Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: BloodEagle on August 05, 2008, 01:52:24 pm
-
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/54037
Independent developer Valve is "happy to have that conversation" should the company be approached with a buyout offer, marketing VP Doug Lombardi has revealed.
---
Note: The editor is talking about any offer, not just offers from EA.
-
"EA was very progressive about saying, 'We understand who you guys are. We understand what Steam is. We don't want Steam to go away,'" he continued. "Well, they might want Steam to go away, but they're not asking us to make Steam go away."
This makes me hate both EA and Valve.
-
Not surprised.
-
I don't see why everyone hates EA so much. I dislike their practice of buying studios and shutting them down when they don't make money, but other than that ...
-
They're sort of the company that it's trendy to bash, the Microsoft of the gaming world. They do a lot of things I hate, especially related to DRM and inconsistent support for games, but much of what they are criticized for can be said equally well about several other publishers (Ubisoft and 2K in particular). On the whole, they aren't any better or worse than the rest of the pack. The EA games I've played in the last few years have on the whole been pretty good, including those developed by their own studios.
-
No, EA really is pure evil. :p
-
Nah. They've been pretty decent lately.
I'm not bothered by this news. Partly because I think EA isn't as bad as their reputation, and partly because I'm not particularly attached to Valve games in the first place.
-
So why does Valve want to be bought out?
That said, he noted that the independent studio behind Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, Portal and the Steam digital distribution platform is "doing pretty well" and is "really happy with what we're doing.
Makes no sense to me.
I don't see why everyone hates EA so much. I dislike their practice of buying studios and shutting them down when they don't make money, but other than that ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_arts#Criticism
Check the part about their employment policy and how they lost a couple of class action suits over it.
Supposedly they've started cleaning up their act, if so, then great. But they really deserved to be bashed for a lot of what they did.
-
Well. An independent studio won't have the resources that a big publishing house like EA would have. They may be doing really well, but having a publisher take care of all the shipping and stuff might mean Valve could focus more on the games and stuff they do.
-
not a chance in hell stormkeeper. i know what these companies do, my fathers friend asked for any company to buy it out but he got put out of business. one of the first things they do is make sure loyalists to the company are put in place to make sure that if you screw up once they move in and your out. so you oppose someone like ea for example and given their bad rep i wouldn't be surprised they dump you so they can take your job, your business and merge it into theirs in order for more resources to compete against the other giants. they dont care what happens to you if your not loyal, well as far as trying to make sense of it would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack inside a tornado. just remember EA does not care what you think of them, so as long as you buy their games they don't care.
besides the business side, EA's games alone are still rubbish, one too many bugs are in every game and you expect to play these games without a problem? the odds of that are small. it also relates to their staffing problem also.
-
Money makes the world go round, folks. These are businesses that expect to not only have their principals pay the rent, but be able to retire at some point.
A Valve acquisition would be alot of money for guys like Gabe. Its really hard to turn down alot of money.
-
they dont care what happens to you if your not loyal, well as far as trying to make sense of it would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack inside a tornado. just remember EA does not care what you think of them, so as long as you buy their games they don't care.
This is true, but how exactly is it different from almost every other publisher out there?
besides the business side, EA's games alone are still rubbish, one too many bugs are in every game and you expect to play these games without a problem? the odds of that are small. it also relates to their staffing problem also.
Not any more so than games from other publishers. EA games are fairly hit or miss in this respect, which can also be said about everyone else. I have recently played Crysis and Mass Effect among their games. There were few problems in the former from a technical standpoint, while the latter has a lot of issues despite being a good game otherwise (neither game was developed by EA themselves though). If I go back a bit and look at games by their own studios, C&C3 and NFS:Most Wanted were very well polished and any issues were patched promptly, while the C&C3 expansion has a number of issues and has been poorly supported, with the long awaited patch breaking more things than it fixes.
Overall though, I would rate the stability and polish of their games above those of Ubisoft for example, who has become notorious for their badly programmed console ports on the PC in the last few years. SCDA was probably the buggiest commercial game I have ever played, and they quickly abandoned support for it without fixing most of the issues. I haven't seen anything from EA that comes even close to that game.
-
Nah. They've been pretty decent lately.
I'm not bothered by this news. Partly because I think EA isn't as bad as their reputation, and partly because I'm not particularly attached to Valve games in the first place.
Two things are wrong with that statement.
#1. Goldeneye: Rogue Agent.
#2. Sicking the FTC on Take-Two.
-
If I go back a bit and look at games by their own studios, C&C3 and NFS:Most Wanted were very well polished and any issues were patched promptly, while the C&C3 expansion has a number of issues and has been poorly supported, with the long awaited patch breaking more things than it fixes.
thank you cp, you proved my point, before they where patched they were bugged which is what i have been saying.
-
If I go back a bit and look at games by their own studios, C&C3 and NFS:Most Wanted were very well polished and any issues were patched promptly, while the C&C3 expansion has a number of issues and has been poorly supported, with the long awaited patch breaking more things than it fixes.
thank you cp, you proved my point, before they where patched they were bugged which is what i have been saying.
MW had no bugs on release that I can remember. C&C3 had no actual bugs or stability glitches either, but there were balancing issues with certain units in the initial version. The patches were basically released to address that.
In any case, it's far better to patch a game quickly than to simply abandon it and just leave the problems there forever. This is something I've seen often from certain other companies, and it seems to be less common with EA.
-
C&C3 had no actual bugs or stability glitches either, but there were balancing issues with certain units in the initial version.
Uh, beg differ, particularly around airlifting there were some very impressive (and annoying) ones.
-
C&C3 had no actual bugs or stability glitches either, but there were balancing issues with certain units in the initial version.
Uh, beg differ, particularly around airlifting there were some very impressive (and annoying) ones.
I didn't notice anything during the singleplayer campaigns at least. I only played the multiplayer later on, after some patches were already out. What I meant though is that there were no problems that outright prevented you from playing the game at some point, which are rather common in many other games these days.
Unfortunately, such problems did (and still do) exist in the KW expansion. The support for that game has been lackluster compared to the original.
-
My gripe with EA isn't their games, it's their DRM, and it's not just EA that are guilty of it.
I recently bought the expansion pack to Warhammer, Mark of Chaos, called Battle March, I was rather looking forward to it, since it has Dark Elves, the race I used to play as.
I installed Mark of Chaos, everything worked fine, no problems, the game happily ran, but the moment I install the expansion, which works fine, the system utterly refuses to accept that the disc I just installed off of is a retail disc, it's a brand new disc out of the box, and it doesn't run, not because it's corrupted but because of some ridiculous anti-piracy measure.
Amazingly, the only way I can fix this is to use a program used normally only by people who have pirated the game in order to disable the disc-check, which is illegal.
In that particular case, it was Deepsilver who were to blame, but I'm finding myself less and less interested in mainstream games as the odds of them actually installing and running properly decreases.
-
thank you cp, you proved my point, before they where patched they were bugged which is what i have been saying.
I have both of the games in question, and they're not bugged in any way that I notice, and I've played them alot.
Uh, beg differ, particularly around airlifting there were some very impressive (and annoying) ones.
Oh? I never had this bug. Except for one concerning an invincible carryall and commando :p
*snip*
Like Inquisitor and CP said, all publishers are interested in the money aspect first and foremost. How is EA any different in its practises? And for your 'loyalists' argument, how do you know that's what they do? And few EA game's that I've played recently have had show stopper bugs, if any, they're mostly minor bugs or exploits.
-
why do i get the feeling im talking to a wall? i already made my point in a previous post.
as for loyalists? you cant play dumb dont try it. would you put someone you know will stab you in the back up in a position or would have people who know they trust you? more like a stupid question where you get a stupid answer. you would choose the latter, wouldn't you.
-
Oh? I never had this bug. Except for one concerning an invincible carryall and commando :p
It would spaz out if you gave a "drop" command to a group, where some of them were over terrain where that was physically impossible. End result, you cannot select the transports that couldn't drop, and they just float there, looking stupid, doing nothing. I'm not sure if the AI could still target them, but I know I did try to shoot them down myself just to get rid of the blasted things and it didn't work. (Found this is the GDI Croatia mission I think, killing the Banshee base.)
This was, however, fixed in a patch; I don't know which one, just that it was.
-
as for loyalists? you cant play dumb dont try it. would you put someone you know will stab you in the back up in a position or would have people who know they trust you? more like a stupid question where you get a stupid answer. you would choose the latter, wouldn't you.
My question was how do you know that's what EA does? How do you that's what every takeover is like? Because from the way you structured you're earlier post, it seems to me that you're saying EA takes over studios that way.
-
EA does the evil things, moreso than most other companies. That makes them more evil. I refuse to buy most Ubisoft games due to their aggressive DRM as well. Sad, because there's some I'd really like to pay for. But EA has proven time and again that they care more about their shareholders' pockets than their customers' satisfaction. Instead of supporting a game, they just release the next buggy incarnation, on the same buggy engine. Just look at the C&C series. It's a support joke. EA really can suck both mah bawls.
-
Nah. They've been pretty decent lately.
They have a new CEO lately, to be precise. The guy who brought Bioware and Pandemic together (and the reason those two joined EA).