A few years old but almost certainly still the case
7 Likes
They could only manage Half-life
4 Likes
Aside from running Steam, which generates almost all of their revenue, thereâs also DotA, which also requires a huge team between keeping a massive network infrastructure up and running, a huge art team to maintain the content treadmill, a small party of product managers, event organizers, community managers, etc. From what Iâve seen of Artifact, that canât have been a small team either.
I have two friends who interviewed at Valve in the last five years and both said that it was their worst experience doing that in the industry and absolutely fits in with that article Doolittle posted.
5 Likes
talking about valve iâm reminded of a conversation i had w a friend in 2019 whoâs a computer science student who was talking about how valve âactually, when you look into it, an example of actually existing anarchismâ and used the fact yanis varoufakis worked there as proof
8 Likes
Not sure I could find it again, but to give another POV, I also read a tea post from an ex graphics-engine engineer at Valve. He said that Source 2 at this point is a kind of pointless not-invented-here-syndrome project thatâs just straight-up inferior in almost all respects to Unreal Engine. So there is a whole team gradually adding features and refactoring purely to catch up with it, while the game teams were dragged down by the shittiness of it and constantly complained at him without feeling able to bite the bullet and switch to a third-party engine like a normal studio wouldâve done, and the whole thing was soul-deadening.
12 Likes
boy I wish that werenât so believable
2 Likes
I mean they did manage to ship half life alyx and ben burbank is a great programmer / lead but I canât imagine itâs the kind of environment where most people can thrive nowadays
4 Likes
Tragic case of believing your own hype. And also of making a hojillion dollars so who gives a fuck
to me this is even more nauseating than the puff pieces written about Jon Blow and how much of a genius he is or whatever that everyone got mad about.
5 Likes
in the fucking post-spotify acquisition ringer of all things
1 Like
Itâs good that the article draws the connection between Sony Santa Monica nearly shutting down and Annapurna, which doesnât just resemble Sonyâs prestige patronage, itâs the same people. Had that not happened these games would probably have been published as Sony titles.
According to Sonic the Hedgehog coproducer Dmitri Johnson, his production company dj2 Entertainment is adapting an unspecified Annapurna game into a not-yet-announced TV series.
ahaha the guy who made a Skulls of the Shogun cartoon to run on Nerdist dot com and used that to hustle up the rights for the Sonic movie found a way to get a quote in
8 Likes
i donât think i heard of annapurna before people started talking about them in this thread a few days ago
2 Likes
i guess consider yourself lucky! as someone who is in the âindie gamesâ space, and partially because of the brief period of me living in LA and also knowing about 5 different people who have had their games published by them, they have been an ever-present ambient force for me.
2 Likes
donât ever click on anything at the ringer that isnât basketball related
3 Likes
the Ringer is def bad for this type of thing (even though my friend Justin Charity works there and i like what he does). but it is also just a good example of the kind of bizarre, tone-deaf glowing puff pieces of some random thing from the games world that occasionally appears in these more mainstream ânon-gamesâ publications. it gives a kind of frightening insight into how ânormiesâ who follow the space might approach this stuff. like: these are the exactly same types of people who say Journey is the greatest game ever made as if itâs some kind of obvious fact - and sadly, iâve met many of those people before. and i imagine this is exactly the sort of audience that Annapurna is courting with many of the games they publish! thatâs why it sort of reminded me of that infamous Atlantic profile of Jon Blow.
2 Likes
video games are eternally stuck in the âdid you know some âvideo gamesâ can be just as good as your favorite TV show?â mode of discourse
10 Likes
Nah. Most people moved on after TLOU1 finally âaccomplishedâ that
To be fair the situation was increasingly embarrassing over the preceding two decades or so that videogames kept trying for and failing to meet that low bar, so I understand why it became a little bit of an obsession at the time
4 Likes
I wish to argue in favor of the Ringerâs video game coverage based on one simple fact:
A week or so back they held their own fan voted âbest video game character everâ tournament. The final four were the obvious Mario, Link, Sonic⌠and Tony Hawk. I am for Tony Hawkâs inclusion here.
Also I just realized recently that Annapurna arenât the folks who made Machinarium and the Samorost games.
12 Likes