Carmack and others should get a clue from Paradox Intereactive

Valve isn't in it for the money? Oh really? Then why pray-tell did they force all DLC to be sold through Steam? Why do they make sure their games have low requirements? Why did they release L4D2 a year after the original? Why have they put so much focus on paid downloadable items like TF2 hats or the Portal 2 co-op items? All them seem very much like profit oriented decisions. You are a fool if you don't think Valve cares about profit or if they're not trying to make the most money they can through the means they believe are best. Every for profit company in the world cares about making a profit. If they didn't they would charities.

Conveniently, you also forget about all the 75% off sales and free DLC they have released for their games, as well.
 
Conveniently, you also forget about all the 75% off sales and free DLC they have released for their games, as well.

Not at all. You're completely ignoring the entire conversation however. If you're just going to look at one post and make a judgement on my point please don't talk to me.
 
Not at all. You're completely ignoring the entire conversation however. If you're just going to look at one post and make a judgement on my point please don't talk to me.

Picking and choosing evidence that justifies your stance while ignoring opposing evidence is no better.
 
I don't think people really understood what I meant when I said that. Read what I said again and notice the "because they're stink'n filthy rich" part :p Its very easy to not be in it solely for making money when you're already making it hand over fist, its much harder to do that when you have a team of 100 people making a game and you're wondering how you'll scrape together the money for their next pay cheque.

I'm afraid you've painted a completely inaccurate picture of Valve. They have moved away from developing games a long time ago. Team Fortress, Counter Strike, Portal, Dota - those are ideas that all came from outside of Valve. They see the ideas as having profit potential and give them some polishing and re-sell. The only actual IP that is truly Valve's is Half-Life, which they've all but abandoned. Valve is merely a publisher.

I get what you are trying to say. At least what I think you're trying to say - Valve doesn't feel the same pressure from publishers to get the game out the door. All that extra development time doesn't seem to help Blizzard much these days. And, being in the Dota 2 beta, I can tell you that game is pretty much done - it's actually ready to go out the door right now. For the time it's taking them to make it, the game is extremely unimpressive. Valve is essentially going down the same road as Blizzard in that way.

As far as "indie" titles go, most of those are simply for profit. And most of them absolutely suck. Very few of those games have any real potential or talent. Almost all of them are puzzle games or some iteration of tower defense. They're all out to be the next Angry Birds. Any time that a indie game is actually full of potential though, a studio like Valve is going to grab it real fast. That's how it works. And that's what most of the indie hopefuls are going for. It's all about the money, if you don't want to or can't realize that - then what can I say.
 
wouldn't be an expception if developers made a great effort on their product..

It's been an exception since the early days in the industry.

Picking and choosing evidence that justifies your stance while ignoring opposing evidence is no better.

I'm not ignoring anything. Instead of being a dick you could ask why I didn't mention them. However I no longer have any interest in discussing anything if you.
 
I'm not ignoring anything. Instead of being a dick you could ask why I didn't mention them.

LOL...You're the one that replied dickishly. Don't even try to turn that shit around.

Why, pray tell, did you not mention those facts?
 
LOL...You're the one that replied dickishly. Don't even try to turn that shit around.

Why, pray tell, did you not mention those facts?

Yes because the tone of your post wasn't confrontational at all. Fine I'll humor you.

Let me direct you to the beginning of the conversation you interrupted. To quote myself:

The only difference between a company like Activision and a company like Paradox is in the route they pick to make their money. In the end every decision comes down to its potential to make money.

Now consider that for a moment while I continue. Whatever route a for profit company makes is in the pursuit of profit. They do business in the way they believe will best serve them. What people don't seem to understand is that being for profit is not a bad thing. Making decisions to increase your customer base and keep your customers happy is also a profit driven choice (and a VERY smart one). Valve's free DLC gets them a lot of good press and praise by gamers. Their sales bring in new customers or sell to customers that might have otherwise not bought that title. So why didn't I bring them up? There was no real point to it. The point of my post wasn't to show Valve in a good light or a bad light, but to show that they do make decisions for the point of profit like any good company should do.
 
I guess it seemed like you (and others in here) were trying to argue that Valve was in it just for the money. If that was not your intention then I apologize, but clearly they are not in it just for the money.
 
I guess it seemed like you (and others in here) were trying to argue that Valve was in it just for the money. If that was not your intention then I apologize, but clearly they are not in it just for the money.

My intention is trying to show that just because a company cares about it's customers (like Valve does seem to) doesn't mean that they don't care about profit or more profit oriented decisions as well. People don't usually seem to understand that point. The hear someone say a company cares about profit and instantly think you're calling them Apple.
 
I'm afraid you've painted a completely inaccurate picture of Valve. They have moved away from developing games a long time ago. Team Fortress, Counter Strike, Portal, Dota - those are ideas that all came from outside of Valve. They see the ideas as having profit potential and give them some polishing and re-sell. The only actual IP that is truly Valve's is Half-Life, which they've all but abandoned. Valve is merely a publisher.

I get what you are trying to say. At least what I think you're trying to say - Valve doesn't feel the same pressure from publishers to get the game out the door. All that extra development time doesn't seem to help Blizzard much these days. And, being in the Dota 2 beta, I can tell you that game is pretty much done - it's actually ready to go out the door right now. For the time it's taking them to make it, the game is extremely unimpressive. Valve is essentially going down the same road as Blizzard in that way.
Perhaps, like I said, I don't pay a lot of attention to Valve because they haven't made any games I give a crap about in recent history :p

As far as "indie" titles go, most of those are simply for profit. And most of them absolutely suck. Very few of those games have any real potential or talent. Almost all of them are puzzle games or some iteration of tower defense. They're all out to be the next Angry Birds. Any time that a indie game is actually full of potential though, a studio like Valve is going to grab it real fast. That's how it works. And that's what most of the indie hopefuls are going for. It's all about the money, if you don't want to or can't realize that - then what can I say.
No doubt they're in it for the money as well, and there's a lot of shit indie games out there, but it was more a comparison to larger business. An indie developer is less bound purely by money, so has more concessions to take time to do things on a whim, where as a large scale developer would have to consider the wages of its employees before any undertaking.

It has to be a decision of how much time in gives how much profit out as the cost of delaying a game even slightly is huge when you are running any remotely large studio. If you're paying 100 people $100k a year, its costing you over $800k a month in salaries. I have no idea what proportion of final sales money actually goes to the development studio, but if you say its like $20 of a $60 game, $800k of wages would have to sell 40,000 copies. So if you're developing a game, if you think you want to delay a game for month for whatever reason, you'd have to ask yourself is it going to get you an extra 40,000 sales compared to just patching it up the best you can and getting it out the door. And that's JUST on wages.

Those numbers are just made up of course, but they're just to give an example of why any company MUST be driven by money. Obviously you also have to do things for the love of it, working at a job you hate just for the money is a shit way to live. But you can't be one of the big boys in the mainstream if you don't make key development decisions on a monetary basis.

Compared to your indie developer who delaying a game a month means they need to work a few extra hours at maccas to pay the rent, think up a fresh excuse to get more unemployment payments from the government or convince their Mum to let them live in her basement for another month :p
 
My intention is trying to show that just because a company cares about it's customers (like Valve does seem to) doesn't mean that they don't care about profit or more profit oriented decisions as well. People don't usually seem to understand that point. The hear someone say a company cares about profit and instantly think you're calling them Apple.

Then I would agree with you.
 
Paradox why do you only release games on the PC:

Real answer: Because we don't have a console SDK and we hate the UDK.


I like their games and stuff, but they aren't exactly...glowing technologically. If you thought RAGE looked bad...you probably want to stay the fuck away from any of the recent dx8 titles paradox has made...:p
 
I'm going to have to say as well this does seem a bit dis-genuine, something I feel a lot of PC gaming community seems to not recognize (maybe due to the relative lack of attention). The majority of games they publish would not be something you'd consider as being remotely mulitplatform oriented. This to me seems more like another case of pandering to your customer base.

I would be more meaningful for instance if they also had many FPS type IPs, which is the genre that is most multiplatform friendly from a business perspective.
 
Oooo, just realized that they made one of my favorite mobile phone games - Majesty!:)
 
The goal of every for profit company is profit. I'm not saying they all want to rule the world or whatever, but at the end of the day profit is the ultimate goal. When companies lose sight of that they die. That is the nature of capitalism.

Spoken like a true capitalist. I forgot who it was that stated "The problem with capitalism is capitalists," but it's a statement I agree with. People like this have absolutely no notion of the idea that some people do something they love, and like getting paid for it, but the pay itself just allows them to continue doing it, it's not their primary goal.
 
It's been an exception since the early days in the industry.

I don't think so as I can name many a game that was totally awesome on the PC

Sopwith
Leisure Suit Larry
Jazz Jackrabbit 1-2
Terminator Future Shock and Skynet
Screamer 1 and 2
Nascar
Lethan Enforcers
Sonic games that were ported
Road Rash
Duke Nukem
King's Quest
Space Quest
Diablo
Red alert series (stratedgy)
Duke 3D
Quake
Doom 1 and 2
Wing Commander
Mech Warrior
Blood
Rise of the Triad
Descent 1-3
Heretic
Hexen 1 and 2
Elite Force 1 and 2
Sin
Unreal
Unreal Tournament
Atomic Bomberman
Batman AC and AA
Monkey Island series
AVP (both of them)
King Pin
A10 thunderbolt
F14 Tombcat
Gore
Mortal Kombat 1 2 and 3
Street Fighter

I could keep going but you get the point.....
 
On OCP, the link loops back to itself and again and again. Fix it.

I gave up and came in the discussion to get the link.
 
If I could get a job in the game industry, I would. In a heartbeat. It's a medium I love dearly, and I enjoy creating. I've tried, quite a few times, and came AGONIZINGLY close, to break in, but it just hasn't happened yet. Haven't given up, though.

And it has nothing to do with getting rich. Making money doing something you love isn't a bad thing, but to try and say that it's the #1 reason for doing it is complete B.S. There are always going to be people in it just for the money, but an equal number of people (or more) do it because they love it.
 
Clearly people do things for various reasons. Open source developers make games because they like them. Some people sell games, and like money. Some people like games with great graphics and happen to run profitable companies and use that profit to make games with lots of professional content.

I guarantee you Newell and Carmack love games for the sake of games. Newell left Microsoft to make games, you don't leave a good job at Microsoft to do something you're not passionate about. They even praise Steam in that interview, clearly Newell is helping push the PC agenda. Both Paradox and Valve push stupid DLC, it's how they employ the artists making the games you like. You don't release the Quake 4 engine for free if you don't love games.
 
Companies like Paradox either -

1. become evil as they realize they can't survive, or
2. get bought by companies who are #1

Valve is the one exception and they've managed to survive because they invented Steam.
 
Companies like Paradox either -

1. become evil as they realize they can't survive, or
2. get bought by companies who are #1

Valve is the one exception and they've managed to survive because they invented Steam.

#1 = their games are good enough that that's impossible.
#2 = their games are niche enough that that's impossible.

I'm talking about their strategy games though, with which they truly made their mark. Victoria I and II, Europa Universalis I-III, Hearts of Iron I-III...
 
I don't think so as I can name many a game that was totally awesome on the PC

Sopwith
Leisure Suit Larry
Jazz Jackrabbit 1-2
....
AVP (both of them)
King Pin
....

I could keep going but you get the point.....

Did you list Kingpin: Life of Crime? That game is insanely hard.
 
They are business savvy when it comes to making money because they need money to continue to work on games, however there is a difference between being mindful of money and letting it lead your every business decision. They're a privately owned company who don't owe money to investors, so they have literally no pressure to generate revenue other than to float the business to the next game and they're already cash rich so that's not a concern. As Gabe has said in interviews, many of the people working there don't need the pay cheque they're rich already and come to work because they like working on the stuff and building great products along side like minded people.

^^This. Just because profits can be had is not the only reason why companies make games. Lot of companies are only interested in profit only as a means to fund the next game or whatever. This is why Valve is superior to most game companies. They don't need to worry about "investors" and other bullshit. They make the games when they want, how they want. Profits aren't the only thing companies should focus on. Raw capitalism isn't the goal, maybe for your average Ayn Rand ditto head, but not for humans who like to work and produce something beautiful and to be remembered. Stop with the right wing "capitalism is all" mentality. Not everyone gives a shit about money, and not all companies should only care about making excessive profits.
 
Lets be honest. Valve stumbled into the right market at the right time. Without that golden money tree Steam they would be just another AAA money grabbing empire like the rest.
 
Steam is practically DRM with a fancy interface, isn't it? Who would want their game to be dependent on such unnecessary software?
 
I don't think so as I can name many a game that was totally awesome on the PC

Sopwith
Leisure Suit Larry
Jazz Jackrabbit 1-2
Terminator Future Shock and Skynet
Screamer 1 and 2
Nascar
Lethan Enforcers
Sonic games that were ported
Road Rash
Duke Nukem
King's Quest
Space Quest
Diablo
Red alert series (stratedgy)
Duke 3D
Quake
Doom 1 and 2
Wing Commander
Mech Warrior
Blood
Rise of the Triad
Descent 1-3
Heretic
Hexen 1 and 2
Elite Force 1 and 2
Sin
Unreal
Unreal Tournament
Atomic Bomberman
Batman AC and AA
Monkey Island series
AVP (both of them)
King Pin
A10 thunderbolt
F14 Tombcat
Gore
Mortal Kombat 1 2 and 3
Street Fighter

I could keep going but you get the point.....

Good for you, but that has jack shit to do with my post talking about SALES.
 
Spoken like a true capitalist. I forgot who it was that stated "The problem with capitalism is capitalists," but it's a statement I agree with. People like this have absolutely no notion of the idea that some people do something they love, and like getting paid for it, but the pay itself just allows them to continue doing it, it's not their primary goal.

Please read the entire god damn conversation before responding to me.
 
Look at a game like The Witcher 2, which isn't exact a game that everybody knows about. It's sold a million copies. That's 50 Million dollars in sales. It only cost 8-10 million to make. These PC developers can't say that PC gaming can't make you money.
 
Look at a game like The Witcher 2, which isn't exact a game that everybody knows about. It's sold a million copies. That's 50 Million dollars in sales. It only cost 8-10 million to make. These PC developers can't say that PC gaming can't make you money.

People really need to stop multiplying full price by the number of sales. It totally ignores retail markup AND publisher cut. Also Witcher 2 has been on sale more than a few times across the various digital platforms it's on and it's even seen a price drop. Though yes I would imagine CDP made some pretty good money off of Witcher 2. However in the PC world a million sales is quite a bit.
 
Spoken like a true capitalist. I forgot who it was that stated "The problem with capitalism is capitalists," but it's a statement I agree with. People like this have absolutely no notion of the idea that some people do something they love, and like getting paid for it, but the pay itself just allows them to continue doing it, it's not their primary goal.

Derangel may have worded his post in a very "dollars and cents" manner, but there's a very important underlying point about the relationship between capitalism and art:

Free market capitalism is about making money...by making something that a lot of other people want. There's nothing inherently wrong with giving people what they want; sure, you might think the general public's artistic preferences are stupid and superficial, but opinions are like assholes, right? ;)

Art, on the other hand, is about making something true to yourself, that you yourself want. The key here is recognizing that the two concepts do not have to be mutually exclusive: I am an aspiring (unemployed, but working on it :p) game developer, and there's nothing I want to do more than make the kind of games that I personally find compelling, and which I personally feel will make a positive contribution to the world. That's why I want to work in the game industry in the first place, rather than some other industry I have no passion for. I'm totally willing to work for a company that will sell fewer copies and pay me a bit less so I can make something great...but I also recognize that pleasing a consumer audience is critically important, because I only deserve to be funded by other people's money if they also find my work compelling.

If developers can make games that they love, and they find that consumers love them too, that's the best of both worlds. In this sense, profits are not necessarily about bean-counters in suits who have no souls or emotional attachment: They're a direct measure of how many other people you have made happy with your game, and they're also the means by which you fund more fulfilling games in the future. (Soulless bean counters do exist of course, but as long as their profits come honestly from making something someone else wants, let them count their money in peace. ;)) Someday, I might have to work on profit-grinding people pleasers, but that's okay, because it'll give people what they want, and the profits from that will enable my team to create a genuine piece of art afterwards.
 
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So basically, developing PC games is better in every way, except the fact you make less money. That's really gonna convince a lot of people! :p

that's sad...

$ as the main driving factor = shitty standards
as an example, look at some of the highest $ grossing movies = crap
you can make a truckload of $ selling crack too

Money should be #2 or even 3rd. on the list of why to create something consumable

fast food is another good example, you want some cheap ass fastfood?
they make alot of money on it, but it's not great, it's barely edible and has no value to a real lover of food.

I agree with the OP
 
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that's sad...

$ as the main driving factor = shitty standards
as an example, look at some of the highest $ grossing movies = crap
you can make a truckload of $ selling crack too

Money should be #2 or even 3rd. on the list of why to create something consumable

fast food is another good example, you want some cheap ass fastfood?
they make alot of money on it, but it's not great, it's barely edible and has no value to a real lover of food.

I agree with the OP

In an ideal world profit and customer satisfaction would go hand in hand in very business. Well actually in an ideal world we'd be living the Star Trek age where humanity has outgrown the need for money and everyone is willing to work towards the greater good of the species, but that's beside the point. Tangents aside, companies like CDP and Valve have done a great job making customers feel like they're cared for and have found ways to make pretty good money in the process.
 
I could keep going but you get the point.....

No actually, I don't get the point. Someone said some games sell better on PC, Derangel said exceptions don't make the rule, you said wouldn't be if developers made a a "great effort", Derangel said something to the effect of not since the early days.

You then proceed to list games, very few of which are recent, and give no evidence to whether or not they sold better on PC (I reckon a couple of those games which are multiplatform probably sold better on consoles).

Hell, for an example of money-driven gaming, you have Arkham City and Asylum listed there, from WB, the company who recently sacked everyone at Snowblind.

So yeah, no, I don't really get the point of what you were trying to convey nor how it fits within the context of this discussion :p
 
Good for you, but that has jack shit to do with my post talking about SALES.

lol not too bright are ye?

Those games sold extremely well for the time period but, alas, you may not have been around then.......

Next time you want to try a smart ass comment, might want to do some research first....:eek:

No actually, I don't get the point. Someone said some games sell better on PC, Derangel said exceptions don't make the rule, you said wouldn't be if developers made a a "great effort", Derangel said something to the effect of not since the early days.

You then proceed to list games, very few of which are recent, and give no evidence to whether or not they sold better on PC (I reckon a couple of those games which are multiplatform probably sold better on consoles).

Hell, for an example of money-driven gaming, you have Arkham City and Asylum listed there, from WB, the company who recently sacked everyone at Snowblind.

So yeah, no, I don't really get the point of what you were trying to convey nor how it fits within the context of this discussion :p

Most of those games did not have console ports thus showing that the PC gaming market was a very viable place to develop for and still is so while TODAY good games are an excepton, It used to NOT be the case...

when developers shifted from PC to Console that is when the market suffered. IMHO dvelopers should develop for both by polishing their work and taking time to do a QUALITY port....

what would you rather play on a console that barely manages 620p for heavy graphics titles or a PC that can handle the same game at obsurd resolutions with much higher details?
 
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