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Gabe Newell and others at Valve are doing a reddit ‘Ask me anything’ and I have compiled a list of some good stuff to read. This took a while to gather, so I hope you find it interesting.

You can see my own personal questions here, which at time of writing have not been answered.

Update: And it's over, my questions didn't get answered.

These first few are from this post.
What is the status of Half Life 3/Half Life 2 Episode 3?
GabeThe number 3 must not be said.

Is Valve still working on any fully-fledged single player games?
GabeYes

An unidentified anonymous source at Valve has said that Half Life 3 has been cancelled. Is that source legitimate?
GabeI personally believe all unidentified anonymous sources on the Internet.


Any chance of a new IP that takes place in the half-life/portal universe? I feel like there's a lot of story left to be explored there. Thanks! (source)
GabeYep.


Does Valve plan on doing anything with Source 2 in the coming years? If so, what? (source)
GabeWe are continuing to use Source 2 as our primary game development environment. Aside from moving Dota 2 to the engine recently, we are are using it as the foundation of some unannounced products. We would like to have everyone working on games here at Valve to eventually be using the same engine. We also intend to continue to make the Source 2 engine work available to the broad developer community as we go, and to make it available free of charge.


If you could go back in time, what would you change about Steam?(source)
GabeBiggest issue has been how we structured support.


This question is related to the above and has a pretty good answer:
Does Valve have any plans on making customer support better? And did you ever think of making it into live support?(source)
GabeYes! We are continuing to work on improving support.
Since the last AMA, we've introduced refunds on Steam, we've grown our Support staff by roughly 5x, and we've shipped a new help site and ticketing system that makes it easier to get help. We've also greatly reduced response times on most types of support tickets and we think we've improved the quality of responses.
We definitely don't think we're done though. We still need to further improve response times and we are continually working to improve the quality of our responses. We're also working on adding more support staff in regions around the world to offer better native language support and improve response times in various regions.


Gabe also said they are considering putting in an option to allow Steam users to disable event pop-ups (source).

Gabe, what is TF2 in Valve's eyes? Do you plan to improve the state of the game in 2017? Will there be more focus on the game by Valve? (source)
DRiller_ValveTF2 has millions of unique players per month, and the team is staffed by a group of people that love and play the game. We're committed to supporting and growing TF2 with new features, content, and player experiences.

We're currently working on our next major update, which features a new campaign, the Pyro class pack, matchmaking improvements/features, and lots of game balancing improvements.


When asked about Counter-Strike Global Offensive: (source)
ido_valveAs far as a roadmap is concerned, our priorities for 2017 are to replace the UI with Panorama, to make CS:GO available in more territories where a lot of Counter-Strike fans don't have easy access to it (like China), and anti-cheat. Of course, we're also planning on continuing to ship bug fixes and new features throughout the year, as in the past.

We plan to continue updating every week or two. As for Operations, there's no set schedule. We weigh that work relative to other work we could choose to focus on and other recent work seemed better for the product. For example, at the end of 2016 we chose to focus on shipping Inferno, improving spatial audio via HRTF, joinable public lobbies, and some long-term work that hasn't shipped yet.

We haven't considered community managers because in general we prefer to communicate by shipping game updates. We try to avoid disrupting conversations happening in the community, which is why we tend to be quiet a lot of the time. But we do weigh in when we have useful information to help those conversations along.


When asked about what led Valve towards open standards: (source)
Programmer_JoeOpen standards are what got the PC to where it is, and we think they'll continue to be important going forward. It's a big part of why we pushed Vulkan along. That's why we're working with Khronos on the VR standard.


That’s all for now, if I missed anything vitally important I will add it in later. It's possible another editor may add it in for me while I catch some zzz.

Apologies in advance for errors, as it's nearly midnight now for me and I need to sleep sometime. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Editorial, Steam
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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32 comments
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gurv Jan 18, 2017
Yeah, disappointing. It's as if they don't care anymore about Linux/SteamOS.

I'm a bit worried by Valve's current mindset tbh, they seem to be caught up in the VR craze (which I think it's painfully obvious that it has no future in gaming due to price, cumbersome, nausea, isolation from friends/family, you name it).

Meanwhile, Microsoft is progressing on its unified console/pc ecosystem.
It would be really ironic that Microsoft delivers on the Steam machine concept before Valve ever does.
Shmerl Jan 18, 2017
Kudos for VR standards push (I didn't know about Valve being behind the effort). No Q&A about Linux though?
Shmerl Jan 18, 2017
Quoting: edoNo linux-related answers, that makes me suspicious.

Yep, sounds fishy. But while Valve are hiring developers to work on Mesa - there is still hope.


Last edited by Shmerl on 18 January 2017 at 1:13 am UTC
Mezron Jan 18, 2017
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Man...That seemed like a waste.
sarmad Jan 18, 2017
Quoting: gurvMeanwhile, Microsoft is progressing on its unified console/pc ecosystem.
It would be really ironic that Microsoft delivers on the Steam machine concept before Valve ever does.

Yup, Valve needs to pay attention and avoid the mistake that Nokia made when it kept on relying on Symbian and was not brave enough to make the switch to a more modern OS in time. Valve is now also over-relying on Windows and have an alternative that they are not brave enough to push full-speed, exactly the same situation that Nokia was in. It's just a matter of time before XBox games and XBox live become cross platform and then Steam will be in real danger.
slaapliedje Jan 18, 2017
I'm not sure you'd compare them to Nokia... Steam is multi-platform. It works equally well on all platforms. The fact that all the software within Steam doesn't work on all platforms isn't Valve's fault. In fact, I'm pretty sure all of their own games do work on all supported platforms.

Nokia's issue was all about trying to support two different Operating Systems and not concentrating resources on either of them. Then selling out to Microsoft and completely ditching the two systems they had.

I'm betting at this point that Valve is simply waiting for Debian Stretch to be released for a major overhaul to SteamOS. Especially since they're probably the closest to core Debian than any of the Debian derived systems.
RussianNeuroMancer Jan 18, 2017
Quoting: sarmadValve is now also over-relying on Windows and have an alternative that they are not brave enough to push full-speed
Right now Linux gaming not in the state that can be accepted by general audience. Many papercuts need to be fixed first (like Steam Runtime issues, Mesa-specific games issues, and get-this-damn-Optimus-tearfree issues, etc.) Maybe a little bit later, when new Steam Beta with Steam Runtime fixes will be pushed to stable channel, stable Ubuntu get Xorg Server 1.19 and Mesa with many game-specific fixes? Yep, I wish that happen ^_^


Last edited by RussianNeuroMancer on 18 January 2017 at 5:10 am UTC
Xicronic Jan 18, 2017
My questions weren't answered either, but I emailed them to Gabe and hopefully I'll have a response by the end of the week to share with you guys. I hear he's good about responding to emails.
SuperTux Jan 18, 2017
Honestly didn't see much get answered...
Corben Jan 18, 2017
There have indeed been some Linux/SteamOS specific questions. And it looks like none of them got any answers from Valve, if I'm right?
Do they only get attention when they had been upvoted by enough people?

Though it was really interesting to follow, I hoped to get some informations about their plans or progress with Linux/SteamOS.

I remember when Gabe Newell first announced Steam coming to Linux/SteamOS:
QuoteIt feels a little bit funny coming here and telling you guys that Linux and open source are the future of gaming. It’s sort of like going to Rome and teaching Catholicism to the pope.
I wish they would bring this feeling back.


Last edited by Corben on 18 January 2017 at 1:46 pm UTC
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