VALVe Doesn’t Mind Being Acquired

 

Having Independent game studios/publishers is always a good thing, independent studios place emphasis over quality instead of quantity and you’re always guaranteed a good game. Valve is probably the largest independent developer around and has some of the most popular and best selling titles in it’s portfolio. Unfortunately, that also makes it an attractive target for biggest companies like Activision, EA and Ubisoft. How does Valve feel about being acquired?

Doug Lombardi talks:

If anyone is interested in acquiring Valve, VP Doug Lombardi is “happy to have that conversation,” 

“EA was very progressive about saying, ‘We understand who you guys are. We understand what Steam is. We don’t want Steam to go away.’ Well, they might want Steam to go away, but they’re not asking us to make Steam go away.”

The “valuable add” of EA’s distribution power to Valve’s business was all the company needed from EA. “And [EA Partners] is obviously in a sweet spot right now. I mean, all publishers go through personality changes, and that caused them to be at better points in time,” said Lombardi.

Ofcourse, If Valve was acquired, they would actually release titles/content on time. Which, hey, no one would mind.

Flagship Studios No Longer Owns Hellgate: London

Flagship Studios is no longer the owner of Hellgate: London. The studio lost the IP to HanbitSoft. HanbitSoft’s reason of IP takeover:

HanbitSoft states that the reason it is pursuing this course of action is because “It is hard for us to accept Flagship Studios’ requests for continued support in capital and funding any longer and because Flagship was being difficult”, and because it co-owns a direct stake in the IP, it therefore “has a say in reviewing and determining any course of action to be taken with Hellgate: London.”

HanbitSoft is expected to take full control over the IP. HanbitSoft goes on to state that in doing so, it will be able to “properly manage and develop Hellgate: London into a good game with proper content”, with its own in-house team of developers.

Basically, Flagship did a miserable job and the korean developer took back the IP to fix the trainwreck RPG.

BioShock Should’ve Failed!

This is something you don’t hear everyday, the lead programmer of BioShock, Chris Kline, wanted BioShock to fail!

At his Paris GDC session exploring the development of 2K’s critical success BioShock, lead programmer Chris Kline started off by saying his main point would be that BioShock should’ve failed.

“In fact,” he continued, “it did fail a lot, over the course of time. A series of big mistakes and corrections and slipped ship dates, but all of these helped make it a good game.

Rockstar Games VP: “Fuck casual gaming”

New York magazine interviewed Rockstar Games’s VP Dan Houser. Houser doesn’t like casual games, infact, he went as far as to say “Fuck casual gaming”. The interview also focuses on the release of GTA IV and the controversy surrounding it. Interesting interview and definitely worth a read. Here’s a snip:

NY Mag: So the gaming industry has changed a lot since the last GTA …
Houser: Yeah, fuck all this stuff about casual gaming. I think people still want games that are groundbreaking. The Wii is doing something totally different, which is fantastic. We’re hopefully going to prove that there’s also a very big audience for people who want entertainment in another form, who think of games as being a narrative device that can challenge movies. We always said: We’re not going release a large number of games. They’re going to have the production values of movies. They’re gonna be about themes that interest us whatever the medium, instead of the weird, special video game–only themes that too many people make — orcs and elves, or monsters, or space. We felt you could make a good game and have it be about something we could actually relate to. Or aspire to.