It’s the incredibly gentle learning curve I’m talking about that meant that GladOS was the only thing stopping me from (both figuratively and literally) switching off and booting up a different game for the first 13 levels or so. The first 5 or 6 levels were utterly patronising, to the extent that I wish Valve had given me the option to skip them.

This can easily be checked by cross-referencing NForce (the site that tracks pirate .nfo documents that accompany all the releases) with Mobygames. They have generally not released Steam rips of other games (Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and Sin Episodes being the only exceptions I am personally aware of), I assume because cracked DVD releases are cleaner and more user-friendly.

I tend to agree that Steam’s real antipiracy benefit is making it easy and convenient to buy, download, and play one’s games without the risks and hassles of the pirate route or (mostly) the retail route.

Secondly – it’s a fallacy that only bigger releases get patch cracks. It’s true that Steam made it difficult to release cracked patches (although it happened anyway), but other than that…it takes a while, sometimes. But search a “reputable” crack site (i.e., one that only takes no-CD cracks and nothing that disables any other facet of copy protection) and you’ll find cracks of every update of pretty near every game on the market with a CD-check.

The anti-Valve guy is funny: “They’re only any good because they hire good people”.

The PC market has always struck me as more patient than the console one, for example, I tend to hit one game hard for a period of time and concentrate on that and completing that. On consoles however its a plug and play affair where I often swap a few times each session. Ea are taking the same console market mold and failingly trying to apply it to PC gaming: 1) Get game on shelf asap, 2) Sell online content asap, or if not possible goto 3, 3)Design and market sequel (preferably cloned from progenitor game) asap and ignore previous games.
The makers of Sins of a Solar Empire have impressed me with their knowledge of the market and really put EA games to shame.

**Edit** Sorry I actually wrote this before I saw that a sequel was announced for Crytek, not after. Do I get browny points for being right about the sequel still?

No, I don’t understand your view. Google X3 and Starforce and you’ll see it was cracked well before it made it to Steam.
Nobody sensible is claiming Steam “kills” piracy. There will always be pirates. What they are claiming is that Steam presents a sensible solution to the piracy problem. Buying a game on Steam is easier that pirating it. You click a button, and the game arrives. A patch comes in, and it’s added. You pirate a game, you need to go to the proper source, find the file, install it, install the crack (in one of a half-dozen ways), and manually apply the patches, which may or may not work. You can still do it (and get patches for the big titles), but it’s more difficult. I’ll add that the procedure for pirating and maintaining a pirate copy is _easier_ than the procedure for doing the same with most retail games.
I like a good troll-and-flame as much as the next guy, but if you’re gonna go after Steam, go for its weakness. The Valve folks have claimed that Steam elevates the risk of piracy, since a pirate stands to lose _All_ Steam games. So what happens when Valve decides that a legitimate user isn’t legit? For that matter, what happens when Valve decides or is forced to cease supporting Steam on legacy machines? Five years from now, will your games work?

Trying to separate “What Valve does” from “What the people Valve throws money at do” is silly. “Valve” has always been getting talented people together and giving them the means to create something. They’d be “throwing money at people” if those groups were off-site and without access to other employees and tools.
Do you really believe Valve just discovered Narbacular Drop in a corner and said “we should throw money at these people”? Wouldn’t it make more sense for someone to see or to suggest that the team and Valve might be a “good fit”? And do you deny that all the Orange Box products share a common ideology in terms of gaming philosophy and art direction, layered on top of a common engine?
These aren’t hate or love issues, but issues of fact.

But I do so enjoy mocking.

You like Valve. You all do. Fine I get it. I really do. But I loath them. I have my reasons for my hatred of them much as you have yours for your addoration; does not mean either of us are wrong (nobody bothers to notice that I never mock anyone for liking Valve, do I?), just that we have had different experiences and hold different expectations.

But I guess Valve are the devil for hiring this kind of talent and giving them the resources needed to create true masterpieces as opposed to concepts with great potential. We should all worship the likes of EA instead, with their armies of code monkeys which get no say over the end product or maybe Bethesda with their art asset factories producing content void of any personality. Yeah, screw Valve.

@Crispy: By the way how was Portal dumbed down? Narbacular drop was an impressive tech demo but I don’t recall seeing anything more complex done in it. Maybe the boulder puzzles were interesting but removing them hasn’t dumbed down the game, if anything it’s harder than any Narbacular Drop level I played so perhaps it’s been smarted up…

Do I have an axe to grind with Valve? Sure do. Can’t stand ‘em. Not one jot. Do I think they took ideas like Portal and TF2 (and here I speak as a veteran QW:TF player of MANY years) and made them better? Sure do: they did a grand job. Do I still think they are the scum of the earth and that these few demonstrations of decency and business accumen have done nothing to redeem them? Sure do!

As to being a pirate? Well I guess I am guilty as charged… kinda. I have acces to VERY fast unlimited broadband so yes, I pirate most every PC game that comes out. However as my bank balance, irrate partner and 7 shelves of boxed games will attest to, if I like something I buy it. If you would like my STEAM ID so you can come chat with me and see the 35 games I own on that platform alone (yes, the irony is sticky-thick here today) then I will happily provide it. I just see my piracy as a “try before you buy scheme”. I give the game a day in court and then if its good I lay out my cash, if it’s not, I delete my image (as I have just done with GRID)

Does that make me a bad person? Probably, but I really don’t care.

I’d like some sources for these claims before I’m inclined to believe you, interested as I am. Reputable media coverage will do.
Also are you talking about the day of release (day 1) or the time of release (day 0)?

CS, TF and even the wonderous Portal are all external products that Valve simply bought and threw cash at. I therefore exclude them from discussions regarding Valve’s programming ability and their commitment to their customers.
Pity the discussion was about whether anti-piracy measures have helped secure Valve’s financial security or not, and not about their programming ability, which seems to be an axe you want to grind into the discussion whether it directly relates to the point at hand or not.

As far as the ‘commitment to customers’ argument goes, while I’d agree that CS, TFC/TF2 and Portal are either derived from or began life as non-Valve ideas, I’d say that in most cases (except DoD:S and CS:S) Valve have actually improved these games. Although dumbed down, Portal was injected with humour and carefully integrated into HL2 lore. The TFC guys came direct to Valve from Quake TF via their commercial Quake II TF2 mod which was never released (it’s possible that Valve gave them the golden ticket to make their TF2 a reality – oh you’re so evil, Valve!). This in turn has spawned Team Fortress 2, which is undoubtedly a clear refinement of many of the ideas from the previous games, if a departure from the previous playerbases. Counter-Strike arguably got better, although this is a more tenuous point. In short with these games I’d argue they’ve done more than just throw money at them, they’ve actually helped the game grow into something that is certainly bigger and -in most cases- better than its forebears.

Is it possible that you’re more pissed off with Valve releasing products with bugs in it because you can’t update your pirated copies? In my experience Valve had a pretty high turnaround for fixing bugs. In fact, if you look at this blog you’ll see that Valve were fixing the stutter bug you mentioned for more users, year upon year. This shows a fair amount of dedication to their users, wouldn’t you say?

If you *must* release a game that’s not finished (and there are plenty of circumstances that can force this – see KotOR2 or Frontier: First Encounters) then post-release support should be mandatory, if only to maintain good will with the paying public.

I was horribly disappointed with the poor quality, rushed ending of KotOR2, yet despite my better judgment, still bought Neverwinter Nights 2 and its expansion pack, hoping Obsidian had learned a few QA lessons, only to find that they were horrible, buggy, inefficient messes. That’s really put me off buying future Obsidian titles, especially because their post-release support hasn’t really fixed a lot of the core problems.

I’m sure a lot of developers just see patching as a time and money sink, but they genuinely can learn something from the Blizzard and Valve models of post-release support. Give your customers what they want and they’ll continue to be your customers. Treat them like organic cash dispensers and watch them walk away…

Of course, there is another option: release games that don’t need patching in the first place. You have to go back a long way for examples, but I can’t think of any LucasArts in-house games (circa TIE Fighter – i.e. the early-mid ’90s golden period, before they out-sourced development and became rubbish) that ever needed any significant patching. Granted, PCs are a lot more diverse in terms of components these days (different combinations of OS, CPU, GPU and soundcards, etc) but using that as an excuse for not testing or optimising a game is not really acceptable. Either do the job right, or don’t do it at all. Or at least don’t expect us to keep coming back to pay for it…

Unhappily, I departed for the consoles right about the time they became internet-connected and the contagion spread to them – and if you’re developing for a console, you have literally zero excuses for shipping a product with bugs, glitches, dodgy framerates and so on. Patching post-release is a sign of a bad dev team, whether in their time-management, their coding or their QA. It’s not much better on the PC, but at least they have more of an excuse…

And patches which add content are generally a good thing (Valve’s TF2 changes debatably so, extra maps almost always so). Look at Soldat (www.soldat.pl); that games been kept alive mainly by constant patching adding new modes, new features, new maps, and the occasional bugfix. And that’s ONE GUY.

RPS should look at Soldat. I’ve never, ever seen it mentioned in any reputable site…