#92 – Vellicate Videogame Vocation

The link to Jeff's website is broken. It points to http://mightohm.com/

I was reading http://www.logbook.freeserve.co.uk/seekrets/ and found something Jeff might have something to say about. On page 25 (PDF page number not the numbers printed in the text.) it refers to the plural of die as dice!

There are rare times I'd wish to live at USA instead of Europe.. And listening this podcast was definitely one of the biggest reasons ever. Great show once again.

Ha, just noticed that Jeff said "wear a lot of hats" at 28:20

All the cool guys are working at Valve... bkraz333, Jeri, Jeff... I want to work at Valve as a hardware guy. :(
Seems like a very interesting company, I've read their "HANDBOOK FOR NEW EMPLOYEES" just yesterday.

Kickstarter Watch - I reckon $1 million will go to the middle men...

"Kickstarter will apply a 5% fee to the funds raised." & "Amazon will apply credit card processing fees, which work out to roughly 3-5%"

While I think working at Valve headquarters sounds like an amazing life experience, I wouldn't want to work for Steam Customer Support and a question if their values too.

This is because last year I purchased ID Software's Rage on the day it was released through steam and it was absolutely full of bugs. I attempted for several hours to get the game working but to no avail. Even John Carmack said the PC launch was a failure.

So I asked for a refund and was denied simply because their T&C state no refunds. So they sold me a game and through no fault of their own it was not fit for purpose, then chose to keep my money and leave me with a game I cannot play.

I would have really respected them if they had just admitted that the game was not fit for purpose and given me a refund rather than shafting me with their legal crap.

Anyway, rant over :)

Sorry. I think we have one more of your guest coming over to Valve. Where do I send the payment? Do you take cake?

Valve! Let us drop the illusion. They may have created a couple of good games over the years, but they are hardly driving the game innovation forward. As far as I can see, their goal is to force the PC gamer into a pseudo console gamer with Steam, which is a world apart.

It seems with most of the games you install these days, you are also forced to install the steam client. Obliged to have that "spyware" lurking in the background, keeping track of my gaming friends, what, when and how many hours we spend playing a game. This is obviously not for my eyes only, but utilized by the company too. I pay for the game, not for some third-party closed monitoring tool.

This may not be entirely Valve/Steams fault, they probably offer a very good service to the game developers which gladly uses it, but for the gamer this locked-in solution is not desirable.

Of course you need to be a gamer to create quality games. Probably by starting playing games from the mid 90s and up to now. You may get away with not having played too many games when creating the underlying software or hardware, but for the actual gameplay its needed. I would say with the current development of games, we reached a peak game quality back in 2005 or so. After that I presume the business folks took the lead.

The most important part in this is "PC gamers are not console gamers".

/Computer gamer since 1988.

@Johan P: On the flip-side, one could argue that digital distribution models, such as Steam, helped the game market survive on the PC. Game developers appear to be increasingly reluctant to make PC titles due to claims of piracy, thus they are opting to target consoles first. If it weren't for Steam I think the situation would be worse. But then I could be wrong, I suppose there is always going to be cutting edge gaming enthusiasts out there, wanting to run pretty games on their monster hardware.

This week was especially full of "lawyer bashing." :) I wonder how Dave really feels about the legal profession. We're not *completely* evil; however, I'll be the first to admit that the patent and tort systems are far from perfect.

Can't wait to see what comes out of Valve in the next few years!