Wasteland 2 - Interview @ Eurogamer

Eurogamer has another interview with Brian Fargo about Wasteland 2, and he talks about Valve being the saviour of the PC. Here is a small sample of the interview.

Steam was first made available to download in 2002, but Valve's own Half-Life 2, released in November 2004, was the first game to require installation of the client to play - even for retail copies.

It wasn't long before Valve opened up Steam to third-parties for digital distribution. Now, over 2000 games are available to buy for PC, Mac and Linux. Steam enjoys over 40m users.

"They're the saviours of the PC as far as I'm concerned," Fargo told Eurogamer in an interview about Steam Early Access title Wasteland 2.

"They've been great. You think about where we all were, kind of in the dark ages, when there was nothing. There was just flash. There was no digital distribution. They've opened up a way to get directly to the audience in a way that isn't politicised, or forces us to do exclusives or all the other things the console guys do."

The console guys - Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony - "put all sorts of guns to our head", Fargo said.

"It used to be with Xbox, just until very recently, you couldn't have an Xbox Live Arcade publishing license unless you had a retail product. What did that have to do with anything?

"Valve has all this power but they don't wield it. They let us all work in an open system. So for that I can't say enough good things about them."

Fargo has been working with Valve on the Steam Early Access release of post-apocalyptic role-playing game Wasteland 2.

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More information.

I'm not sure that I'd solely credit Valve and Steam but I do think that Steam has played a huge part in the surge of PC gaming by providing a common and easy to digest platform for PC game distribution AND by making it so much easier for developers to distribute and manage games, along with including some core features if they want like multiplayer and achievements without having to recreate the wheel in a hundred different clunky ways (benefits both devs and players).

One of the key selling points for consoles is how easy it is to just plop in or acquire a game and play without having any technical knowledge, and most users have no technical knowledge. Steam makes PC gaming just as accessible yet allows PC games to retain all of their glory and stay away from the dumbing down and streamlining that's inevitable on consoles.

By presenting a unified front and by making game publication and distribution a common and simple thing Steam has presented the more helpless end-users with a more console-like experience for ease of acquiring entertainment and has given developers a more common and simple way to distribute without all of the anal qualifiers and restrictions of consoles.

It makes me happy when developers say they'd rather just develop for PCs and be free than deal with the hassles of consoles - and a large part of their freedom now is going thru Steam.

Yes, there are other digital distribution mechanism but Steam is by far the best.

Some anal people get all worked up over DRM as it relates to Steam when Steam's "DRM" is amongst the most transparent and least intrusive and least annoying ever. Some people just like to complain about nothing and it's extra comical when the supposedly "DRM free" games have their own clunky login/registration - DRM - schemes.

Yep, we could have all done far worse than have Valve implement Steam. We would have ended up with fragmented Origin, UPlay, & XYZ services across the board - all imposing limitations on their service.

It was just a matter of time.

Valve figured out how to maximise profit by being inclusive - and I'm not sure why anyone would feel thankful for the chance to make them richer - but I guess the big picture is irrelevant once you get something out of it, personally.

For me, I use it because it's impossible to avoid it - not because I'm thankful paying Valve rather than some other business.

That said, I'm glad someone was quick enough to create a near-monopoly on this - but I'm afraid I don't believe they did it for the consumers.

In that same way, I'm happy Windows has been a near-monopoly for so long - because it means I don't have to consider other operating systems. That doesn't mean I think Microsoft should be thanked for their kind efforts to become rich.