vr to my already too expensive pc until something happens that convinces me it isn't a gimmick. We will see, but hopefully? this will be the first full, AAA vr game experience. The trailer sure as hell looks pretty good.