The Story of Valve Part Three

was launched by a couple of Microsoft millionaires. And as I mentioned in part two of this series, we were leaving off at two thousand three. That was when Steam launched. That would be Valves online platform. It was much more modest at that time than what it is today. So when Steam launched, it was largely meant to do three things.

It was meant to roll out patches for Valve games that already existed, so you could get them up to the latest version and therefore make them compatible with other players. A lot of Valves games are multiplayer games, and you have to have everybody using the same basic game rules in order to be able to play together. That's what Steam was meant to do. For the first part I would let players match up against each other without any conflicts.

The second purpose for Steam was to activate some digital rights management strategies by requiring players to essentially check in online when their games were active to verify that they were in fact playing with legitimate copies of that game. And the third purpose was to sell Valve Games as an online store, with Half Life two becoming the title

that would lead that charge. This would mark the beginning of a shift toward digital delivery rather than physical media for games, though obviously that did not happen right away. It wasn't an overnight success. For one thing, not everyone had a fast enough Internet connection, so many folks didn't really like the idea of spending a day or longer just to download a single game when you could just drive over to a video game store down the street

and pick up a physical copy right there. Valve also moved to acquire another popular Half Life mod in that year.

That mod was called Day of Defeat and it featured the Western Front of World War Two as the game setting, So it was taking the basic game engine and graphics of Half Life but modifying it for this World War two setting, and it was a multiplayer only game in which players could choose characters of various classes of various sides of the conflict to complete objectives and compete against each other in team based play. And that leads us up to two thousand four, which was a huge year

for Valve. First things first, Early in the year, Valve announced a new game engine. So it had been using one called gold Source g O L D s r C, which was a heavily modified Quake engine. It had been relying upon that since the foundation of Valve. Now it had a new game engine and they called it Source, So so so you r ce. Source wasn't built from scratch exactly. It was more of a fork off of the Quake

engine code that was the foundation for gold Source. So on one branch of that fork you would find yourself heading toward gold Source, the engine that powered Half Life and the numerous mods like counter Strike and Day of Defeat. Along the other branch you had Source, the more risky game engine, stuff that needed work so that it could become usable and stable. And with the Steam platform, Valve could roll out updates to the Source gin across its user base on a regular basis. And it also meant

the company could avoid backwards compatibility issues. Everyone would always be on the same page as long as they were maintaining their Steam account. The Source engine itself would branch for different games in the future, so the version for Left for Dead is significantly different than the one for Half Life Too. But we'll get into more about those games later on. The Source Engine actually got its debut

with the launch of Half Life two. It was the first game to really push the Steam platform, as gamers could buy the game in stores or they could purchase it digitally through Steam. It also would become the second title the company produced for the Xbox platform. The first one was counter Strike, which came out the year before. Both Counterstrike and the original Half Life would get Source re releases in two thousand four. The counter Strike one

was called counter Strike Source. It also came out the same year as counter Strike zero, so that's a little confusing, especially since Counterstrike zero was still based off the old Gold Source engine and counter Strike Source was obviously based off the Source game engine and had a lot of visual upgrades compared to the original game. As for Half Life Too, it was eagerly received by the gaming public. The game had taken six years to complete and forty

million dollars to develop. In the game, you are once again playing as the character Gordon Freeman, the silent protagonist. You are a physicist who's out of his elements, so to speak, and you're awakened by the government agent the

g Man from the end of the first Half Life game. Now, this sequel assumes that at the end of Half Life you accepted the G Man's offer to work for his organization, because obviously if you did not accept that job, you got teleported into an area filled with an endless stream of enemies and you would eventually die. So you start off the game as an lay of the G Man, and you learn that there is an extra dimensional alien called the Combine, and it is pretty much wrecked shop

and taken over everything. It's your job to free humanity from the oppressive alien force. And like its predecessor, it received critical and popular acclaim, It pulled in tons of awards in the process and sold millions of copies, and it would set up an expectation among gamers that would plague the company up to and including the present day. I am talking about the expectation for a Half Life three.

Spoiler alert that's part of the Valve story that doesn't really have a resolution even as we speak, so don't get your hopes up. I do not have any insider information about a magical release of Half Life three, So if that's what you're listening for, uh, I'm sorry. But in two thousand five, Steam took its first big step into becoming the powerhouse that is today, because that's when Valve began to carry third party games on the Steam platform.

So if you've never used Steam or you aren't into games at all, here's kind of how it shakes out. Imagine you have an online store similar to something like Amazon, only in this particular online store you're primarily buying games or expansion packs or downloadable content stuff like that. You're doing it digitally, so once you make the purchase, you can download that data to your computer. Games you've purchased

remain attached to your Steam account. Now that means even if you delete the game off of your machine, there's still a record of your purchase and that exists on your Steam account, which means that you can download the game again at some future point if you have the desire to do so. It also means that you can download that same game to different computers using your Steam account. You log into your Steam account and then you can

download it to that machine. Typically, there are imitations as to how many instances of the same game can be active at one time. So in other words, you might have the same game on three different computers, but you may only be able to run it on one computer at a time. You can't just download the game endlessly on different machines and therefore distribute one title to say all of your friends. They thought about that ahead of time, so it's convenient for gamers, but it also tries to

avoid abuse of the system. And also you need to typically have an Internet connection to play a lot of these games because of that DRM segment. It's checking back in with the home server to make sure that, in fact, you are playing the one and only allowable instance of that game. Now, Valve makes money from these sales of

third party games. The company didn't make those games. They're just acting as a store, virtual shelf for those games to exist upon the actual details of how much money Valve makes and whether it's the same across all games studios remains a secret. However, a general rule in the industry is that a platform like Steam takes a thirty percent cut of all sales, with the rest of it going to the game's publisher. So if you spend sixty dollars on a game on Steam, Valve would take an

eighteen dollar cut of that. The other forty two dollars would go to the publisher. As Steam has grown to carry games from various publishers, it has earned Valve a truly enormous sum of money every year. And how much are we talking about? Well, and and sixteen Valve took in about three and a half billion dollars from Steam sales alone. Now, games Industry Biz points out that that really means that the growth was flat in Steam sales

across the two years. It was three and a half billion and twenty fifteen, three and a half billion and twenty sixteen. But one, that's three and a half billion dollars largely made by selling other people's stuff. That's not bad now for those of you who want to impress or perhaps disturb people with your knowledge of Steam based trivia. The first two non Valve games to hit the virtual

market were rag Doll Kung Fu and Darwinia. Rag Doll Kung Fu was the brainchild of Mark Keeley, who at the time was working at Lionhead Studios, and it requires players to control fighters who move kind of like marionettes, like stretchy marionettes. You can grab parts of their body and move them around and then make them engage in fierce kung fu battles. It looks absolutely ridiculous. You can

find game footage online. Darwinia, however, was a tactical real time strategy game in which you could would control these artificially intelligent polygonal constructs against a malicious computer virus. So think of like an RTS game, something like war Raft or something along those lines, where you're controlling different units

and you're positioning them and making them attack enemies. It's kind of like that, except it was all very tron esque and that you're working with virtual constructs, not representations of units. In two thousand five, Valve also released Half Life two, Lost Coast as a tech demo and the source version of Day of Defeat. The company also decided to hire on six students from Digipin Institute of Technology. The students had created a game called Narbacular Drop. Now.

In that game, the player had to navigate puzzles inside of a dungeon using the ability to create magical gateways or portals from one point to another. Placing those portals in particular ways would allow players to cross big gaps or avoid enemies and traps. You would put one in the portal near you the other end of the portals, say on the other side of a big gap. You walk through your side, and you come out the other side.

The game impressed Valve so much that the company began development on its own spin, using that same basic gameplay mechanic. Now that game would eventually become portal and would impress gamers when it launched a few years later. But before we get to that, we still have two thousand six to talk about. And that's when Valve released Half Life two, Episode one, and here's where we get into some tricky territory. Valve made the decision to take an episodic approach to

releasing a sequel to Half Life Too. Originally, they released the game and called it Half Life to Aftermath. Because Valve had not yet revealed that they were looking at this from an episodic point of view, they wanted to

kind of test the waters. It was a success, so they retroactively renamed it Half Life two Episode one, and this was to be the first in a trilogy of episodes that would follow the events that happened in Half Life to The second episode would come out in two thousand seven, and the third episode, well, we're still waiting on Half Life two episode three. Half Life two Episode two came out in two thousand seven, and ten years later,

episode three is nowhere to be seen. Back when episodes one and two came out, Valve announced that their intent was to release episodes between six and eight months apart from each other, and in fact, there was even talk of an episode four that would be developed by a different game studio but then published by Valve under the half Life two brand. But the only thing we've seen of episode three over the last decade are some examples of concept art, and there was a synopsis of what

the story was supposed to be. Now, within the gaming community, there's been a lot of discussion about this, and discussion is a kind word for what has been going on

for the last ten years. Some people think Valve made a decision to drop episode three entirely and instead develop up an all new Half Life three, a fully formed sequel to Half Life two that would take whatever the elements of Episode three and incorporated into a larger game with a new game engine, new graphics, something along those lines. Maybe they said Episode three was just getting too complicated,

too big to be an episodic game. It had to be something more than that, or maybe there were other problems during the development process. Valve has been infamously quiet about the whole thing, to the point that employees get visibly irritated when asked about it. There's been no official confirmation from Valve that the series is over, which leaves fans somewhat in the lurch as they wonder if they'll

ever see another entry. In fact, Half Like three has now supplanted Duke knewkeambe Forever as the poster child for vaporware, since Duke Nukem Forever finally came out in two thousand eleven after years of being in development. And if you don't know what vapor ware is, vaporware is when a company announces a product and the product never seems to

come out. There are tons of different examples, and in fact, if you search through the Tech Stuff archives, you will find that we've done full episodes about the concept of vaporware and given lots of different examples of it throughout the years. Now I'm gonna get back to the timeline for Valve in a second, but figured this is as good a place as any to wrap up the half life part of the history, because there's no resolution to this.

It's still ongoing, it's still nebulous, and it's better to go ahead and rip off the band aid here than just prolonged it throughout the rest of the episode. In Mark laid Law, who you'll remember, was an author who joined Valve back in its earliest days and helped define valves approach to gamemaking as being very story centric. He

left the company left the company in twenty six. Perhaps at that point he had come to the conclusion that Valve had no more need for storytellers, as maybe there were no plans to develop any games that were revolve

around the cohesive story. Well, whatever his reasons were, he left, and he also wrote a piece called Epistle three in the voice of Gordon Freeman himself, which is a bit ironic since Gordon never actually spoke in the games, but it was from his point of view, and in that letter laid Law gave out information about what the plot

of Episode three was supposed to be. I'm not going to go into detail about that here because some of you might still want to read it for yourselves, or maybe you're holding out hope that at some point, in some form this game will finally emerge in those story points will be incorporated into it. But it does exist online if you want to find it. It's called Epistle

three and it's from Mark laid Law. Now, when we come back, we'll jump in Devolves timeline and talk about some of the other big events that have shaped the company and how it found itself moving away from developing games, or at least appeared to. But first, let's take a quick break and thank our sponsor. Back before I jumped on the Half Life two and three, tangent I was

talking about the year two thousand and six. That year, Valve began to add more content to Steam, so not only could you purchase games and use it to get the latest patches for your game library, you could also visit Steam to get HD videos or you could get demos of upcoming games. By the end of the year, Steam carried about one games, and it wasn't enough to make Brick and mortar stores nervous, but it was starting

to build some serious momentum. In two thousand seven, Valve released a collection of games under the title The Orange Box. The collection included Half Life two and Half Life two Episode one, both of which had already been published, but it also included Half Life two Episode two, Portal, and the game Gabe Newell had announced after the first Half Life went gold so many years before Team Fortress Too. We've already talked about Half Life two, so let's talk

a little bit about these other games. Portal, as I mentioned earlier, was created by the team that built the similar dungeon puzzle game called an Arbocular Drop, and as I mentioned, in that game, you could create gateways that linked to different points in space. Together, passed through one gateway, you emerge out of the other. The same game mechanic exists in Portal. One interesting aspect of this gameplay mechanic is that the laws of motion remain in effect with

the portals. So if you were to open up one portal on the ceiling and a second on the floor directly underneath the first portal, dropping something into the floor portal will cause it to fall through the top. One all the way down into the bottom one, again through the top one, and it will continue this until it reaches terminal velocity, until it falls as fast as it

can possibly go. Then you can open up a portal on a wall, closing the one that's on the ceiling, and the falling object will shoot out of that at the same velocity it was falling earlier, except now it's going to go in a different direction. So if you switch it to go from a vertical alignment to horizontal, it will suddenly shoot out across the game area. Sometimes this object might end up being the player character herself, so you could use it to get across particularly tricky

areas of the game. In the game Portal, you're playing as a test subject, a woman attempting to escape from Aperture Science Labs. Now that's an organization that exists in the same universe as Black Mesub, the fictional research facility in the Half Life franchise, there's an artificially intelligent construct called Gladows, and GLaDOS claims to be testing your ability to navigate puzzles, but simultaneously is hurling lots of passive

aggressive insults your way. She's a jerk. The game received critical acclaim for its novel approach to problem solving and the versatility of the portal gimmick. The game also featured one of the greatest songs in video game history, in my opinion, it's a sa called Still Alive, and in the game it's sung by Gladows. It was a song that was written by Jonathan Colton, who made a name for himself by releasing his music online independently and writing

lots of geeky, nerdy songs. So if you're not familiar with him, go check him out. Jonathan Colton. He's really great. His earlier stuff tends to be a little bit more nerdy, and his later stuff a little bit more melancholic kind of uh, exploring the existential crises of the average person in there the middle of their lives, that sort of stuff. But all of it's great now. The other game I mentioned Team Fortress too. That one had been announced way

back in n game. Newell said that was the next game they were gonna work on after Half Life went Gold, but then it seemed to kind of disappear into vapor. Around two thousand was the last time the company had ever publicly acknowledged the fact that Team Fortress Too was in development, they just stopped talking about it after two thousand. At that time, the word was developers were working to adapt it to the new Source engine and that that

was slowing things down. The game that came out was dramatically different from the original Team Fortress, which in itself was a mod of the game Quake. The original Team Fortress was a serious team based, competitive multiplayer game that had vehicles in it. It had realistic violence, and strategic elements like air drops were part of the game. That

all changed with Team Fortress Too. Valves said that while it was working on Team Fortress, who had actually developed three or four different style games almost to completion, and there was a chance that any one of them could have become the actual Team Fortress Too. But eventually Valve decided that, for some reason or another, each of those didn't work, and the one that did come out was

again very different from its predecessor. So some of the ideas that didn't make it into Team Fortress Too included setting it in the same universe as Half Life, something that val has done a lot of, or allowing for

non player characters to appear in multiplayer matches. However, the Team Fortress two game that did come out would just feature a lot more not just that's unfair, but it would feature more cartoonish and comedic characters and art styles, with players selecting from ultimately nine character classes to play on a team, and they would play against other teams.

So you and your team made up of various players playing different classes of characters, would be competing against a similar team operated by different people, and game modes would include stuff like a King of the Hill style control point mode. There was Captured the Flag games, a very classic kind of online game attack defend modes in which one team would have to defend a position and the other one has to try and take that position away.

The game became enormously popular and developed a peculiar reputation involving hats. So the hats thing would come a little bit later, but let's go ahead and cover it now because I think it's an interesting part of what makes Team Fortress Too special. It also is another example of how Valve did something that today has become a widespread tactic in games across multiple genres. So within Team Fortress to players can customize the look of their characters to

some extent with various accessories such as hats. Now, some of those accessories are just included in the basic form of the game, but others are called unusuals, and you have to actually get earned those those types of of accessories, and they can even have visual effects associated with them, like particle effects, and it kind of gives you a special kind of flare. Now, those effects don't give you any special bonuses or advantages, but they are seen as

something of a status symbol. So within the game world, if you have one of those cool hats, people will take notice of it. It's not necessarily going to give you a real advantage, but people might say, wow, it's really cool. I want that. Within some groups, people who play together regularly with a group of people, they may all wear similar hats, so that would require each member to get one of those hats for him or herself.

Special hats, those unusuals I was talking about, they can only be found in crates, which you can purchase with real money if you want to, or you can trade with other players and get hats that way. This created an ongoing economy and Team Fortress too, and opened up a revenue stream for Valve. These days, it's not unusual for a game to include some sort of paid content

element like this. The ones that tend to use it as a way of setting apart your character cosmetically, those seem to get a better reaction from the gaming community than say, a game that offers up items and skills that give you an advantage over other players. That strategy a lot of people derisively referred to as pay to win.

You pay the money, you get the various weapons or other items that give you an advantage, and then you are making up for a lack of skill with the willingness to pay money to get artificially better at a game. That's the pay to win approach, whereas this was more of a cosmetic thing. A lot of players I know

don't have a problem with this. Some of them don't care for it, they don't purchase into it, but at the same time, it ultimately makes no effect on the gameplay itself, and so therefore it is more easily accepted in some circles of the gaming community. Now you can

find this in lots of other games, like Overwatch. Overwatch has a similar crates system, and you can earn crates through gameplay at a certain speed, or you can spend real money to buy several crates at a time and try your luck opening one crate after the next to try and get that one special item you're looking for.

And typically there's no guarantee that whatever it is you want is going to be an any given crate, so you could open it up and find a whole bunch of neat stuff, but none of the things that you specifically wanted, and you might end up finding out that you're dropping as much cash as you spend on the game, or more in some cases, just trying to chase that one accessory. It's certainly true now that Team Fortress Too Is is a free to play game, but at the

time you would actually purchase it. Not everyone is lured by this promise, but enough people are to make it very profitable. Meanwhile, Valve also upgraded Steam and added the Steam Community, which was a suite of social networking features

on the online platform. This let people use Steam as a virtual gathering place they could share information, they could try and find groups with other like minded gamers to play certain games, and according to Valve, around that time, there were about fifteen million people using Steam regularly playing

around two hundred games. The new version of Steam also incorporated Metacritic ratings for games, which gave players a chance to see what other critics have thought about different game titles before they made the commitment to purchase that game for themselves. In two thousand and eight, Valve acquired a game developer called Turtle Rock. That company had been hard at work on a cooperative multiplayer game set in a

zombie apocalypse. The game was Left for Dead, with four being the numeral for Turtle Rock had been developing the game before Valve acquired the company, but the developers had been receiving some funding from Valve toward the late stages of game development. Valve would end up being the publisher for Left for Dead, and this became another big hit. Turtle Rock, however, would not remain part of Valve for very long. It was a fairly curious turn of events.

Valve Is located out of Washington State, but Turtle Rocks headquarters were in California, and at first Turtle Rock would operate as an offshoot of Valve called Valve South. It was a satellite office for Valve is the first time the company he had really been trying to do that but things didn't work out very well. The folks a Valve South in general felt like they were largely forgotten about and we're out of the loop. They had infrequent

communication with Valve HQ up in Washington. The developers at the former Turtle Rock Studios also got frustrated with Valve time. That's that lag time between when a company has said, or when specifically when Valvis said it's going to develop something and when it finally, if ever comes out. It's that nebulous, indefinable amount of time, and the folks over Turtle Rock didn't much care for that kind of uncertainty.

So after only a year or so of working with Valve, Gabe Newell agreed with the folks over at Valve South that it just wasn't a great arrangement and the group split off again from Valve. It would re establish itself once again as Turtle Rock Studios. Turtle Rock would continue to collaborate with Valve, but it would operate as its own independent entity from that moment forward. Valve in return, received ownership of the left for dead intellectual property and

they got to work on the sequel. Steam also evolved some more, allowing players to create cloud based saves so that they could continue playing certain games across different devices and pick up where they had left off. It also meant that if you create a specific control scheme for a game where you bind keys to specific in game actions, you could save that configuration on Steam and have access

to it on a different machine under your account. Valve also released a software suite called steam Works to third party developers, which gave them the ability to use the tools Valve had created over the years while they were developing Steam itself. Team Fortress Too would also get a few new classes in two thousand and eight which would

help refresh the game and players eyes. And the following year, which was two thousand nine for those of you keeping score, we would see the release of Left for Dead Too, which is still one of my favorite games. It broke all of valves records for pre sale figures, meaning more people pay for the game before it was even available than any other Valve game up to that point. That's despite the fact that there was a growing movement online

to boycott the game. So what was that all about? Well, the crux of the matter was in downloadable content or DLC for the original Left for Dead game. Some players who were fans of Left for Dead got very upset when Valve announced that there was going to be a sequel coming out just one year after Left for Dead itself had come out. They said, that's too soon. That means you're abandoning this other game. And you said you were going to develop downloadable content. How dare you go

back on your promise? Valve, I shake my fist at you and anger and say ger. So they felt like they were never going to get the d L see that they felt they had been promised, and as a result, about forty thousand people banded together and said they were going to boycott Left for Dead too. That turned out to not matter so much. A lot of them ended up buying the game on pre sales anyway, even though they were saying they were going to boycott it, because

they really wanted to play the game. And further down the line, Valve would release DLC both for the first game and for Left for Dead too, including DLC that would link the two games together because if you aren't familiar, both games feature four sets of playable characters, but it's two different sets of four, so you've got four characters in Left for Dead one and four different characters, and

Left for Dead too. They released some DLC that had a bridging character that would go between the two and link them together. Otherwise they were independent titles within the same universe. In two thousand ten, Steam users were treated to a redesign that made the service much easier to navigate and more attractive to boot. It also added in more content, including stuff that wasn't related to gaming, so

you could get non gaming apps through Steam. At that point, players could also get a look at games in development through Steam green Light, which is a service that would let potential game developers essentially audition their ideas an attempt to get some funding to complete a full game. Valve also learned the power of the Steam Sale. Those are always big events on the Steam platform. Several times a year.

Valve will offer titles at severely discounted prices, and I am definitely one of those people who have been known to pick up a title or two, even titles that I previously had not had much interest in because their price so low that I feel like an idiot if I don't buy them. And yes, there are games in my Steam library that I have yet to even open, so I am part of the problem. Oh. In was also when Mac users would finally get support for Steam

and there was much rejoicing. Y I got a lot more to say, but before I jump into the last section of the last episode of the story of Valve, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. A couple of other things happened in that I had not yet mentioned. One of those was that Valve moved to a larger office space in Bellevue, Washington. It would stay

there until when it would move again. Valve also announced it was working on Portal two and that the game would release in twleven, and the company began development on a little project called Doda Too. So what the heck is Dota Too, And for that matter, what the heck was Dota one and what happened to it? Well, let's start at the beginning. DODA is an acronym d O t A. It stands for Defense of the Ancients. At least the original DODA did. This was a multiplayer online

battle arena game or mobile game. So if you've ever heard the term mobile, it stands for multiplayer online battle arena. This particular one was based of Blizzards title Warcraft three Reign of Chaos, as well as an expansion for that game called The Frozen Throne. Now, the way a mobile game typically works because you have two teams that are fighting against each other and the goal is to destroy the opposite team's structure. It might be a base or

some other representation of that team. So you are to try and take your character from your end of the map, go across the map to the enemy side of the map and destroy their structure while they're trying to do the same thing to you. So you control a unit. In DODA, they are called heroes. These are characters that have particular powerful abilities, sometimes their time based, so you can use an ability and then it's on a cool

down period until you can use it again. Some other games might use something similar, like a Manna meter where you have to fill up the meter in order to use special abilities, but the basic idea is the same. You're not just allowed to spam the enemy to team with an ability over and over again. There's a cool down period built in one way or another, so you have to preserve your side while destroying their side, and they're typically different pathways to get from your end of

the map to the other end of the map. That's your basic MOBI and Doda was a great example of that. Well, Valves saw the value in that style of game. They didn't have one of those themselves, and they decided to hire abdul Ismail, better known as ice Frog, who was one of the developers for that Doda mod back in the day, so they brought him on board to develop

the sequel. Now, this relied upon valves source engine instead of on the Blizzard game and Valve launched the game at the game's con conference in Germany, Inn and that became the first Dota to Championship tournament. It remains an insanely popular mobile and is frequently featured in various pro gaming tournaments. For a very long time, it was consistently

the most played game by concurrent players on Steam. Recently, it has been replaced by a little game called Player Unknowns Battlegrounds, a game I am so bad at that you're gonna want me to be in the game if you ever play, because I'm guaranteed to soak up those bullets for you. Well, Valves Dota to tiptoed around the fact that it was a sequel to a mod to a game that Valve you know, didn't actually make. Blizzard wasn't quite ready to concede and ended up filing a

lawsuit against Valve. That lawsuit would stretch into twelve but it was eventually settled out of court. Back in Valve made the decision to switch Team Fortress to two free to play mode at that point, and that means you can download and play Team Fortress too absolutely free. Players can still pay to get access to crates in an effort to find unusuals, and lots of people still do that, which means Team Interest Too is profitable even though the

company gives away the basic game for free. Gabe Newell had some pretty hefty criticisms for his former employer, that being Microsoft in the year that was when Microsoft launched Windows eight, and Gabe Newell called it quote a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space end quote. He went on to say, and I quote, I think we'll lose some of the top tier PC O E M s who will exit the market. I think margins will be

destroyed for a bunch of people. End quote. He was saying, essentially that the platform wasn't as open as it should be and that Microsoft was taking too much of a micromanagement approach as to what could and could not run on their platform, and this was a hint that Valve was starting to look around at other options, including developing something that could run on a Lenox based machine, Lenox being totally different operating system, and it stirred rumors that

the company might be looking into creating a console like device of its own. This would become the foundation for the stories about the fabled Steam machine. At the end of twenty twelve of the company announced that it in fact was working on a set top box dubbed the steam Box. Valve planned on creating a piece of hardware in house that they called Bigfoot. This was the internal name for the device, and that the purpose of this was to be a model upon which other manufacturers could

base their designs. So, in other words, Valve wanted to make steam boxes a new type of hardware, not just a single product. It's not like the Microsoft Xbox. It's more like an offshoot of the PC itself. So they would open this up so other manufacturers could make their own version of the steambox using the Steam operating system

and some other basic parameters. That meant that you could purchase, presumably a steambox from any number of different providers, each of whom would determine the design and components of the box pursuant to the various parameters that Valve had set up. Val revealed some of the Steam OS devices in along with a special controller that resembled the game pads found with consoles like the Xbox, although it had a lot

of touchpad type stuff with it. I never got a chance to actually play with one of those myself, but I heard a lot of my friends criticize it for the way they performed, and also the Steam controller was one of those devices that underwent numerous changes throughout its development, to the point where gamers were starting to get a

little frustrated with that story as well. Steam devices went into beta testing in ten with the goal of releasing them as commercial hardware, and eventually Valve would push that date back to November two thousand fifteen, and today you can go out and buy a Steam OS box from the few places that will have them. They just haven't sold very well, so a lot of manufacturers discontinued their Steam product lines as a result, and it might mean that you can't find one anywhere, So why didn't they

take off? Well, they're probably a lot of different answers to that question, but one of them maybe that gamers tend to be drawn either to the consoles or to the PCs. In the extreme, they might own both, but there don't appear to be very many who care for something that seems to straddle between the two different extremes.

In Valve launched a Steam app for smartphones, which gave users the chance to interact on online forums or peruse the Steam Shop even when they were on the go, which meant, never again, what a player need to worry about missing out on one of those Steam sales just because they weren't away or they weren't near, Rather their gaming rig at home. Valve released a successor to their Source game engine, called fittingly enough, Source two in two thousand fifteen, and the first game to get the Source

to treatment was Dota Too. They updated Dota two to the Source to engine. Steam has continued to evolve over time and is now one of the primary stores for PC games, including virtual reality games. It has also become the tool of players when they want to send a message to the video game industry. If a developer does something that displeases gamers. Sometimes they will organize and they will head over to Steam and they will leave reactionary reviews,

negative ones. Typically for that developers games. This is called review bombing. It does not necessarily reflect how people feel about the specific game they're reviewing. That's kind of messed up when you think about it. So here's an example. Some players felt that Valve abandoned development of Dota two.

And these are hardcore Dota two players that want more content, They want more development on that game, and they continue to play Dota two, but they will go and leave negative reviews on Steam about Dota two to voice their disappointment to Valve that the company is no longer actively seeming to support them. Now, those negative reviews don't indicate that the game itself is bad. In fact, the players

still love the game. The negative reviews are there because they love the game so much they want more of it and they're not getting it. But let's say you're a new player. You're someone who's just now coming to look at Dota two, and then you see all these negative reviews are there. You might be disinclined to get it for yourself because you think oh, this must be

a bad game. Look at all the negative reviews. It becomes sort of a self defeating strategy for gamers, really, because lower adoption rates of a game are not the best motivator for a company to go and throw some support behind that product. There's even more extreme examples than that. In fact, here's a recent one, a story that continues

to unfold as I record this episode. The YouTube personality Beauty Pie, who has the largest following on YouTube, found himself the tar to get of game developer Campo Santo's ire after the streamer had used a racial slur in a live streamed gaming session. So Campo Santo's response was to issue a Digital Millennium Copyright Act or d m C a takedown request of all of put Pies gameplay videos that featured him playing one of their games, and

YouTube complied. And that's a sizeable portion of Pauti Pies videos, not all of them, obviously, he's done hundreds of videos, but he was making money off of those videos and now they're gone. A sizeable group of his audience responded by flocking to Steam to give Compo Santo's title fire Watch a negative review. They skewed the score dramatically, so they weren't actually feeling like Firewatch was a bad game.

They were expressing their disdain for the game developer or issuing the d m C a takedown notice in response to this racial slur. It's all pretty ugly when you get down to it. Valve has attempted to address this in a couple of ways, the most recent of which is to create a means of visualizing when a game

gets a dramatic number of extreme reviews. So this idea being that you can see a visualization of here's the date where all these negative reviews piled in, and you can see that it is correlated with this other development that happened and therefore may not have any connection to

the quality of the game itself. So presumably this will give gamers more information so that they can make a decision about buying a game and not feel like that decision was influenced by unfair reviews that don't actually reflect the quality of that game. However, there's some critics who say this strategy really just prolongs and possibly enhances the effects of those negative reviews, and that it may do more harm than good. But Valve may always go back

and change this up again, tweak it again. In fact, they're constantly tweaking Steam to make it more effective, usable, and to have more features. Valve continues to have an enormous impact on the PC games industry. Will we see any more transformative titles emerged from the company, actual titles developed by Valve and not just published or or sold by Valve. Well that's hard to say, because everyone at Valve, all thirty five of them or so, or pretty quiet

about what they're working on. But there's no doubt the company will continue to be a major mover and shaker in the PC gaming world moving forward. Well that's all I've got to say about the story of Valve in these three episodes. And again, the reason I decided to break it out into that many is because so many of those elements spill out beyond Valve to affect the gaming industry and general also just the general PC industry in ways that are felt today well beyond video games.

So things like having the online store platform, the online forums, the community, having this issue of a community acting as a block vote against stuff because they feel that that is their way to voice displeasure or their opinions. There are a lot of these issues that are plaguing various companies or or challenged to various companies that have nothing to do with video games. But Valve is a great example of how those play out. And it's just a

fascinating story all on its own right. And I know there are plenty of people out there eagerly hoping that someday they'll hear something about another Half Life game. Keep holding out, hope, just don't hold your breath. If you guys have any suggestions for future topics for tech Stuff, whether it's a person or a company specific technology, let me know. Send me an email the addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on any social media platform you like,

as long as it's Twitter or Facebook. The handle of both of those is tech Stuff hs W. Remember I often will stream this show live on twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. I record on Wednesdays and Fridays, so just head over to twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. You'll see the recording schedule there. You can join me for a live recording. I often will chat with the chat room answer questions. You get to see me mess up.

It's a good old time for everybody, and now I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it stop works dot com eight