Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Jim has already linked to the fascinating Valve new employee handbook in yesterday’s Sunday Papers, but the wisdom of the massed Hivemind is that it deserves its own post due to being possibly the most interesting thing on the internet today. In equal parts inspiring and a bit culty, it’s a long, cheerful document that aims to explain Valve’s unusual non-hierarchical structure to nervous new starters. No-one is necessarily anyone’s boss there – even Gabe Newell is just another link in the chain, apparently.
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Back when DOTA was nothing more than an elaborate WarCraft III map, it used to be my way of relaxing. Sure, I wasn’t some unholy whirlwind of might and magic, but it was an experience that fell somewhere on the spectrum between “pleasant” and “killing a million things.” Flash forward to today: I don’t really play LoL very often. It’s stressful! If I can get a couple friends together, sure, but the community’s a grab-bag of mean people who use curse words. So, how does Valve plan to avoid walking down a similarly suicidal lane with DOTA 2? How does an oddly utopian-sounding player-driven wonderland strike you?

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Valve doesn’t like to say things. Where’s Half-Life 2: Episode Three? Silence. Why has Left 4 Dead 2′s Cold Stream DLC taken nearly a year? Silence. What does Gordon Freeman’s voice sound like? Silence. Yesterday, though, a Valve job listing seeking out new hardware tech wizards for its shadowy developer coven got the whole Internet talking. And, somewhat shockingly, Valve’s decided to talk back.

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The unblinking internet eye of Engadget has spotted a new job placement ad at Valve, appealing for an electronics engineer. It reads: “For years, Valve has been all about writing software that provides great gameplay experiences. Now we’re developing hardware to enhance those experiences, and you can be a key part of making that happen. Join our highly motivated team that’s doing hardware design, prototyping, testing, and production across a wide range of platforms. We’re not talking about me-too mice and gamepads here – help us invent whole new gaming experiences.” Valve previously denied a “Steam Box” gaming platform, and the wording of this new ad suggests this might be something else entirely. But what? To the Speculatotron! See below for some video-clues.
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Gun Game, which my brain has decided now needs to be sung along to the Duck Tales theme tune, is crouch-walking into the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive beta. On Friday, Valve added the first Arsenal: Demolition map de_lake, a game mode that reverses the ever-increasing returns of the original GG. When you start the match, you’re given a rifle: if you get a kill with it that round, the next round you’ll receive a weaker weapon. After five rounds CTs and Terrorists swap over. It includes the traditional Terrorist/Counter Terrorists defusal dance, and for every additional kill you’ll receive more equipment in the next round. It’s like someone’s accidentally tumble-dried Counter-Strike and it’s come out all dizzy and tried to explain its own mechanics. I can’t wait for Talk Game, where you attempt to negotiate demands: I did just attempt to negotiate a doughnut drop for me and my fellow Ts, but the response was rather anatomical and descriptive. While I call my mother to make sure he didn’t follow through, here’s a video showing it all in action.
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Following rumours circulated by The Verge, Valve has told Kotaku that they are experimenting with biometrics and connecting PCs to TVs. However: “All of that is stuff that we’re working on, but it’s a long way from Valve shipping any sort of hardware.” Marketing VP Doug Lombardi said: “We’re prepping the Steam Big Picture Mode UI and getting ready to ship that, so we’re building boxes to test that on.” Lombardi denied that the boxes were prototype of a home console, and instead suggested it was simply a part of the current Steam development process, allowing them to make it easier for us to play PC games on our TV. It’s not a denial that Valve would ever head in that direction, and they’ve reiterated that they might ship hardware eventually, but the purported “Steam Box” (okay, Steam Engine, if you like) looks like hot air for now.

The initial announcement of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive gave us the hope that we could all get along; that you there with your hand-build Intel i7 rig could be playing with a friend who might be sat on his sofa, starting at his giant television, holding a joypad. I wanted that, you (maybe?) wanted that, Valve initially wanted that. Now Valve do not want that. Speaking to Joystiq, Chet Faliszek told them it was because they need to frequently update the PC and Mac versions more frequently.

The beta has proved we want to update not just the beta, but the game itself post-launch frequently on the PC. To do that we need to separate the platforms so one doesn’t hamstring the other. So for that, we have removed the idea of cross-platform play — essentially make all platforms stronger by not mixing them.

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I am sure there’ll be more comment on this in the week (especially if it is announced at GDC), but while I was compiling the Sunday Papers I realised that the The Verge reporting that Valve could be making a “Steam Box” gaming console probably warrants its own thread: “Apparently meetings were held during CES to demo a hand-built version of the device to potential partners. We’re told that the basic specs of the Steam Box include a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GPU. The devices will be able to run any standard PC titles, and will also allow for rival gaming services (like EA’s Origin) to be loaded up.”

Obviously this is largely speculation and hearsay, so to be taken with a hefty pinch of internet-salt, but it’s a fascinating possible next move in the console wars, with everything basically becoming a PC. The idea that it will allow for other services to be run on it is the particularly interesting point, to my mind, because it allows internal competition in the way that consoles usually do not.

I was rather close to falling down a deep, dark Counter-Strike hole just after the Counter-Strike:Global Offensive launched in November, but a broken PC released me from a frightening future of constant de_dust2 battles and crying about how unfair it is. I’d actually forgotten I had it until Valve and Hidden Path updated it this week, switching from a stress test to a big-assed closed beta, with over 80 tweaks. The big changes are the addition of three reworked classic maps, de_inferno, de_train, and de_nuke, and new guns, the Nova shotgun, the Bizon and the MP7 SMGs. But there’s more.
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Penny Arcade’s new games journalism site (note the lack of capitalisation), the PA Report, has kicked off with an interview with Uncy Gabe of Valve’s new beard. Most interviews with the newly hirsute Newell have some form of forward looking speculation about the industry, because that’s the way his mind works, and Newell’s take on hardware shows that the Valve hivemeind are contemplating how best to serve customers hardware as well as software. Though Newell observes that “It’s definitely not the first thought that crosses our mind”, Valve’s biofeedback experiments have been so successful that they are, if no-one else does it adequately, prepared to sell the hardware themselves.

“It’s not a question of whether or not this is going to be useful for customers, whether or not it’s going to be useful for content developers, you know, it’s figuring out the best way we can get these into people’s hands.”

But how could that happen?

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