theyarecomingforyou wrote on Apr 21, 2012, 14:51:
RollinThundr wrote on Apr 21, 2012, 13:47:
translation: after we loopholed our way and screwed over Vivendi/Sierra who were pressuring us to release a product sometime in the same decade we had contracted to.
Yeah, let's pity Vivendi - the €60bn company that owns Activison/Blizzard. The company that was found by a jury to have lied to shareholders about its shaky financials. The company that refused to pay Valve royalties it owed and was required by an arbitrator to pay Valve over $2.3m. Whatever.
Valve wanted to put out decent games and Vivendi kept interfering. They both settled, meaning both parties accepted the agreement. And given what Valve has done for the gaming industry I think it's ridiculous to paint them as the bad guys.
I don't pity Vivendi, if I pity anyone it's Sierra for going with the CUC/Cendent deal which pretty much destroyed them as a company, for now being defunct after making some of my very favorite titles over the years. HL2 and that series in general (and I know I'm going to get jumped on for this) is one of the most overrated titles ever imo. Portal sucked, Counterstrike sucks, L4D sucks. Much like Blizzard, Valve is right up there in regards to most overrated developers in the industry.
Personally while Steam is a nice convenience to have anytime I want to buy a game and it's say 3am, the way some people call it the savoir of PC gaming, just makes me cringe. It's a digital distro system, just like D2D, or Origin, or Impulse etc. That's all it is.