Valve On STEAM, PC Gaming, and Being Indie
GamesIndustry.biz is running a fascinating interview with Valve’s director of marketing and unofficial company spokesman Doug Lombardi on what makes the studio so unique. Here’s an excerpt:
Q: What is your reaction when people say that traditional titles are on their way out and that indie games are the future of PC gaming?
Doug Lombardi: I think it’s the expansion of it. Orange Box sold really, really well on the PC and in some places it sold really well at retail and in some places it sold really, really well on Steam. And in some places it did pretty good in each one and together that was great.
Different markets have different buying behaviours. Meanwhile, I think that one of the great expansions of the PC are things like Audiosurf, and I think Steam has kind of enabled that because retail would look at Audiosurf and say “A USD 10 game? There’s not enough margin in there for me to do that. It’s a weird and wacky music thing, and it needs to have 15 hours of gameplay and multi-player” and all these things - you know the retail trappings.
But Steam has sort of broken that mold, you know? Darwinia did it two years ago. They had limited UK distribution at retail - we put it up on Steam, it won a bunch of awards at GDC, it started selling really well and they got a world wide distribution deal. So it was like, okay, we can change the model and Darwinia and Audiosurf are part of that expansion as we move into the new worlds.