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Jay Pinkerton (Portal 2 and Team Fortress 2 writer) has left Valve.

Love it or hate it, Valve started this games as service phenomenon. Now quite a few companies are copying it. If you think about single player games after you are done with the main story or objectives how often do you go back to it? If it's a permanent part of your collection maybe once a year or honestly, probably even less than that. Games as service has no such issue, because there is always something new to keep players engaged.

I am not defending the games as service model, but if you look at some of the great games out there today that continue to make money years after they initially release you would see this model brings in steady money for the developers who do it right. Games like TF2, CSGO and Dota 2 are from Valve, but you also have Microsoft making bank off of Minecraft too.
 

jayu26

Member
They already told the public. But I can see that's not going to stop certain people in here from insisting they're lying anyway.

No, because talk is cheap and as far as Valve is concerned no one should believe anything when it comes what they say about their game development, not unless they actually show something.

They have a HUGE update on the way for Team Fortress 2, the biggest ever, after they left the game's matchmaking broken for an entire year and without a content update. Also, they just released a really half-baked campaign for CS:GO and Dota 2 gets updated with cosmetics literally all the time, so back off buddy.

no.
Can we be upset that they have stopped making new games altogether?
 

TheBowen

Sat alone in a boggy marsh
Love to get hired as writer for valve

I could just sit around doing nothing and get paid.

Such a waste of talent
 

Ploid 3.0

Member
Ah VR tests and sellers. I wish steam machines really took off. I feel like a Half Life would have been a thing if they did to move people to buy them. I really wanted computer gaming to move to linux. Imagine, if it did, we'd also have sure adoption of Vulkan.
 
I said it before, I'll say it again. The updates to TF2 really did mark the beginning of the end of Valve as we once knew them.

The reliance on the community to produce new content, the micro-transactions/in-game store, pretty much everything Valve did to that game they ended up applying to their future releases like DOTA2 and eventually their entire business model.

Sad.
 
I would have never ever imagined that Valve would end like this. So anticlimactic. It feels like a bad joke honestly.
Do we even know what is Valve doing appart from DOTA and managing the store?

Valve didnt end, in fact they are doing better than ever, their buisiness just no longer is in narrative driven single player titles. Yeah it sucks, its a hard pill to swallow, but its just the way it is, gabes silence is defening though, would be way better if he said "hey we no longer make those games, but if your interested in making our third half life title were open to strikinf a deal" i would love to see the black mesa guys have a shot at making half life 3.
 

Zia

Member
Valve didnt end, in fact they are doing better than ever, their buisiness just no longer is in narrative driven single player titles. Yeah it sucks, its a hard pill to swallow, but its just the way it is, gabes silence is defening though, would be way better if he said "hey we no longer make those games, but if your interested in making our third half life title were open to strikinf a deal" i would love to see the black mesa guys have a shot at making half life 3.

It's not even necessarily about narrative single-player games. It's about tone and aesthetics. Valve used to be insanely clever, generous, a test bed. Valve of today is a monolith that is bleeding its named talent and seems to be driven entirely by numbers.
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
It's not even necessarily about narrative single-player games. It's about tone and aesthetics. Valve used to be insanely clever, generous, a test bed. Valve of today is a monolith that is bleeding its named talent and seems to be driven entirely by numbers.

It's an unsettling look on the surface, however the majority of Valve's high-profile departures have been OGs or otherwise older folks either retiring or making the transition to retirement. The company has been around for more than two decades now, after all.
 

gatti-man

Member
How are they corrupt when they just want to do different things? People should stop being angry at Valve because they don't churn out single-player games anymore.

This made me laugh. When was the last time valve "churned" anything out? Never.
 
Love it or hate it, Valve started this games as service phenomenon. Now quite a few companies are copying it. If you think about single player games after you are done with the main story or objectives how often do you go back to it? If it's a permanent part of your collection maybe once a year or honestly, probably even less than that. Games as service has no such issue, because there is always something new to keep players engaged.

I am not defending the games as service model, but if you look at some of the great games out there today that continue to make money years after they initially release you would see this model brings in steady money for the developers who do it right. Games like TF2, CSGO and Dota 2 are from Valve, but you also have Microsoft making bank off of Minecraft too.

Games as a service is not a Valve invention.
 

Bluth54

Member
We still had one more TF2 comic to go

Someone please tell me it was written before his departure ;_;

Also, lol

Given how long it's been taking to work on the TF2 comics it's hard to say if the last one is finished. However Valve does have another writer, Sheila Sadeghi that's been working on TF2 for some time now so I imagine she'll finish the comic.
 
People saying Valve doesnt develop games anymore are nuts and decide to just avoid the truth altogether.

That said, the last of the best writers in Valve has left. Don't expect anything to the quality of Portal 2 or TF2's comics anymore.
 

Yukinari

Member
We're definitely gonna see how this affects the writing in TF2 after the final comic is out.

TF2 is basically a husk of its former glory and the comics were always keeping it relevant.
 
Valve are wasting talent.

Seriously. It's a shame what Valve has become as a game developer. They have some great IP's and developers and they are going to waste.

TF2 is basically a husk of its former glory

Definitely, in story and the way it works and they never optimised it like they should have years ago.

I stayed until they changed the way servers work. I literally can't play it with my international friends anymore. We used to choose Valve servers to split ping between us so it was playable (usually USA), now we can't unless we want to go to a boring trade server, they are the only ones we can "choose" any more.
Matchmaking puts us all in a server close to one of us only, so the rest have terrible ping.

They basically broke the game for our group. It really sucks, was our favorite go to game.
 
Shame, I've only really enjoyed Valve's single player games like Portal 2. TF2 was okay I guess. But it sucks we'll never see another great singleplayer campaign from them again.
 
I stayed until they changed the way servers work. I literally can't play it with my international friends anymore. We used to choose Valve servers to split ping between us so it was playable (usually USA), now we can't unless we want to go to a boring trade server, they are the only ones we can "choose" any more.
Matchmaking puts us all in a server close to one of us only, so the rest have terrible ping.

They basically broke the game for our group. It really sucks, was our favorite go to game.

Yeah, the new TF2 server interface is so fucking obtuse.
 
I don't understand why they don't pay other companies to make it. Half Life 3? Give it to Obsidian, or Human Head or something. Orange Box port for current gen? Bluepoint would do a fine job.

It's money on the table. Half Life 3 is Duke Nukam Forever. You could have the guys who made Ride to Hell churn it out in a weekend and it'd still make it's profit back, and then some, day 1.
 
So after the departure of Valve writers Marc Laidlaw, Erik Wolpaw, and Chet Faliszek, I figured Jay Pinkerton's exit would only be a matter of time. Best of luck to all of them with their future endeavors.

When you list them out like that...damn, they really had a dream team over there.

What happened, Valve... :(
 
He used to be one of my favorite internet writers before he joined Valve. Maybe now he can write stuff that actually get published somewhere again.
 

hydruxo

Member
People saying Valve doesnt develop games anymore are nuts and decide to just avoid the truth altogether.

That said, the last of the best writers in Valve has left. Don't expect anything to the quality of Portal 2 or TF2's comics anymore.

So what games do they still make? It's been 6 years since Portal 2, and DOTA 2 barely counts. I think it's pretty clear Valve has basically moved on from game development.
 
So what games do they still make? It's been 6 years since Portal 2, and DOTA 2 barely counts. I think it's pretty clear Valve has basically moved on from game development.

To be fair, they do repackage community designed assets and sell them while also taking almost all of the profits. That counts.
 

guybrushfreeman

Unconfirmed Member
But my TF2 comics..... All these departures are a real shame. It's hard to feel like we didn't get enough work out of such talented people over the years
 
Half-life 3 will be community written in a new service called Steam fanfics
$100 fee for each story written, with 7%* of writting fee awards to those who get accepted

*based on 7% of what a jr writter would make writting that level of text weight in hours. Washington statelaw states Jr Writters paywages and rights are nothing, you may be paid between 2cents - 20 dollars a hour. If you are accepted and ask to remove your fanfic, your account will be terminated and the rights to your writing wiaved.
 

daveo42

Banned
Seems like the perfect opportunity for all the Half-Life and Portal writers to come together and finish up the Half-Life series with all the tie-ins to Portal we were expecting. I look forward to reading about the adventures of Fordan Greeman, Alex Vince, and Shell as they finally defeat their alien overlords.
 

baconcow

Member
Just curious about something. There were several writers at Valve and several of them have quit recently (or perhaps the last year?). Since it can be assumed that Valve is no longer making games, what would these writers be doing? This writer, for example, has his last Valve game credit in 2012 on a FPS. I couldn't imagine working for a company for 5 years and not writing, especially after being part of Portal 2.
 

Vintage

Member
Damn, TF2 and Portal are the best things Valve has written. I'll miss TF2 comics.

The only writing needed at Valve are for hat descriptions.

And they were fucking hilarious:
Introducing the "Something Special For Someone Special". It's ring-shaped, it's gift-wrapped, it's basically useless, and it's really expensive ($100!). In short, it's the most accurate simulation of an actual Valentine's Day gift ever made available to the public.
 

Sarcasm

Member
Don't know this guy but I got curious negative or his last name.

I remember seeing that (last) name in fallout 3.

So I came to check him out.
 
Hopefully he gets to write for other games.

Writing in Portal 2 was fantastic. I'd love to see more of his writing, even if it's not from Valve.
 
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