They sell a collection of taunts in the TF2 store for ~£50 last I checked. A good chunk of the updates to TF2 have just been Valve taking stuff from the workshop and putting it into the game officially, the same for CSGO. CSGO sells "graffiti", images you press a button to put on a wall somewhere, something that was a general feature in prior source engine games. The graffiti is limited use. To put a jpeg on a wall in a videogame that already has that feature, you have to pay money, and it's number of uses is fucking limited.
They want these characters in CS:GO because characters in other games sell and make money.
Half-Life Alyx, their big return to Half-Life after over a decade, exists entirely to sell VR Headsets and the ending amounts to a retcon of Episode 2. There is no meaningful commentary on why the ending is what it is, so I can only assume they just had no clue what to do to continue from episode 2. They have no creative drive besides "we play tested this and people liked it" and "This looks like it'll make lots of money through the store we own and integrate into games".
On the bright side, they at least put that Steam money into DXVK/Proton. Linux-wise, Valve does SOME good despite their dicking around on tech shit and basically abandoning their Debian/Ubuntu fork that was "SteamOS" when the Windows Store was a diarrheic fart of a launch.
They sell a collection of taunts in the TF2 store for ~£50 last I checked. A good chunk of the updates to TF2 have just been Valve taking stuff from the workshop and putting it into the game officially, the same for CSGO. CSGO sells "graffiti", images you press a button to put on a wall somewhere, something that was a general feature in prior source engine games. The graffiti is limited use. To put a jpeg on a wall in a videogame that already has that feature, you have to pay money, and it's number of uses is fucking limited.
They want these characters in CS:GO because characters in other games sell and make money.
Half-Life Alyx, their big return to Half-Life after over a decade, exists entirely to sell VR Headsets and the ending amounts to a retcon of Episode 2. There is no meaningful commentary on why the ending is what it is, so I can only assume they just had no clue what to do to continue from episode 2. They have no creative drive besides "we play tested this and people liked it" and "This looks like it'll make lots of money through the store we own and integrate into games".
Valve is shit.
On the bright side, they at least put that Steam money into DXVK/Proton. Linux-wise, Valve does SOME good despite their dicking around on tech shit and basically abandoning their Debian/Ubuntu fork that was "SteamOS" when the Windows Store was a diarrheic fart of a launch.
I disagree on alyx