22 Feb, 2012
Valve’s own space-time continuum always sees them working with obnoxiously long development cycles. It pisses off the hardcore fan, and when it comes to games that really need that proper ending (a certain Freeman comes to mind…), gamers just get that much more testy.
Valve co-founder Gabe Newell is acutely aware of the delicate situation, but says that their announcements are both strategic and on purpose. He knows that game announcements, particularly sequels, are an integral part of marketing, and any chance of disappointment following a big announcement is damaging.
“We’re acutely aware of how much we annoy our fans and it’s pretty frustrating to us when we put them into that situation,” said Newell in an interview with Penny Arcade. “We try to go as fast as we can and we try to pick the things that we think are going to be most valuable to our customers and if there’s some magic way we can get more work done in a day then we’d love to hear about it, but we recognize that it’s been a long time whereas we have so many games that people really love — Counterstrike, Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, not a whole lot of Ricochet enthusiasts out there, and at the same time we want to be making sure that those games and tose stories and tose caracters are moving forward while also making sure that we don’t just get into terminal sequelitis.”
Terminal sequelitis. Now that’s a disease that some may say is currently afflicting half of the industry. Not that it’s a bad thing, as some of us just can’t let go of a world once we’ve stepped into it. However, in Valve’s case, we just want them to give us a lot more because they take so damn long to come out with a proper announcement.
However, with the internet ready and willing to take anything as an announcement, be it fact or fiction, Valve wants to avoid such a situation, and in turn avoid disappointing millions of fans.
“…we’ve always somehow, you know, part of the reason that we back off talking so much about what was happening in the future is that when we’ve done that in the past, you know, with Half Life 1 it was a year after we originally said it would be, Half-Life 2 basically if you go and read the forum posts apparently took us fifty or sixty years to get done so we’re trying to be careful not to get people too excited and then have to go and disappoint them,” said Newell. “So we’re sort of reacting in te other direction and saying, ‘Okay, well let’s have things a little more baked before we start getting people all excited about it’.”
In that case, we want them to crank that oven up, because Half-Life 3 should’ve been baked, cut, and ready to go by now. However, Valve is still quite mum on the subject, and it unfortunately looks to stay that way for now.
Head over to Penny Arcade to read the full interview with Gabe Newell.
Via The [A] List.
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