Valve's boss Gabe Newell clarifies reports about Valve ending its focus on single player games in favor of multiplayer games.
The current goal of the studio is trying to add social features to their games to go along with the tradition of Valve's focus on single player experiences. The studio doe not want to just tack on multiplayer features just for the sake of having multiplayer at the cost of the single player experience.
Quote:
I think what we’re trying to talk about is the fact that, not that we’re not doing single-player games. Portal 2 was a pretty good example of what we’ve learned over the years in terms of how to create those experiences. It’s more that we think we have to work harder in the future, that entertainment is inherently increased in value by having it be social, by letting you play with your friends, by recognizing that you’re connected with other people.
That’s the thing that we’re trying to say, is that, single-player is great but we also have to recognize that you have friends, and we wanna have that connected as well. So, it’s not about giving up on single-player at all, it’s like saying, we actually think that there’s a bunch of features and capabilities that we need to add into our single-player games to recognize the socially connected gamer.
|
Portal 2 was the test game by Valve to see if their "social features" could work within Valve's current philosophy of making games and as a stepping stone for bigger features such as more Steam-integration and Cloud-based applications.
http://gamrfeed.vgchartz.com/story/8...cial-features/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) officially recognizes video games as art and is willing to fund the development of video games as long as the company itself is a non-profit organization.
The move comes after the NEA renamed its program from "Arts on Television and Radio" into the more generic "Arts in Media" as a way to cater to more forms of art and entertainment. This move also could impact California's debate on the idea of video games as art vs censorship of "violent" games and any potential future Supreme Court case involving this situation.