Gabe Newell - VR Exclusives Bad For Everyone

We've all thought about it with some dread: the idea of VR-exclusive games.  This could impact RPGs in the next few years.  Gabe Newell has chimed in on the question.

Now Valve frontman Gabe Newell has weighed in on the matter through an email posted to the the Vive subreddit, in which he was asked whether Valve ever considered doing the same thing for its Vive headset. (Newell confirmed with us that he did in fact send this email.)

“We don't think exclusives are a good idea for consumers or developers. There's a separate issue which is risk. On any given project, you need to think about how much risk to take on. There are a lot of different forms of risk—financial risk, design risk, schedule risk, organizational risk, IP risk, etc... A lot of the interesting VR work is being done by new developers. That is a triple-risk whammy—a new developer creating new game mechanics on a new platform. We're in a much better position to absorb financial risk than a new VR developer, so we are happy to offset that giving developers development funds (essentially pre-paid Steam revenue). However there are no strings attached to those funds—they can develop for the Rift or PlayStation VR or whatever the developer thinks are the right target VR systems. Our hope is that by providing that funding that developers will be less likely to take on deals that require them to be exclusive. 

Make sense?” 

Some of the commenters in the thread don't seem to think so; several responses express concern that developers will take Valve's money and then, as one put it, “just turn around and make a deal with Facebook anyway.” I'm more inclined to give Valve the benefit of the doubt, however. It has a pretty good track record of getting things right, for one thing, but more importantly, it brings the power of Steam to the table. How much money is it worth to keep your new game off of Steam, even temporarily? I have no idea how much cash is in a “shitton,” but it would have to be a pretty big pile to justify avoiding a distribution channel with that kind of reach.