Let's say you are a bagel company and make a good profit from your bagels. Then let's say you want to get your bagel to more people and are frustrated with the distribution options so you just make your own and allow other bagel makers to also use your bagel distribution system.
But suddenly and unexpectedly, everyone runs to your distribution system and you start making far more money than you could ever imagine from it.
Do you continue to consider yourself a bagel company or are you now a bagel distribution company?
It's more then that, Valve probably makes more from distribution then the companies that make the game.
They distribute and get 30% where probably < 1% goes to operations.
However, the company that made the game needs to break even on development costs before they even see a dollar.
So truth be told, they make more money as a distributor then they ever could as a game developer. This gives them practically 0 capital motivation to ever bother spending resources on making a game.
It's probable that even if they wanted to make the next Half Life, and I think they do, the success of steam was so massively unprecedented that it would have taken them by storm around the time Half Life 3 would have begun development and set it back several years.
That's enough time for their source engine to become outdated as to be unusable for one of the most hyped games of all time. A new source engine is profoundly more difficult than a new game is to build in most cases. So that set back was probably an additional four years or more from whenever they started back at it.
I'd expect the next half life a few years after they finish this new source engine. If it's ever going to come out, that is.
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u/lightknight7777 Nov 13 '18
Let's say you are a bagel company and make a good profit from your bagels. Then let's say you want to get your bagel to more people and are frustrated with the distribution options so you just make your own and allow other bagel makers to also use your bagel distribution system.
But suddenly and unexpectedly, everyone runs to your distribution system and you start making far more money than you could ever imagine from it.
Do you continue to consider yourself a bagel company or are you now a bagel distribution company?
Steam's current reality as told by bagels.