Pikminiman
Assistant Writer
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- Nov 12, 2012
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With Steam Dev Days wrapping up yesterday, the Twitter-centric news-drip of Valve updates has officially run dry. But that doesn't mean every bit of news has been covered. After yesterday's round-up of news from the conference's first day, here are the bits of news that stood out to us from the second day.
A large portion of updates from the second day centered around user-generated content and in-game economies, which have become defining tenets of Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Portal 2. Valve stated that their ultimate goal for these in-game economies and communities is to make players happy, since they have found that to be the most effective way of making money off the playerbase without making them feeling cheated or regretful.
Reiterating what Gabe Newell has said several times in the immediate past, Valve presenters stressed that user-generated content is valuable principally because it invites players to generate value for the games in question as well as for other players. As a result, in-game economies gain a certain stability and even offer significant real-world profits to amateur content creators, even if only a small percentage of players actually spend real-world money in the first place. For example, TF2 content paid out $400,000 to content creators in the first week of 2014 alone, and over $10,000,000 in 2013. Valve also clarified that launching new Workshops for games that previously lacked Workshop support actually does not displace Workshop creators, but rather increases the size of the modding community as a whole.
Valve also gave a presentation on their recent virtual reality pursuits, which has included significant collaboration with Oculus VR. In the presentation, Valve stated that the PC (including Linux, Windows, and OS X) will be the platform most suited for VR technology, since it allows for such effective iteration and prototyping. In fact, Valve's Michael Abrash predicts that a high quality, consumer-priced VR system is almost guaranteed to launch in 2015 or very shortly after. For now, though, they made it clear that VR technology, in its present form, is far from perfect, citing optics, head tracking, and eye tracking as the current biggest hurdles. Valve confirmed that the company is going to continue collaborating with Oculus VR in the future, but the hardware team remains undecided on whether Valve will create and sell their own independent virtual reality headset.
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey took the stage to talk about the challenges of porting existing games to VR. His main point was that developers should focus far less on porting old games to VR (which he says is difficult and largely ineffective) and focus more on experimenting, prototyping, and iterating. After stating that Valve's in-house VR tech is the best VR tech demo in the world right now, Luckey predicted huge success for VR versions of Hearthstone, FIFA, and Sims. After the session, Oculus VR released their "Oculus VR Best Practices Guide".
And, aside from the "Corporate Anthropology of Valve" session being canceled, that about does it for our coverage of Steam Dev Days.
A large portion of updates from the second day centered around user-generated content and in-game economies, which have become defining tenets of Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Portal 2. Valve stated that their ultimate goal for these in-game economies and communities is to make players happy, since they have found that to be the most effective way of making money off the playerbase without making them feeling cheated or regretful.
Reiterating what Gabe Newell has said several times in the immediate past, Valve presenters stressed that user-generated content is valuable principally because it invites players to generate value for the games in question as well as for other players. As a result, in-game economies gain a certain stability and even offer significant real-world profits to amateur content creators, even if only a small percentage of players actually spend real-world money in the first place. For example, TF2 content paid out $400,000 to content creators in the first week of 2014 alone, and over $10,000,000 in 2013. Valve also clarified that launching new Workshops for games that previously lacked Workshop support actually does not displace Workshop creators, but rather increases the size of the modding community as a whole.
Valve also gave a presentation on their recent virtual reality pursuits, which has included significant collaboration with Oculus VR. In the presentation, Valve stated that the PC (including Linux, Windows, and OS X) will be the platform most suited for VR technology, since it allows for such effective iteration and prototyping. In fact, Valve's Michael Abrash predicts that a high quality, consumer-priced VR system is almost guaranteed to launch in 2015 or very shortly after. For now, though, they made it clear that VR technology, in its present form, is far from perfect, citing optics, head tracking, and eye tracking as the current biggest hurdles. Valve confirmed that the company is going to continue collaborating with Oculus VR in the future, but the hardware team remains undecided on whether Valve will create and sell their own independent virtual reality headset.
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey took the stage to talk about the challenges of porting existing games to VR. His main point was that developers should focus far less on porting old games to VR (which he says is difficult and largely ineffective) and focus more on experimenting, prototyping, and iterating. After stating that Valve's in-house VR tech is the best VR tech demo in the world right now, Luckey predicted huge success for VR versions of Hearthstone, FIFA, and Sims. After the session, Oculus VR released their "Oculus VR Best Practices Guide".
And, aside from the "Corporate Anthropology of Valve" session being canceled, that about does it for our coverage of Steam Dev Days.
