Originally posted by: ShawnD1
Originally posted by: Coldkilla
The programmers at Valve are geniouses, I'd hate to have some 2nd rate company come in and distroy their work.
I wouldn't worry about this. Right now Valve is its own distributor in a sense that they own and control the Steam network. IIRC, Steam was created because of some problem with Sierra (Valve's distributor for Half-Life), but don't quote me on that.
Please remember to pick your games carefully. Try your best not to get games published by shit companies, because that only encourages this kind of behavior. If people stopped buying things that said EA, they might actually get the hint and stop making terrible games.
Distribution companies can have a huge impact on the quality of games, and sometimes they'll force a developer to release a bunch of games that causes a split in the community. As an example of how this works, there have been 4 Battlefield games released since 2002 (or was it 2003?). Each of those games is completely incompatible with the others. A community of let's say 100k people is split into 4 groups of 25k people that you can play with at any given time. That's what happens when the distributor sucks (EA).
Contrast that with Half-Life. HL has been active for maybe 10 years, is still getting regular updates, and is still more popular than HL2. Check the Steam stats if you don't believe me. Everybody you know has a copy of Half-Life, every one of those people has the Counter-Strike mod, and every one of them can play on the same servers. This is how a good game should be when there isn't some pushy publisher like EA trying to fvck it all up.
The distributor can even affect what kinds of games are released. EA, for example, releases full games every year. Valve releases a base game, then adopts mods as their own and sells those as standalone. Huh? Ok well say you have BF Vietnam and I have BF1942. For us to play together, one of us needs to buy another $50 game (price at time of release). What if, instead, you were playing Counter-Strike and I was playing DOD? Both of those games are mods for HL1 that are free to download, if you already own a copy of HL1, so it costs both of us nothing (relative to what we already paid for, HL1). But maybe you're playing CS and I don't own a copy of HL. How much does CS cost? According to Steam's game list, Counter-Strike is only $10. What about CS Source? That's $20. What about TF2? That game is $30. CS, DOD, and TF2 are arguably half a game each, but they're still half the price and that's why people buy them