There is much we can take away from the recent furor around Verge reporter Sean Hollister’s decision to do his job by revealing basic information about a new Valve game tens of thousands of people are playing, but it’s worth zooming out to examine how we got here. Valve isn’t just any company, and that goes a decent portion of the way toward explaining why people showed up with pitchforks and torches drawn to defend a game that hasn’t even been announced yet. On this week’s Aftermath Hours, we talk about that.
We begin by surveying the aftermath (lol) of the drama surrounding Deadlock, Valve’s new hero shooter that hasn’t been officially announced yet, and one brave (read: normal) reporter’s decision to, well, report on it. Why, in an industry where regularly unreliable leakers amass hundreds of thousands of followers, did so many people object to a journalist writing about a game to which they obtained legitimate access and which they did not break any NDAs to write about?
Then we talk about the live service death spiral that Helldivers 2 now finds itself in a mere six months after receiving near-universal praise upon launch. At what point does live service, as a model, become destructive? Are games – and gamers – worse because of it?
Lastly, we discuss some cool games we’ve been playing, like Crush House, in which players must please reality TV-addled masses, and Doom, which might catch on someday.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we, like Valve, can spend years quietly working on dozens of interesting projects that ultimately never see the light of day.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Nathan: I think about this compared to Grand Theft Auto. People in that community love when there are leaks. They love leakers. They follow them. They deify them, even though a lot of them are just lying. Like Chris was saying, there’s this different perception of Valve – that they’re a little mom ‘n’ pop shop that needs to be defended, even though they are, as I wrote about a couple weeks ago, one of the pioneers of technofeudalism. That’s about as far as you can get from being a mom ‘n’ pop shop, at least structurally and in terms of what you have wrought through your actions.
Riley: That’s another question, too – and I think we were talking about this in Slack: this idea that Valve deserves it to be stuck to them in a way that other indie companies wouldn’t. This made me think a lot about, when you’re a journalist, you kinda weigh the consequences of your actions and public vs private, etc, and would you do this if it were not a Valve game? Maybe not. But I don’t know that that’s necessarily because Valve is a bad guy and you’re taking him down a peg as it is just the news value and the consequences.
Chris: But also I do think that it is a consequence of the strange dichotomy of having a low headcount to a company with a lot of resources – and the way that they have this sort of culture of exceptionalism. I highly recommend watching the [People Make Games] documentary on the internal workings of Valve and the contradictions in there, because it explains so much. It’s like special kid syndrome. It’s like libertarian special kid shit where people say “I don’t think 98 percent of people could work at Valve.”
That’s such an unwell thing to say. I think that’s incredibly wrong. I think that’s patently, provably wrong. There are very talented people who work at Valve, but the idea that they’re this sort of elite group of people – that they’re geniuses – is sort of baked into the foundations of the company. Whether or not that’s still the case or true, I hope for reform internally.
But it’s interesting to see even the audience for games turn when we were talking about how bad Valve fucked up on Team Fortress 2, like, a month ago. I think everyone has it in them to understand the contradictions of these two realities. But how much of the gaming industry are they skimming off of [with Steam], and what does that mean consequentially for the newsworthiness of any game they make?
On top of that, the development of Valve games is not the same as the development of an indie game. If you blow up the spot of an indie game that’s less consequential, you’ll be more perceived as a dick. But practically speaking, Valve is a company that people make conspiracy charts about whether or not a game is coming out. That is a materially different condition of newsworthiness. And maybe Valve wanted to do this [with Deadlock] so they don’t have to deal with this shit. I hope that’s the case, because that’s probably healthier for everybody involved.
Nathan: I was thinking about it, and there is this relationship people have to Valve, where they put the company up on a pedestal and have this almost parasocial relationship with it. They feel like they need to defend it. It is somehow their friend. And at first I was like, well, it’s kinda weird that they have that in this era where parasociality is otherwise about putting faces to names and being on camera – people making themselves presentable and accessible.
But I think that being so opaque – making it so hard to see into the black box – kind of serves Valve’s mythology. It serves the notion that they are geniuses. We don’t see many Valve folks get on camera and talk. We don’t hear them say things that are dumb or potentially wrong. So everyone is like “Yeah, they’re geniuses, because look at their output.” Steam is a huge success, and the only games they release, for the most part, are good. But that’s because they have all the time and money in the world to make sure they’re good. They can afford to just cancel everything else.
But holistically, when you have very little communication and all your output is that good, you end up in this place where people say “Yeah, they must be the best. They must be these unassailable, untouchable geniuses.” When in reality, it’s a product of circumstance and them refusing to talk.
