Some people are also cheesed off about the new infected, new weapons, new characters, two or three daylight campaigns, and the incendiary rounds.
He said ‘community’, not ‘content’. The thinking is, the people who buy and play L4D2 are largely the same people who bought and play L4D1, and that once both games are out there the same number of players will be split into two groups - at any one time some of them will be playing 1 and some will be playing 2, making both suffer, but probably 1 the more so. Eg, people who don’t buy the sequel will find it harder to find a game as all the players are in 2. They also feel like L4D1 will be abandoned and stop receiving updates and new content, despite the fact that Valve said before launch that they planned on releasing lots of additional free content for L4D for a long time to come, as with TF2.
This is what the boycotters believe anyway. Which is daft because Valve have repeatedly said they are looking for ways to link 1 and 2 to avoid splitting the community, and have not abandoned L4D but will be announcing more updates for it before L4D2 comes out.
As for this idea, it’s intriguing, but other than Valve there’s not many developers I’d be prepared to hand money before there was a reviewed finished product.
Alright before the tangent this thread took (for which there is already a thread), I was hoping for people to clue in on the one big positive this concept has.
raw_bean alluded to it, hence the quote. The last part of it being the important part.
How many games have you all played that felt that they weren’t polished to a glossy finish?
I know I’ve played a shit-ton of games that would have been better had there not been deadlines set upon it, and deadlines where the only concern was a dollar amount being met at a certain time.
The concept Gabe brings up would take out (let’s call it) the corporate aspect of game development and allow more freedom for the Dev’s themselves. Sure it would be a risk to any community that decides it wants to support the project, but in the end, overall, I think the individual would lose about 90 percent more money slapping down 70 dollars for a game that is less than stellar, or as stellar as advertised (insert your own personal experiences here).
About the legal aspect, I’m sure any lawyer would love to draw up the stipulations of any agreement a game developer would make with a paying community.
Really, it’s a far out idea, but it would seriously bring out the best in videogames if the corporate side were to lose a bit of its power.
VALVE DONT WANT YOUR MONEY.
He said he’d like to see a system where you help out INDEPENDENT developers publish their games by investing in them.
FFS, get it right guys.
As Raw_bean said, I wouldn’t hand over my money to anyone except Valve, but thats just because everything they touch is gold. If I go to invest my money, I would like a return. So if he really only means this for indie developers, which Gabe seems to really like, and not his company, I doubt there would be very many people that would be willing to.
Which brings up the point that Gabe has recently made many decisions with regards to helping indie developers, do you think that that stems from the fact that he was once an indie developer and feels for the little guy? Or do you think he is a little tired with other large corporate developers that own a majority of the market share who are turning out crap, and is trying to help smaller developers bring something new to the table, boosting competition and therefore the quality of games?
If by ‘was once an indie developer’ you mean ‘worked at Microsoft for over a decade and became a millionaire before leaving to invest his millions in founding a video game company’, then yes.
That doesn’t mean that he wasn’t an independent developer, just that he had more resources than other start up developers and a better chance of getting his product out of production and out on the market.
People are suprisingly hostile to this idea.
And this guy below is just a faggot;
If you don’t like valve, don’t read articles about valve.
l4d 2 is gaay ololol
As mature as it gets, really
Personally, I have nothing against this.
Say some members of the BM team want to make a retail game unrelated to the HL series, but they lack the funds to do so.
They’ve proved their ability, and what they’ve come up with so far for this game looks promising. Do you donate a small bit of cash to help fund the game, getting a free copy in return?
What I’m worried about is the amount of money the contributer would have to pay. Because even if you finance a low budget game (around a million, maybe a bit less*) it’s still quite a lot of money. How many contributers would it require to fully finance a game?
*Yes, 1 million isn’t a lot for a game or a movie. Making one of them with this amount of money is like doing your groceries with 10$.[/size]
I can see Gabe doing this, grabbing our millions we send him, and running to the Bahamas never to be seen or heard of again.
To be honest, I don’t think this’d be a solid approach, because only a fool would blindly invest money in a product, and at the point in development where they need the money, there would most likely only be concepts, and very game actually developed. It’s a nice thought, but getting it off the ground would be a large risk for the investor, and it’s hard to know how many people would jump aboard.
No, John, Gabe Newell just talked about a modified version of an already existing business model – you DEMO your creative skills by providing the public with something “for free”, such as a mod or a small game or a short story, and then say “If you are interested in getting more, please send any sum (X dollars or more) to [Address / Bank account of a lawyer]. When XXX.YYY dollars accumulate there, I promise to deliver the next [installment / story / whatever]”
That business model still uses a middle-man – it’s the lawyer who keeps the money and would return them back to “investors”, should the original author fail to deliver.
Gabe suggests sending the money to the small creator team directly, which basically means that the creative team would be spending the money as they create, rather than receiving them AFTER finishing the job.
However, it could also work a bit differently, such as: “Hello, this is Episode 1 of our game. It’s free, but if you think we deserve some reward, send us XX or more dollars as a sign of appreciation. We will send all those who send us money a signed copy of Episode 2, if we succeed in creating it.”
Which, basically, means that you “pay after you play”, and when enough people do that, it’s an incentive for the team to continue creating. And since originally, they provided their first product for free, but they got paid for it, the worst case scenario for them is that they will do Nth product for free and NOT get paid for it, after getting paid for all (N-1) products before it. So the worst case scenario is they didn’t get paid for 1 product – just as at the beginning.
Funny, I didn’t read any of that in the article. But I did IN MY OWN POST. Seriously, the one constructive post in this topic, and the only reply it gets repeats it in detail.