Gabe Newell on why game delays are okay: 'Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever.'
Half-Life was delayed a full year past its original release date, and Valve has no regrets.
Half Life 3 is super late
Half Life Alyx was sick and demonstrated everything VR could be. I will standby that statement and tolerate the flamers.
Hard agree. That game is what I hope the future of games is like. Meeting Jeff is one of my favorite moments in gaming.
I started my second playthrough before even completing my first (due to PC upgrades) and I'm still having a great time.
I actually have that in my library because I bought the Index but haven't played it yet because I wanted to play the first 2 games first. I didn't play the first game for very long tho because I got stuck at some point early into the game and haven't felt like continuing yet. You can also really feel the age of that game, controls and that kinda stuff. Not sure if I should just punch through that game or just say fuck it and play Alyx.
At some point the Late vs Suck balance will tip the scales of So Late That the Customers Lost Interest or Died
Am not sure there's a way for them to release HL3 and don't disappoint huge number of people. Not because they suck at making games but because expectations have grown so so so much they are downright unachievable now.
The logical end point of that argument is not everyone is going to be happy with everything so why release anything.
Is it?
Is Gabe slowly turning into a wizard
Gabe has remained a wizard through all of time
I'm pretty sure he is Santa
If he is then I guess nobody ever put Half Life 3 on their Christmas list
I hope so.
wizards are turning into Gaben as he echoes across eternity. It seems like he's turning into a wizard, but that's because we can only see behind us in time.
tbf that's a lot easier to say when you're the president of one of the richest companies in the industry. I don't disagree, but not everybody has the resources to just keep developing forever, and that's easy to forget too.
But he's also president of one of the richest companies in the industry because he always said this.
And while your point is valid for smaller studios, it feels like it's usually used by the big ones that do have the resources, but would rather give more money to investors.
It's often enough AAA with tons of money that force insane crunch to hit a release date and still have buggy, uncompleted games.
In the documentary this quote is from he said that about thr development of HL1. To be fair the devs themselves said they voluntairily crunched quite a bit and had some time constraints at the end of the game.
Fun Pimps were a smaller company and they have been developing 7 Days since my gramps was in nappies!
The context for this was them deciding to take the time to finish the game properly even if they were no longer going to get paid to do it (the publisher would stop funding).
suck is forever
Why is the consumer just expected to roll over and take it when a game sucks instead of the responsibility being on the publisher to release updates until the game resembles what was originally advertised? Games aren't on ROM cartridges anymore, you can still improve the game after it's released.
Look, No Man's Sky set the precedent for what you're supposed to do when your game sucks at launch. And we should expect nothing less from game studios with ten times the person-power and money.
No Man's Sky is a great redemption arc, but it would have been better if the game hadn't sucked at launch
Yeah, if a product is sold, I expect it to work for the most part. Now, mistakes happen, and not much to do about very obscure things and it's great if thing can be added afterwards.
But what I want, and this is apparently wild, is a finished 1.0 product that works as expected.
Obviously sucking at launch is bad. But it's inevitable that some games will suffer that fate and as No Man's Sky showed, that's no excuse for the game continuing to suck after launch.
Yeah, if their publisher hadn't forced them to release in its unfinished state, it would've been a lot better.
Agree. Also the same with CP77 - I don’t care how much they update and polish that game, I’m not touching it again. It was barely playable on XBOX1X on release. I luckily was able to sell my launch day copy with a small loss, but I’m not trusting them with my money again, after I (and many others) have been misled, and given an unplayable game on consoles.
I am not an investor to lend money to the company for development, I am a consumer, so I want a working game for my money on Day 1, otherwise I’m shopping elsewhere - as plenty of studios manage to great and polished games (e.g. most PS exclusives).
I was gonna write. I agree with him but No Man's Sky kinda defeats his point.
I pre ordered no man's sky, because the people who made fucking Joe Danger said "I'm going to procedurally generate a universe"
I played it a bit at launch, but the antihype, especially spoilers about the ending made me stop. It's a bit dense to try to get back into at the moment, but I regret nothing. I paid a modicum so that the guys that made Joe Danger could make a universe, and because me and people like me didn't demand a refund, they got to do it.
I have no proof but in my eyes it all smells like Sony and other gaming news are to blame. They hyped up the game to unachievable levels and then held Hellogames to the previously set deadline. I am very happy they sat down and finished the game, although there is new content patch ever few months still. Gave them those 60$ happily even though it's not my kind of game.
It's not a redemption arc, it's a people forgetting it exists except for those who want mediocre resource accumulation simulators.
Gabe was talking about the making of Half Life, back when you shipped your disc and that was that. And the game was, apparently, crapola.
Same kind of deal with the original Deus Ex. It was a spaghetti of poorly interacting systems until the devs were able to make it all click together.
Gabe was talking about the making of Half Life, back when you shipped your disc and that was that. And the game was, apparently, crapola.
There were patch and updates back in the day. The problem was that not everybody had a good internet connection or a connection at all, during the 90's.
Games like Daikatana and SiN were flops due to bugs that required patches to fix.
CP2077 had a bunch of issues on release as well. Much better now. I feel like they(developers) need to bring in different testers near release. If you have the same testers whom have been testing builds for years it can probably be hard to see the issues with the same clarity.
Also stop having release dates. Just use vague terms like 2nd half 2024. When you get the release build, anounce a date, like a month later, give your devs a couple weeks off as there will be missed bugs after release. Hard release dates aren’t helping these situations.
It’s not about unknown issues on the dev side, it’s about greed. CDPR wanted to release for Xmas when the large playerbase of the prev gen consoles was still relevant, so they happily pushed marketing and lied to take people’s money, hoping they can pay exec bonuses and fund future development from that.
Sony had to pull the game from the online store, as it was barely playable. One good question of course why Sony would let it even be there without testing, but of course major companies are trusted to QA themselves, and not release a broken game - luckily this seems to work most of the time.
Because people will pre-order games to the point that it's made a healthy profit even before it's even released. Consumers vote with their wallet and for some reason gamers just constantly choose to show publishers that shoddy, half-assed products are good enough for them.
It's because that's how capitalism works. If you keep buying stuff from the same source without due diligence, you can't be surprised when you get stuck with another sucky game.
The only incentive to spend resources on fixing a game is to preserve reputation for future games.
However, delay also doesn't mean a better product. It's possible for a game to be delayed a ton, and then still really suck.
Delay doesn't equal good. DN: Forever and Aliens: Colonial Marines made that clear.
Didn't colonial marine turn out to actually have really good AI that totally changed the game feel that had been broken by a single misplaced semi-colon or something?
https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/15/17574248/aliens-colonial-marines-fixing-code-typo-ai-xenomorphs yep, a code typo broke the alien AI. Unfortunately for that game though no amount of delays could've helped it, there were many more problems besides the AI. The AI was just the biggest problem.
Well the AI went from "literally dogshit, you can run past them without a second thought" to "oh you have to fight them now."
Not sure how good it is in the grand scheme, but at least the update fixed their brokenness and made the game playable.
Still better than if they released the same game earlier. Unless of course they kept adding features or content.
The real question is... Can indie games publishers afford the delay of a game?
Valve was a completely new company then. They weren't going indie, but Sierra didn't pay them for the remake of Half-Life. In the documentary they talk about financing it by creating Half-Life: Day One.
Chet Falizek, a dev who led L4D and a couple other games at valve talks about this a lot on TikTok, now that he's running an indie studio. He's a cool guy, would fit in on .ml or something for sure.
Yes. If I can wait for the Dune movie in February, video game nerds can also wait.
It's up to the companies to coast and ration their resources accordingly.
Implying they're not passing on whatever that "costs" them to the studio...
Depends on the circumstances. Small self funded team, part time? Can probably delay indefinitely.
Usually publishers have multiple products in development simultaneously with varying degrees of investment, the more money invested into a studio to develop a game the more urgent they want it finished.
Generally they would fare better than AAA studios who are beholden to their publisher to release no matter what.
Counterpoint: Star Citizen.
I'm not being snarky there. If there are no deadlines and unlimited feature creep, you get Star Citizen. Or rather, you never get Star Citizen except as a janky hyper-monetized pre-alpha.
Yes, landing is difficult.
There is delaying to release a higher quality product and delaying while having features creep... Not the same thing.
Nah star citizen was a scam first, game second. If it ever produces a game it will have been purely incidental to continuing to run the scam and milk those whales
I kind of believe Chris Roberts himself is just an overambitious perfectionist. He pulled the same kind of bullshit with Freelancer, which only released because Microsoft put its foot down.
I can also believe that a lot of the top people around him are grifters feeding his ambition and perfectionism to keep the gravy train running.
Either way, they got my Kickstarter money so the only entertainment I'll ever get from that game is opining about it like I know anything.
That's my take too, though "overambitious perfectionist" still sounds too flattering for what a bumbling narcissist he is.
He even put himself directly into the fiction's lore as
but bigger.Me disappoint you long time
I mean, Miyamoto said pretty much the same thing long ago. Glad to see Gaben being on the same wavelength.
Game developers seem to be very afraid to change core features or the story of the game in a major way (even if the actual work would not be too extensive) after release. But there are enough examples where games improved a lot after release.
Sure, the initial impression of the game might be ruined, but that is more a consequence for the producers that most often where responsible for the rushed release, than for the gamers or developers, of the game is fixed afterwards.
“Suck is forever”
That’s some Gen X Yoda shit.
Joke on him, often game gets delayed under this exact pretext and it suck anyway.
I think it becomes a mixture of too early and delaying.
Some games clearly need another year to finish but they delay it for half a year and wont allow more for themselves
While this was true in a pre-Steam world, it hasn't been true for a while.
See Terraria (which didn't suck, but was lackluster compared to how the game is now), No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077.
I don't have a problem when small studios do it for games like Terraria and No Man's Sky. It keeps them solvent without having to attach themselves to a big publisher.
I do have a problem when a giant, established company does it, as is the case for Cyberpunk 2077.
There's also a recent trend of "forever games", where it's clear that the goal is to keep you playing it perpetually. It has both upsides and downsides. These games tend to change intensely over the years. Minecraft is such an example.
Cyberpunk and NMS did exceptionally decent first day numbers......and then they didn't do exceptionally decent numbers due to the well-deserved backlash. They would have sold even more copies over the last 5 years if they didn't scare half of the gaming industry away initially. You have to work really damn hard to save your game from death. Case in point: Bethesda isn't working to save Redfall and it shows.
Whenever I hear this quote I also think of the developers/publishers. They need to have a good reputation so people buy their games.
I think that's why EA, Blizzard, Ubisoft, Activision, etc sales have gone down. I will not say that gamers react fairly when it comes to unfinished game releases, but it takes one bad game to ruin a developer. Especially when you consider how small the margins are or if they are publicly traded. Even developers with good games have recently been going out of business because it's not sustainable.
I also think of their legacies. Especially in a post-steam world, a game with a good legacy will continue to sell for much longer. I don't think a game like Watch Dogs ever got rid of the stink surrounding it, even though it isn't a bad game to go back to nowadays.
Makes me think of old school Blizzard. Rest in peace.
I always thought that Miyamoto quote was real too!
Fair point, even with upgrades a la Cyberpunk 2077, the lost sales out of the gate are unlikely to be made up a year and a half later when they release the game they should have released in the first place
Sick of hearing about this this loser, go away already
How did Gabe Newell offend you?
The dude has been a bastion of how to run a company that delights its end-users and doing their best to run a company ethically. A staunch group of people that believe in right-to-repair as well as believing in modding and community growth of games.
Yes there's issues on the publisher/developmer side of things, however Valve constantly works with studios to help mitigate these pain points and on-board to their platform.
Such a great quote.
"Suck is forever"
-GabeN
Game delays are okay, but let's maybe have a conversation about why valve is incapable of producing the kind of content it used to. Half-life 3 isn't "delayed", it's not happening because of internal reasons.
Half life 3 had never been announced to be in development. It's not delayed, late, on-time, or anything else for us except a hope it might eventually come out.
Half-life alyx was as good as any other half life content they've produced
