Valve doesn't know how much Orange Box cost to develop News
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by
Tom Bramwell
In light of recent chatter about Stranglehold having cost USD 30 million to make, we thought we'd ask Valve's Gabe Newell how much Orange Box ran to. "I don't know," he told us at Games Convention. "We don't track that."
"One of the nice things about being an independent developer is we just keep everybody busy. We're making lots of money, and we just focus on what we're trying to build and then build it."
All well and good, of course, but surely there must be a number they want to hit? Somebody in the company who's going to measure their work against a big number? Apparently not. "No," in fact.
"We're trying to make the decisions that a gamer would if they were given the opportunity to run a games company," says Newell.
"We've never really even had a conversation internally where we say 'we've put enough money into this - let's just cut it off'. That's not even a conversation that happens at Valve."
All this comes from today's interview with Newell, which also touches on the Orange Box contents (as you'd imagine), Steam, Wii controls and what's going on with those TF2 movie shorts.
But you'd have to look back to our previous interview with Newell for an insight into why Valve might not give much of a damn about sales figures. We'd asked why Valve was set up in such a freeform way, with developers moving between little cabals.
"If you're making cars or you're doing product support, repeatability and defect-detection are critical aspects and you need to build an organisation that works well," he said, "but I think that the challenges that we have right now in the games industry, specifically and more broadly in the entertainment industry, are about inventing new things, about seeing things that occur between disciplines."
"So a lot of time the people who are most successful doing that here at Valve are people who are engineers who have fine arts background, and our goal is not to make them increasingly narrow and increasingly specialised but instead push them to be broader in their perspective."
Which is all very well thought out. But less interesting than finding out how we got him to swear in today's chat, so see to that instead!
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Comments: 1-29 of 29 in total
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Frankly, I don't believe him .
...and as for the whole 'We're trying to make the decisions that a gamer would if they were given the opportunity to run a games company'... wasn't that what John Romero said when he founded Ion Storm ? I hardly think Newell (a man who made his fortune at Microsoft), is that daft or idealistic.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 29/08/07 @ 08:58
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Let me get this right; When a Developer comes out and says "Our game cost $x-millions to produce" you all reply "Who cares how much it costs just make it fun", but when a Developer comes and says "We don't track how much our game cost, we don't care we just want to make it fun" you all reply "Well you're an idiot, you should know how much it cost"....
MAKE YOUR BLOODY MINDS UP! Personally I cheer Valve for being more interested in making fun innovative games and I'll continue to support them in doing so. Also congratulations to Newell for managing to hold an interview without saying something inherently stupid, unlike everyone else at the moment it seems. |
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the_sas_man
29/08/07 @ 08:24
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What a load of twaddle. Of course they know - if not they'd a) be out of business and b) his managers would sack him!
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asphaltcowboy
29/08/07 @ 08:33
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"What a load of twaddle. Of course they know - if not they'd a) be out of business and b) his managers would sack him!"
QFT (and obviousnessness). What a load of crap! |
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kangarootoo
29/08/07 @ 09:01
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@Fab4
"Its called Accounting, and every properly-run business should be doing it." +1. He is also talking bollox. I don't believe for a SECOND that they don't know how much it cost. Gabe himself might not know, but someone working for Valve (their accounts for example) can account for every cent. In fact they will HAVE to account for every cent for tax purposes. Its just sales bravado. @Rirekon "Personally I cheer Valve for being more interested in making fun innovative games and I'll continue to support them in doing so" If by "more interested" you mean they care more about making fun games than making money, you are utterley deluding yourself. |
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0
But didn't I hear a few years back that Half Life 2 cost about/over $40 million to make? I'm sure they had accountants for that, since they didn't bring in too much revenue for 5 years of developement time...
Still, I'm pretty sure he has a big idea on what the company spends every month on its teams, and what its revenues are. Maybe he just didn't tally it all up to: "We've been making Episode 2 for 12 months, it cost us X amount"... I don't really care. GET ME THE GAMES FASTER people! Episodic my ass! |
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kangarootoo
29/08/07 @ 10:47
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@Rirekon
I think Valve do both. Half Life 2 cost a fortuune to make. Not having to track and plan your expenditure doesn't mean you aren't spending a lot, it usually just means you are minted. I don't think anyone is interested in making expensive games if they could make the same profit on cheap games. Whether Valve are interested in making expensive games or not is not really a straight forward question, but I'm certain they are interested in making profitable games above anything else. Quality feeds profitability (in an ideal world), but its the profits that drive everything. I think first and foremost Valve are interested in making money, which is no bad thing at all. They also know that spending a lot of money on their titles is a sound investment, which is a good attitude I agree. |
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Dr_Lobster
29/08/07 @ 12:11
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Oh Valvie. I've heard they take around 30-40% for each Steam title, but this is vaguely remindful of id's early days (shareware, Ferraris, etc.) before they had folks like Todd aboard to make them a successful business.
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Mentalist(air)
29/08/07 @ 13:34
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Maybe, like Sony were measuring PS3 prices in beers, Valve should measure the cost of their development in pies.
Though if that were the case, it would appear as if Gabe had consumed all of the expenditure personally. (do you see what I did there?) |
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subtlesnake
29/08/07 @ 13:53
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Well, if the size of the Episode 2 team is variable then it might not be easy for them to track how much the project has cost.
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He certaintly knows how much his company costs to run per month. That doesn't mean he keeps exact track on how a particular game costs; especially if people in the company are working as freeform as the article suggests.
That said, he must definetely have a rought estimate on a figure, he just isn't willing to say ATM. |
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kangarootoo
29/08/07 @ 16:31
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@subtlesnake
"Well, if the size of the Episode 2 team is variable then it might not be easy for them to track how much the project has cost." It would still be an easy task for any competant accountant. The only thing that could cloud it a little now I think on it, is if a lot of the team were working on multiple projects at once, and you weren't tracking what hours went where. Then you might be saying "well we spent 7 shilling and 6 on wages this year, but its hard to say exactly how much of that was dedicated to Episode 2 and how much went into Bongo Monkey 3". Though even that sort of thing should be accounted for in a decent schedule. Though on that basis no company can really say exactly what something cost. "Yeah, the project cost us £50k, but we also spent £10k that year paying our employees to browse facebook and smoke cigs outside". It just depends where you draw your boundaries I guess. |
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The Bodybuilder
29/08/07 @ 19:48
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Complete and utter bull. You mean to tell me a company doesn't watch it's cashflow? Not accounting AT ALL?
BALLS. Do they even pay the staff equal wages? |
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The Bodybuilder
29/08/07 @ 19:52
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But how did stranglehold become so expensive?
Did 90% of the cost go to paying off john woo and chow yun fatty? |
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kangarootoo
29/08/07 @ 21:55
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"Do they even pay the staff equal wages?"
Huh? Of course they don't pay their staff equal wages. Last time I looked the games industry was missing a union. |
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RazorObsession
30/08/07 @ 01:28
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I'm sure the IRS would be very interested to know this.
I'm pretty sure there is someone keeping tabs on that sort of thing, but what Gabe meant is that Valve spare no expense, and money is no object, and once the game is finally on shelves someone taps him on the shoulder to tell him he's made a profit. Must be nice to work under these conditions. |
Comments: 1-29 of 29 in total
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