Creston wrote on May 9, 2011, 18:12:

Graham wrote on May 9, 2011, 16:46:
It's absolutely mind-boggling how you got there. This isn't jump-to-conclusions-mat level, this is Olympic scale triple-jump-to-conclusions or possibly high-jump-to-conclusions.

Relax Sparky. It's called sarcastic exaggeration. I'm under no illusion that Valve will actually make the next Farmville. That's EA's territory.

The panic over the form that this platform will take is unwarranted, especially considering the principal subject.

What panic?

/re-reads thread.

I don't see any panic. I see people saying that they're unhappy that Valve is apparently ditching Half Life like games in favor of whatever they come up, and I see a fuckton of apathy towards social gaming. (basically, everyone but you doesn't see the point.)
It's a far cry from that to panic. If Valve doesn't make the games I like anymore, I buy someone else's games. Not really a big deal, since I've given up on another Half Life anyways.

Finally: buried within those 100 million people are millions of gamers who just haven't found their game yet. This is their gamma-ray exposure, they can Hulk-out with us in the future when they find their trigger... which they're more likely to find if they're exposed to cool new games that their friends are playing.

Perhaps you don't get this, but a ton of people here enjoy SINGLE PLAYER GAMES. Me playing a single player game isn't going to require one of my "friends" to "hulk out" with me in order for me to tell him about how cool it is. I can actually do that myself, without EA or Valve or whoever creating a "social network" page where other gamers can "see" what I've "done" in the game. (which reached a truly ludicrous height in Dragon Age, because three million people had "achievements" up of "finished chapter 1" with a stupid automatic screenshots.)
That's the kind of stuff you're excited about?

Social integration is a good thing.

Really? Why? So far, I've seen ZERO benefits to social gaming. It's mostly been a whole bunch of retarded crap that I've fortunately been able to ignore, and in some cases it's been of the kind where a lot of people had to cry out against it or it would have meant things that few of "us" would have enjoyed. (think the RealID thing in SC2, and automatic friending of your friend's friends.)

It makes us bigger as a group, it makes us more cohesive, and it means that there will be more developers working on projects, giving us more choice.

But what good does that do me if those projects don't interest me? Social gaming is never going to lead to bigger and more interesting single player games. So it all serves no purpose to me. You enjoy hanging out with your "friends" on facebook, great. More power and friends to you. I don't. I like my single player games. So do many people here. There is no benefit for us in one of the main PC developers of the last ten years to go "social." And so therefore we complain about it, and lament the fact that even the great PC stalwarts apparently decide that it's more fun to do social shit than make another kick-ass single player game.

The only downside here is that some folks who prefer to play alone might feel upset that there's an added feature in a game that doesn't cater to them, or that the gaming experience might be moving away from their preference of play-style. As I said before, I hope it's not the case, but if it is, the minority (no matter how vocal) will be left behind.

If it's strictly an added feature that doesn't cater to the SP crowd, eh, then that's fine. I happily ignored all the Dragon Age idiocy, and was even more happy when I found I could turn all of it off. But like we originally saw with Blizzard's SC2 plans, not all of devs' social ideas start out (or turn out) so innocently.

I do agree that it'll mean we get left behind, however. The money is in social shit, and that's where lots of developers are flocking, because after all, MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY.

Creston